antifa_archive5.html

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/isra-j19_prn.shtml

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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE

Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)

Web: http://www.wsws.org/

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- Wednesday, 19 July 2006 -

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1. WESTERN DIPLOMACY SUPPORTS ISRAEL'S WAR OF AGGRESSION

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News & Analysis: Middle East

By Chris Marsden and Barry Grey

On Tuesday, the seventh day of Israel's air war on Lebanon, with some 250 civilians killed and much of the country's infrastructure destroyed, President George Bush issued yet another threat against Syria.

Declaring that Syria was "trying to get back into Lebanon," he warned against any attempt to invite Syrian forces back into the devastated country little more than a year after Syrian troops were forced to leave as a result of a campaign orchestrated by the United States and France.

Bush's statement was typical of the cynical and thuggish declarations coming from both Washington and Tel Aviv--all of which go unchallenged by the European powers and the Western media.

Bush charged Syria with meddling in the affairs of a country that is being reduced to rubble by bombs, missiles, ships and warplanes supplied by the US to its closest Middle East ally. And as he painted Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as the aggressors, he continued to oppose any cessation of Israel's bombing of civilian targets throughout a defenceless Lebanon--a violation of international law that defines its perpetrators as war criminals.

Bush's comments crowned a day of much vaunted diplomatic initiatives by the major powers and their cat's paw, the United Nations, to resolve the Lebanese conflict along lines dictated by the United States and Israel. For its part, Israel made clear that it would accept nothing that cut across its current drive to destroy Hezbollah and transform Lebanon into a tool of Israeli policy, or its ability to launch future attacks against any and all forces or states that resist its imperialist designs.

The "international peacekeeping force" proposed jointly by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan is advanced in order to police such a victor's peace. Its stated mission is to oversee the removal of any Hezbollah presence from the southern areas bordering Israel.

At the same time, the international force proposed by Annan and Blair would directly serve the interests of the major imperialist powers. It would provide Washington with an opportunity to establish a permanent military presence, working directly with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones said, "We're open to the possibility of that force being necessary." Other US spokesmen, however, discounted the proposal.

The European powers welcomed the proposal, seeing it as a potential means of mitigating Washington's dominant position in the Middle East. Russian President Vladimir Putin was among the first to pledge support for the force, along with the European Union. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin backed a deployment, while French President Jacques Chirac said he believed "some means of coercion" might be needed to enforce the UN resolution calling for the disarming of Hezbollah.

But even such a UN-run police force is deemed by Israeli Prime Minister Edhud Olmert to be an unacceptable limitation on Israel's freedom of action. Military violence is the preferred method of both the American and Israeli ruling elites.

Israel will, moreover, be satisfied only with the complete subjugation of Lebanon and its reduction to an impotent client regime. As the Israeli daily Haaretz pointed out, the creation of a security zone in the south is considered insufficient by the Israeli Defence Forces as it would "not... prevent Hezbollah from deploying long-range rockets and missiles further north in Lebanon."

Bush and Olmert insist that no ceasefire is possible until Israel has achieved its basic military objectives. In her discussions with UN representatives, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni insisted on the same conditions.

On this question Tel Aviv is knocking on an open door. UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said, after meeting with Livni in Jerusalem, "I think both parties agreed that it is necessary to have a political framework in order to reach, eventually, a cease-fire."

The resolution issued by leaders of the Group of Eight at their summit in St Petersburg Sunday fully accepted Israel's presentation of the conflict, blaming the outbreak of hostilities in Lebanon on Hezbollah and in Gaza on Hamas. It stopped short only of specifically identifying Syria and Iran, though this was the clear implication of the resolution and the specific intention of Washington and London.

Russian President Putin has since let it be known that this omission was a concession to Moscow. Yesterday Bush remedied this failing with his accusations against Syria.

Israel welcomed the G8 resolution as a legitimization of its attack on Lebanon. Livni stated, "Israel concurs with the position of the international community, which places responsibility for the conflict on extremist elements. Israel and the international community share a common problem--the presence of extremist terrorists."

As far as the Olmert government is concerned, the realization of a Greater Israel, including the permanent annexation of most of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, demands the crushing of all resistance by the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Of necessity, it requires military action against Syria and ultimately Iran. Since the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq, Iran is Israel's only serious contender as a regional power.

The Bush administration has accused Damascus and Tehran of masterminding the actions of Hezbollah and Hamas at a time when it is pushing for international sanctions against Iran and meeting resistance from Russia and China. It sees Israeli aggression against Gaza and Lebanon as a means of furthering its own geo-strategic agenda in the Middle East.

An editorial in the July 18 Jerusalem Post, which supports the most hawkish elements within the Olmert government, stressed the unity of purpose between Israel and the US. It was entitled "Bush's Brilliant Thought."

After hailing the G8 resolution for "mentioning Hizbullah and Hamas by name and Iran and Syria by implication," it praised Bush and Blair for being "more explicit" in identifying "the 'root cause' of the problem, namely Iran and Syria."

It drew attention, in particular, to Bush's statement, "[T]here seems to be a consensus growing that in order for us to have the peace we want... we must deal with... two nation states that are very much involved with stopping the advance of peace, and that would be Iran, and that would be Syria."

The Post commented, "It has been the case for decades, but it is finally dawning on the world, that there are not two conflicts--the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Islamist-Western conflict--but one. As John Gibson, a commentator for Fox News, put it, 'When the Iranians get nukes this ruckus we're witnessing today will look like a walk in the park... It seems like a war between Israel and some terror groups. It's really a war by Iran on us.'"

The editorial concluded: "As of Sunday, [Israel Defence Forces] sources stated that Israel had eliminated about 25 percent of Hizbullah's missile capacity. Defense Minister Amir Peretz has said that Israel requires another week or two to finish the job...

"If Israel succeeds in destroying Hizbullah, it will have done the world, not only ourselves, a great favour. Bush and Blair, and perhaps other leaders, seem to understand this, and that the broader task of free nations is to confront Hizbullah's sponsors in Damascus and Teheran."

Even as Israeli bombs and missiles continue to rain on Beirut and other cities and towns in Lebanon, the US is working for a new resolution in the UN Security Council that will provide a legal fig leaf not only for intensified attacks on Hezbollah, but also for future military actions against Syria and Iran.

Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

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2. UNITED STATES TO ISRAEL: YOU HAVE ONE MORE WEEK TO BLAST HEZBOLLAH

Bush 'gave green light' for limited attack, say Israeli and UK sources

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THE GUARDIAN

International News

Wednesday July 19, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1823817,00.html

Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall and Patrick Wintour

The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources.

The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels.

"It's clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week," a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.

US strategy in allowing Israel this freedom for a limited period has several objectives, one of which is delivering a slap to Iran and Syria, who Washington claims are directing Hizbullah and Hamas militants from behind the scenes.

George Bush last night said that he suspected Syria was trying to reassert its influence in Lebanon. Speaking in Washington, he said: "It's in our interest for Syria to stay out of Lebanon and for this government in Lebanon to succeed and survive. The root cause of the problem is Hizbullah and that problem needs to be addressed."

Tony Blair yesterday swung behind the US position that Israel need not end the bombing until Hizbullah hands over captured prisoners and ends its rocket attacks. During a Commons statement, he resisted backbench demands that he call for a ceasefire.

Echoing the US position, he told MPs: "Of course we all want violence to stop and stop immediately, but we recognise the only realistic way to achieve such a ceasefire is to address the underlying reasons why this violence has broken out."

He also indicated it might take many months to agree the terms of a UN stabilisation force on the Lebanese border.

After Mr Blair spoke, British officials privately acknowledged the US had given Israel a green light to continue bombing Lebanon until it believes Hizbullah's infrastructure has been destroyed.

Washington's hands-off approach was underlined yesterday when it was confirmed that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is delaying a visit to the region until she has met a special UN team. She is expected in the region on Friday, according to Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN.

The US is publicly denying any role in setting a timeframe for Israeli strikes. When asked whether the US was holding back diplomatically, Tony Snow, the White House's press spokesman, said yesterday: "No, no; the insinuation there is that there is active military planning, collaboration or collusion, between the United States and Israel - and there isn't ... the US has been in the lead of the diplomatic efforts, issuing repeated calls for restrain,t but at the same time putting together an international consensus. You've got to remember who was responsible for this: Hizbullah ... It would be misleading to say the United States hasn't been engaged. We've been deeply engaged."

Steven Cook, a specialist in US-Middle East policy at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, said: "It's abundantly clear [that US policy is] to give the Israelis the opportunity to strike a blow at Hizbullah ...

"They have global reach, and prior to 9/11 they killed more Americans than any other group. But the Israelis are overplaying their hand."

Israel is already laying the ground for negotiations. "We are beginning a diplomatic process alongside the military operation that will continue," said Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, yesterday. "The diplomatic process is not meant to shorten the window of time of the army's operation, but rather is meant to be an extension of it and to prevent a need for future military operations," she added.

Moshe Kaplinsky, Israel's deputy army chief, said the offensive could end within a few weeks, adding that Israel needed time to complete "clear goals". Israeli officials said fighting could begin to wind down after the weekend, if Hizbullah stops firing rockets.

A peace formula is also beginning to emerge: it includes an understanding on a future prisoner exchange, a deployment of the Lebanese army up to the Israeli border, a Hizbullah pullback, and the beefing up of an international monitoring force. For the first time, Ms Livni suggested Israel might accept such a force on a temporary basis.

There were signs of differences of emphasis between the Foreign Office and Downing Street over the conflict.

Kim Howells, a Foreign Office minister, explicitly called for the US to rein in Israel. "I very much hope the Americans will be putting pressure on the Israelis to stop as quickly as possible." he told the BBC. "We understand the pressure the Israeli government is under, but we call on them to look very carefully at the pressure ordinary people are under in southern Lebanon and other parts of Lebanon too ... We want to stop this as quickly as possible".

Israeli airstrikes killed 31 yesterday, including a family of nine in Aitaroun. More than 230 civilians in Lebanon have been killed in the past week.

An Israeli man was killed by a Hizbullah rocket in Nahariya in northern Israel, bringing the total of Israeli civilian deaths to 13. The army said 50 missiles were fired yesterday at northern Israel, injuring at least 14 people.

Flashpoints

* 31 Lebanese killed in Israeli air raids. Nine members of one family were killed and four wounded in a strike on their house in the village of Aitaroun. Five were killed in other strikes in the south and two in the Bekaa Valley. An attack on a Lebanese army barracks east of Beirut killed 11 soldiers and wounded 30. A truck carrying medical supplies was hit and its driver killed on the Beirut-Damascus highway. Hizbullah says one of its fighters was killed.

* One man killed as he was walking to a bomb shelter in Nahariya, northern Israel. The army said Hizbullah fired 50 missiles, hitting the port and railway depot at Haifa, as well as the towns of Safed, Acre and Kiryat Shmona.

* Hundreds evacuated from Beirut in helicopters and boats. HMS Gloucester arrives to start evacuation of Britons. The Orient Queen, a cruise ship capable of carrying 750, sets out from Cyprus, escorted by a US destroyer.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA

A Resource for Countering Myth, Distortion and Spin from the Israeli Media War Machine

E-mail: info@electronicIntifada.net

Web: http://www.electronicIntifada.net

- Wednesday, July 19, 2006 -

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3. A NEW MIDDLE EAST IS BORN:

BUT NOT EXACTLY THE ONE SHIMON PERES HAD IN MIND

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Omar Barghouti, Electronic Lebanon

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5096.shtml

Six long, bloodstained days have passed since Israel launched its barbaric attack on Lebanon without succeeding in exacting a significant military toll on the resistance itself. Six days are exactly what it took Israel to deal a crushing and humiliating military defeat to the largely inferior armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967, and to subsequently occupy the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula. How the "Middle East" has changed in the past 4 decades! Indeed, thanks to the Lebanese resistance, and to an extent its Palestinian counterpart, this volatile zone is undergoing radical transformation from a region where Arab regimes -- and societies, more or less -- have largely internalized defeat and US-Israeli hegemony as fate to one that is palpably rebuilding its confidence in the future and its hope for an era of justice and peace, without colonial and racist oppression.

This is certainly not the "New Middle East" that had been on the agenda before the current Palestinian intifada broke out. Shimon Peres, the current Israeli deputy prime minister and one of the few remaining historic Zionist leaders, often spoke during the heyday of the Oslo "peace process" between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of his vision for a new Middle East, where Israel and its Arab "neighbors" would live in harmony, peace and common prosperity. For the uninitiated in Zionist talk, this translates into an official Arab capitulation to Israel's hegemony over the Middle East, opening up lucrative Arab markets to its advanced economy and to its insatiable desire for becoming a regional empire. Conspicuously missing from Peres's grand plan was a just solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict which, according to international law, would entail ending Israel's occupation and colonization of the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territories occupied in 1967; recognizing the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands, from which they were ethnically cleansed to establish Israel on the ruins of their society; and ending Israel's system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens, who are denied any semblance of equality in a state that not only discriminates against them in the provision of basic services and recognition of fundamental rights, but precludes them from its very self-definition as well.

After six days of Israel's aggression against Lebanon -- ostensibly to free two of its soldiers captured by Hizbullah in a stunningly sophisticated military operation at the Lebanese-Israeli border -- and its deliberate, gradual massacre of innocent Lebanese civilians as a tactic to erode Hizbullah's public support, the Lebanese resistance has not only persevered but has also dealt Israel some unexpectedly harsh blows that have already succeeded in lastingly changing the face of the Middle East. While the West chose to ignore the plight of Arab civilians who have fallen victim to these latest Israeli war crimes, the Arab world did not miss the blunt felling of several other "victims," illusions and myths that have hitherto been perceived by many as facts of life.

The first of those victims is Israel's "deterrence." Israel explicitly admitted that its deliberate use of overwhelming -- or "disproportionate," in the West's sanitized language -- force was aimed at recovering its "damaged deterrence." Its patent means for achieving this end is through indiscriminate killing and gratuitous devastation, both intended to reinforce Israel's image in the collective "Arab mind" as an invincible, unrivaled power in the region, and, crucially, as a "mad dog" that knows no rational bounds to the exercise of brute force to achieve its objectives, as Moshe Dayan once advocated. From this perspective, instilling despair and utter fear becomes Israel's weapon of choice in psychological warfare, the tools of which it has mastered for decades. Accordingly, hope among the oppressed must be crushed at any price lest it leads to upheaval and open defiance to the oppressive order. What Hizbullah did in six days, coming at the heels of six years of open Palestinian defiance in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), is nothing less than tearing down that "iron wall" of Arab hopelessness, thereby further undermining the foundations of Israel's deterrent capability.

Another casualty of Israel's double-aggression on Gaza and Lebanon is the official West's claim to moral consistency, decency, or even respect for international law. Western governments have, by and large, openly or bashfully supported Israel's invasion of Gaza and its ruthless bombardment of Lebanon as a form of "self-defence," overlooking the standard definition of this notion and the limits set on it in international legal conventions. European submission to, or voluntary adoption of, the US doctrine that only Israel is entitled to the right to "defend" itself in this conflict betrays Europe's collusion in reinforcing a key pillar in the US empire's world view: might makes right, and international law can take a hike. As an editorial in the Guardian today rightly states, "Not calling clearly for a truce at once could suggest [Europe's] complicity with what Israel is doing and the US is tacitly backing: using overwhelming force to defeat or cripple Hizbullah, whatever the consequences for Lebanon or the region."

Furthermore, by expressing a nauseatingly unbalanced concern over loss of Israeli lives -- military and civilian -- while comparatively devaluing loss of life among Arab civilians in Lebanon and Gaza to little more than a nuisance that may potentially blemish Israel's otherwise bright image, Western officials and most of the sheepish, corporate-controlled mainstream media in the West have betrayed a level of naked racism that many had thought extinct in these beacons of democracy and enlightenment. Reflecting this phenomenon, a recent New York Times editorial, for instance, describes Israel's atrocities in Lebanon as "far-reaching military responses" that are "legally and morally justified."

Of course this hardly comes as a surprise to anyone closely monitoring Western political and cultural discourse about the Arab world, as expressed by officials, pundits and media editorials. Still, the unmitigated disregard for the sanctity of human life in the "global south" in general, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Rwanda, Palestine or Lebanon, in comparison with Western -- including Israeli -- lives, is a disturbing reminder that racism, far from being an ugly memory of the colonial West's past, is live and kicking and abundantly present in its corridors of power, singularly affecting its decision making vs. the Middle East. At the core of this resilient bigotry is a common view -- not always overtly articulated -- of non-whites as merely relative humans, lacking some of the basic attributes associated with "full" humans, i.e. whites. The essentially equal worth of all human life, irrespective of ethnicity, color, gender or faith, has again become among many Western elites a matter of opinion.

The latest fatality in Israel's war of aggression is the Arab-Israeli "peace process." The Arab League's Secretary General, Mr. Amr Moussa, has officially announced its death in a press conference held right after the emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday. Again, this is not news to any observer of this process of deception, which was carefully designed to legitimize Israel's control over parts of the occupied Palestinian territory and its denial of some of the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine, as well as to dictate Israel's terms for "peace," namely unqualified Arab submission to its injustice.

Given all the real and virtual victims of Israel's ongoing trashing of international law and mockery of the so-called international political system, purportedly headed by the UN, Arab civil society ought to struggle to further spread the reach and depth of the growing, progressive movement advocating a boycott of Israel, similar to that applied to apartheid South Africa. Ultimately, only such a morally sound, non-violent form of resistance can produce sustainable and practical pressures that can hold Israel to account and therefore give just peace a chance.

Israel embarked on its latest bloody adventure hoping to change the rules of the game. People of conscience everywhere can indeed hand it brand new "rules of the game": turning it into a pariah state until it fully complies with its obligations under international law and starts treating its victims as equal humans who deserve full human and political rights, most crucial of which is their unassailable right to live in freedom and dignity.

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian analyst.

Copyright 2000-2006 ElectronicIntifada.net

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4. 'LEBANON CRISIS AN INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY'

The Israeli-Hezbollah conflict threatens

to drag Syria, Iran and the US into a regional war

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ALJAZEERA

News: Arab World

Tuesday 18 July 2006

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D259C343-ED88-4C43-B839-BCEFBED61924.htm

by Firas Al-Atraqchi

As'ad AbuKhalil, author of Bin Laden, Islam, and America's New 'War on Terrorism' as well as The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power, believes the recent violence is a symptom of an international conspiracy under way to enforce UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of militia groups in Lebanon - a reference to Hezbollah.

A professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, and visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, AbuKhalil just returned from Lebanon. He is the webmaster of the Angry Arab News Service, http://angryarab.blogspot.com.

Aljazeera.net: Israel says its assault on Lebanon is in self-defence against Hezbollah's Katyusha rocket attacks and the capture of two of its soldiers.

Hezbollah says southern Lebanon has long been an area of conflict with Israel occupying Lebanese land and that it wants indirect negotiations to secure the release of its prisoners in Israeli jails. How did the situation deteriorate so rapidly and so violently?

As'ad AbuKhalil: This particular conflict, and Israel's act of aggression on Lebanon, did not take place in a vacuum, and Israel did not act in some spontaneous fashion.

Hezbollah did not surprise Israel with the capture of the two Israeli occupation soldiers. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has repeatedly warned that if Israel does not release its Lebanese prisoners, he will be compelled to take Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips.

And Israel has not been sitting idly by since its partial withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. It has not only continued to occupy parts of South Lebanon, but also has been violating Lebanese sovereignty, by air, sea, and land.

Israel has also been kidnapping innocent Lebanese citizens: fishermen and shepherds. And one fisherman from Tyre - my hometown - is still missing, and at least one shepherd was killed last year.

Furthermore, Israel has adamantly refused to give to Lebanon a map of the more than 400,000 land mines that it left behind in South Lebanon, and which continue to kill Lebanese children in the region.

The recent crisis, as the article in the Washington Post by Robin Wright pointed out yesterday, is an international/regional conspiracy to implement United Nations Security Council resolution 1559.

The groundwork for this aggression began with the work of Rafiq al-Hariri [the slain former Lebanese prime minister] in 2004, when he worked with the US and France to pass that resolution in the Security Council.

The plan has the full support of Israel and client Arab regimes of the US: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. But it will not work, and Hezbollah will not lay down its arms.

If the Lebanese government, led by the Hariri camp, thinks that it can now convince Hezbollah to lay down its arms and to trust the Lebanese Army - which has been sitting idly over the last week - to take care of Lebanon's defence, it is wildly mistaken.

What are Israel's goals? What are Hezbollah's goals?

I think that Israel often acts in revenge. The Zionist movement is a vengeful movement; it always has been.

It wants not only to implement UNSC 1559 to disarm Hezbollah, but it also wants, as it did in 1982, to pave the way for the installation of American puppets as rulers of Lebanon. These plans never work: All grand plans for Lebanon strike the rocks of deep sectarian divisions in the country.

I think that Hezbollah started by wanting to achieve a prisoner exchange with Israel, and probably to ease the pressures on Palestine.

But now, they mostly and primarily want to retain possession of their weapons, and they have in that at least the overwhelming support of the Shia in Lebanon, the single largest sect in the country.

Dozens of civilians have been killed on both sides but there has been little movement in the international community. Is there a feeling that mediation or efforts to bring about a ceasefire will be fruitless?

The silence of the so-called international community, which has been under the control and in the service of the US government since the end of the Cold War, has been most painful for those in Lebanon who have been told in the last two years that the international community cares about Lebanon and its people. Now people know better.

I do believe that the same racist impulse that considers Israeli lives worth more than Arab lives is at play here. I have no doubt that the lives of Arabs never meant much for the descendants of colonial powers in the region.

And it is important that we don't allow Israeli propaganda to present an image of symmetry between the two sides: There is no symmetry between the two sides in this conflict.

Not only in terms of Israeli military superiority, but also in terms of massive killings by Israel of largely innocent civilians.

Do the Lebanese blame Hezbollah or Israel for this crisis?

I think that all Lebanese blame Israel for the killing and for the aggression. But the Saudi clients in Lebanon are trying to exploit the events to build up resentment against Hezbollah.

In Lebanon, there never are unified opinions on anything, and certainly the sectarian divisions do not amount to a unified stance behind Hezbollah. There are many Lebanese who don't support the ideology of Hezbollah but who also believe that the party is now single-handedly defending Lebanon against savage Israeli aggression.

John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, implicated Iran and Syria as being at least partially to blame for supporting Hezbollah...

It is ironic to speak of John Bolton - the same person who was honoured a few months ago by the Hariri ruling coalition in Lebanon.

Yes, Hezbollah receives the support of Iran and Syria, just as the Hariri coalition receives the support of US, France, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and possibly Israel indirectly.

Will Israel attack Syria or Iran next? Could this become an all-out regional war? Could this draw the US into the conflict?

It seems that Israel will avoid attacking Iran and Syria at this stage. With the Israeli war on Palestine still proceeding unabated, the Israelis may not find a need.

The US/EU/UN will deal with both countries, on behalf of Israel, through pressures and punitive measures.

But, if Syria and Iran come under attack, then all bets are off in the region, and US plans in Iraq will face more challenges and more subversion.

Iran has indirectly facilitated the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Syria has recently been co-operating with the US occupation in Iraq.

If attacked, both countries can easily make things worse for the US, and that explains the reluctance of the US in endorsing attacks on Iran or Syria.

With Iraq on the verge of civil war, how will the Lebanon crisis affect the region?

It depends on what happens. If Israel is permitted to continue in the aggression, Syria and Iran may feel threatened, and that may unleash their forces in Iraq against the US.

Under such circumstances, American troubles in the region will only increase. But no matter what happens, this carnage will have affects thoughout the Middle East.

Let us remember that the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon unleashed seismic changes and movements in the region, including the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Those who think that when the dust settles, all will go back to normal, are people who have not read the contemporary history of the Middle East.

In the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this Israeli aggression will go down as a watershed; it will have an impact on the course of the conflict and also on the stability of the very regimes that the US spends money and weapons to prop up.

As the main power-broker in the Middle East, what role can the US play to end the violence?

You have to be either ignorant or foolish or both to consider the US interested in ending the current conflict. The US has clearly endorsed an unconditional Israeli aggression on Lebanon and Palestine. The US will leave it to Israel to decide not only the manner of killing of Arabs, but even to determine the number of Arabs that Israel wishes to kill.

Some Arab countries have criticised Hezbollah and its backers for the recent crisis but Iran and some fighters in Iraq have firmly stood by Hezbollah. Could we see a more extensive Shia-Sunni conflict on the sidelines of an Arab-Israeli war?

Yes, the Saudis have now officially endorsed a Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East. And this plan has the support of the US and Israel. This can easily, however, affect stability of several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. So trying to manipulate the Sunni-Shia divide is like playing with fire. We saw the fruits of American sectarian manipulation in Iraq.

How likely is the Lebanese government to survive the crisis?

The Hariri element of the ruling coalition will come out weaker as a result of this crisis. That seems certain. They will either be seen as incompetent, or as secret partners of the American/Israeli/Saudi plan for Lebanon.

But even at the humanitarian level, the Lebanese government has failed miserably in meeting the basic demands of the refugees.

In recent months, there was a general feeling that Lebanon had bounced back with major economic drive and a tourism boost. How do Lebanese look at their long-term prospects now that much of what they rebuilt has been destroyed?

The Lebanese have been through a lot - the people of south Lebanon have been through scores of savage Israeli invasions and campaigns of aggression. Not only are the people known for resilience, but their ability to reconstruct and resume normal life - as much as possible - has become well known.

But the funds needed for reconstruction will come at a high price: It will be like Hariri's accruement of foreign debt which further eroded the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon.

Copyright 2003-2006 Aljazeera.net

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5. NEOCONS RISE FROM MIDEAST ASHES

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TOM PAINE.COM

Feature Story

July 17, 2006

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/17/neocons_rise_from_mideast_ashes.php

Robert Dreyfuss

Israel's reckless, high-stakes decision to launch simultaneous wars against both Hamas and Hezbollah last week is a critical, perhaps world-shattering event. It cannot be seen merely in its local context, that is, as an act by the unilateralist regime in Jerusalem to crush the armed wings of two Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Nor can it be seen merely in its regional context, that is, as an effort to raise the stakes in the struggle against Syria, Iran and rejectionist factions in occupied Iraq. Rather, Israel's actions must be seen, first and foremost, in the context of global politics.

The key question: Is the Israeli offensive designed as a calculated effort to catapult the hard-right, neoconservative ideologues back to power in Washington?

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 21st century's Pearl Harbor, allowed Vice President Dick Cheney--along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, John Bolton, et al.--to steer President George W. Bush and the U.S. government toward a global war, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the endless "war on terrorism" and the militarization of American foreign policy. Since then, and especially as the adventure in Iraq bogged down, the less adventurous realists in the American foreign policy establishment have begun to eclipse the previously hegemonic neoconservatives. For the past year or so, the Pollyannas amid the chattering classes have told us that the neoconservatives' moment has passed, and that the adults are back in control in the nation's capital. What they forgot--and what Israel's criminal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon have reminded us--is that the neoconservative war party is global, not domestic. Outflanked, temporarily, in the United States, the neocons are now flexing their muscle outside the United States in a way that can give them added new leverage at home.

Let's analyze the current crisis, piece by piece.

First, Israel's actions in no way can be seen as a legitimate response to the small-scale attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, what Israel has done has used the pretext of those pin-prick attacks--a couple of border raids and a handful of errant rockets--to launch a strategic attack whose goals are to crush Hamas and the remaining institutions of Palestinian self-rule and decapitate and destroy Hezbollah politically and militarily in Lebanon.

Second, it's clear that Israel would never have launched this war without having made the calculation that it would win the support of the United States. The rest of the world is solidly aligned against Israel's outrageously disproportionate attacks, but none of that matters. No diplomatic mission from the feeble United Nations, no angry statements from the Arab League, no fulminations from Western Europe will deter Israel. As long as Israel has the support of the United States, it will forge ahead relentlessly. So far, in a shocking display of craven capitulation to the Israeli fait accompli, President Bush has repeatedly endorsed Israel's aggression. But Israel is clearly counting on more than just Bush's support for its actions in Gaza and Lebanon. More broadly, Israel is seeking to shift the balance in the Bush administration back in favor of the neocons, the hawks, and their radical "New American Century" comrades.

Third, by invading and bombing Lebanon and acting brutally to crush the Palestinian Authority, Israel has created a unified field theory of the Middle East's crises, uniting the escalating world showdown with Iran, the unraveling civil war in Iraq, the crisis over Syria's role in Lebanon, and the Arab-Israeli conflict itself into one big tangle. To be sure, all of those conflicts were always linked. But now they are as one. And in each case, the United States now faces a huge dilemma.

A sane U.S. policy would (1) exert backbreaking pressure on Israel to halt its attacks; (2) open a dialogue with Iran and Syria about containing Hezbollah and Hamas; (3) take drastic steps to stop the Iraqi civil war by making across-the-board concessions to Iraq's Sunnis and forcing the Shiites to swallow it, while starting a phased U.S. withdrawal; and (4) getting the White House directly involved in the Israel-Palestine peace process as if their lives depended on it.

But Israel, and its neoconservative allies, are counting on none of that to happen. Instead, they've gambled that in each case President Bush will fall back under the spell of Dick Cheney and the neocons, and do precisely the opposite: continue to give Israel the green light, throw rhetorical bombs at Damascus and Teheran, escalate the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, and take Israel's side in its wall-building, settlement-defending, no-talks-with-Hamas unilateralism.

Make no mistake: Until last week, before Israel went to war, the neoconservatives were losing across the board. They watched in horror as the war in Iraq faltered, and they were appalled by President Bush's Condi-led opening to Iran. Indeed, to many it seemed as if the entire post-9/11 project to remake the Middle East and build American hegemony on that cornerstone was in jeopardy.

Speaking at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Frederick Kagan warned that the United States is in "danger of losing everything" because the war in Iraq is not being pursued aggressively enough. "All of this success can and will be undone ... if we do not get the security situation [in Iraq] under control, and fast," he said, accurately enough. Now that Israel is at war, they have the chance once again to go on the offensive, against Iran, in Iraq, against Syria, and against the mythical Terrorist International that they warn about so regularly. You can imagine what Cheney and his allies are whispering to the president: Be resolute, be strong--and bring 'em on!

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

Copyright 2006 TomPaine.com (A Project of The Institute for America's Future)

*****

COUNTERPUNCH

'Tells the Facts and Names the Names'

Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

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- Monday, July 17, 2006 -

_________________________________________________________________________

"The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel"

6. ATROCITIES IN THE PROMISED LAND

_________________________________________________________________________

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON, former CIA analyst

http://www.counterpunch.org/christison07172006.html

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. "This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral," wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel's arrogance.

We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.

A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.

A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer's brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.

A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in "moral collapse."

Michel Warschawski writes of an "Israeli madness" and "insane brutality," a "putrefaction" of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a "gang of hoodlums," he says, a state "that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive."

As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.

Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity.

*****

_________________________________________________________________________

'Crime is a leading benificiary of globalisation'

7. THE DEVIL'S BANKERS

_________________________________________________________________________

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE

July 2006

http://mondediplo.com/2006/07/18clearstream

By Ibrahim Warde

The belief of the US and British governments that they could seize dirty money thought to be financing terrorism has merely diverted scarce police resources from the pursuit of criminal money laundering.

The Clearstream scandal, which is currently roiling the French political establishment, exposes two aspects of financial globalisation: the promise of transparency and the potential for money laundering. Indeed, the very name of the Luxembourg-based clearing house suggests both transparency and a cleansing flow.

It was originally assumed that the information revolution and omniscient, self-regulating markets would provide their own defence mechanisms. But huge black holes soon appeared in a world in which "the language is coded, the uninitiated excluded and the rules seldom written and communicable"(1).

Senator John Kerry, in his 1998 book The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security, wrote: "The opening of borders to international commerce and the information highway have benefited terrorists every bit as much as they have helped legitimate businesspeople and criminals"(2). In 2005 Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, observed that illicit activities were not limited to the margins of the international economy and that crime (the most lucrative business) has been a leading beneficiary of globalisation. Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, arm sales, drug dealing, counterfeiting, piracy, human trafficking, tax evasion and money laundering have all exploded(3).

In a system based on speed, efficiency and anonymity, shadowy operators have an advantage over political and judicial authorities, especially considering the ground lost by national regulators to the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) or the Basle Committee.

The rules of the game are now largely determined by the world's most powerful nations, especially the United States, in cooperation with little-known private companies such as Clearstream, of which its former boss, Andre Lussi, said: "Banks have customers and our customers are the banks. We are the notaries public of the world"(4).

In 2004 Lussi was indicted in Luxembourg for money laundering, manipulation of financial statements, fake accounting, financial fraud and tax evasion. The Clearstream affair testifies to the potential for dissimulation and manipulation among those new notaries.

The role of anti-money laundering measures was to fight such dysfunctions. Money laundering integrates funds derived from criminal activities into the legitimate financial system: it cleans dirty money. According to some sources, it goes back to the 1920s (when the gangster Al Capone bought laundromats to help disguise the criminal origin of his hard cash). But the idea, just like as the war against it, is of more recent vintage. The media began to mention it at the time of Watergate (1972-74), which revealed how the Nixon administration had adeptly hidden the origin and destination of funds. The phrase first appeared in legal proceedings only in 1982.

In 1986 the US became the first country to criminalise money laundering, as part of the escalating war on drugs. The idea was that, since profit motivates drug dealers, going after the money would damage the drug trade. The money trail also promised to yield useful clues and unmask vast conspiracies. None of the "three stages of money laundering" -- placement (the introduction of funds into the financial system), layering (multiple conversions and movements designed to confuse the money trail) and integration (when the funds re-enter the legitimate economy) -- is illegal in itself. But it is illegal to combine them to hide the criminal origin of funds.

The 'crime of the 1990s'

Money laundering was the "crime of the 1990s" and throughout that decade money laundering laws and regulations grew exponentially. Beyond drug dealing, the range of crimes covered expanded to include almost 200 offences, among them racketeering, theft, trafficking in human organs and endangered species, and, of course, terrorism. In parallel, the US effort against dirty money was internationalised through the FATF, created by the G7 in Paris.

As it expanded, the anti-money laundering apparatus was criticised: the supply of illegal drugs had steadily increased while the amounts of dirty money seized by the government were negligible. In 2001 Paul O'Neill, the Bush administration's first Treasury Secretary, noted that there was little to show for the $700m a year spent by the government on money laundering: over 15 years there had been only one substantial catch. Although the apparatus gave law enforcement agencies plenty of opportunities to go after smalltime dealers, major drug lords, who could afford to skirt the rules and use the services of the best lawyers, remained elusive.

The Spanish investigating judge, Baltasar Garzon, said that judges felt like mammoths chasing leopards in their battle against major financial criminals: "By the time the mammoth reaches his hideout, the leopard is already far away, laughing"(5).

The 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania led to more concentration on dirty money. It was said that Osama bin Laden had a $300m war chest; and a cottage industry developed in which self-proclaimed "experts" purported to reveal the whereabouts of that fortune. In reality, Saudi Arabia had seized Bin Laden's wealth in 1994, and his assets in Sudan were confiscated in 1996 when he was forced to leave(6). Terrorist financing was the result of permanent fundraising within Islamist networks(7).

In the late 1990s the Clinton administration attempted without success to introduce "know your customer" rules which would have forced banks (already bound to disclose suspicious transactions) to scrutinise their clients. It also undertook, in conjunction with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, to crack down on tax havens.

As soon as he became president in 2001, George Bush scuttled that initiative and took steps to diminish the anti-money laundering regime until the 9/11 attacks resulted in a major policy U-turn. With the zeal of new converts, those who had been intent on dismantling financial controls presided over an unprecedented expansion of the anti-money laundering apparatus.

The war on terror began with finance when Bush announced "a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network" on 24 September 2001. The president and top officials kept repeating that money was the oxygen of terror and that acts of terror could not be conducted without an important financial infrastructure(8).

The USA Patriot Act ("uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism"), passed in October 2001, had a major anti-money laundering component. That month, at an extraordinary meeting in Washington, the FATF, which the administration had spurned until then, saw its prerogatives officially expanded from money laundering to terrorist financing.

The two activities became interchangeable. A new acronym, AML-CFT ("anti-money laundering -- combating the financing of terrorism"), was instantly and uncritically adopted, joining two fundamentally different issues. Money laundering is based on crime-for-money; it involves large sums and transforms illegally obtained cash into seemingly legitimate funds. Terrorist financing, by contrast, is a political phenomenon, involving relatively small amounts, and, at least since 9/11, the financing happens outside international banking channels.

Terrorist financing is more like money soiling than laundering, since small sums of clean money (not illegally obtained) are used to fund acts of terror(9). None of the post-11 September attacks has cost more than $20,000. The London attacks of 7 July 2005 cost less than $1,000(10); their "terrorist financier" was one of the suicide bombers who made a living as a substitute teacher. In Iraq, more than half of US casualties have been the result of cheap roadside improvised explosive devices.

Scorecard logic

Yet the financial terrain, vast and little understood, offers political advantages. In the days after 9/11 swift action was not immediately possible against Afghanistan, which harboured Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. No contingency plans existed and military action took weeks(11). Bush was attracted to financial strikes because freezing accounts was the one seemingly bold action the US could take immediately. An added advantage was that the financial front was conducive to what he called a scorecard logic. He gave the order to "seize some assets, and quickly".

The Treasury general counsel, David Aufhauser, later described the subsequent frantic weekend search: "It was almost comical. We just listed out as many of the usual suspects as we could and said, let's go freeze some of their assets"(12).

Such financial strikes have since become routine. Not surprisingly, they have done little to dent terrorism(13). Easy and often innocent victims were targeted, such as the Somali remittance group Al-Barakaat. The first 100-day progress report of the war on terror set the tone: "The US and its allies have been winning the war on the financial front" and "denying terrorists access to funds is a very real success in the war on terrorism"(14).

In reality, shifting resources from money laundering to terrorist financing caused terrible mismatches. Those trained to spot global financial crime, and Spanish-speaking specialists in the Latin American drug trade, found themselves chasing Islamic terrorists, leaving the business of money laundering unattended.

Translated by the author

Ibrahim Warde is adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of law and diplomacy, Tufts University, Massachusetts, and author of 'The Price of Fear: the Truth behind the Financial War on Terror' (IB Tauris, London, 2006)

(1) Denis Robert and Ernest Backes, Revelations, Les Arenes, Paris 2001.

(2) Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997.

(3) Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Doubleday, New York, 2005.

(4) Denis Robert, La boite noire, Les Arenes, Paris, 2002.

(5) Denis Robert and Ernest Backes, op cit.

(6) Jonathan Randal, Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2004.

(7) See The 9/11 Commission Report, Thomas H Kean, chair, and Lee H Hamilton, vice chair, authorised edition, WW Norton, New York, 2004; John Roth, Douglas Greenburg and Serena Wille, Monograph on Terrorist Financing, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Staff Report to the Commission, 2004.

(8) "President Freezes Terrorists' Assets," remarks by the President, Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill and Secretary of State Powell, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 24 September 2001.

(9) See Ibrahim Warde, "Clean money, just a little soiled", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, November 2001.

(10) Ibrahim Warde, The Price of Fear: The Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror, IB Tauris, London. 2006.

(11) Bob Woodward, Bush at War, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2002.

(12) Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2004.

(13) Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, Random House, New York, 2003.

(14) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news

Copyright 1997-2006 Le Monde diplomatique. All rights reserved.

*****

_________________________________________________________________________

8. MADMEN AND LEMMINGS STOKE MIDDLE EAST CONFLAGRATION

_________________________________________________________________________

ONLINE JOURNAL

Commentary

July 18, 2006

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1005.shtml

By Larry Chin

Online Journal Associate Editor

As the Israel-led rampage in the Middle East worsens by the day, the giddy complicity of the Bush administration, its elite allies, and Arab functionaries becomes more evident. The neocons really think they can bomb and mass-murder their road map into a reality, and seem to be rushing to finish the job (before they lose some of their political power in the fall).

There is clearly no urgency to stop the killing. Witness the brain-diseased Bush yapping and joking about a pork dinner as the Middle East blew up. Witness Bush, just days later, his mouth full of buttered bread, exchanging expletive-laced non-sequitors with Tony Blair.

A widening escalation to take out Iran and Syria appears to be the end game, a deliberate plan, perhaps shared across Washington. For those who remain in deep denial, leading congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and even allegedly antiwar Russ Feingold, have issued statements uniformly and stridently pro-Israel, full of the same disinformation and bilious rhetoric as that coming out of Tel Aviv. Such is the power of AIPAC.

What form will this new and bloody "road map" take if Arab regimes beholden to, or cowed by, the US and Israel, or complicit with them, do nothing? These are the "moneyed Muslims" that Noam Chomsky waxes about. (Some would call them other names, among them "traitors".) More importantly, with an open Pandora's Box, and the fingers of criminals at the nuclear buttons, what will go wrong?

The analysis being provided by Electronic Intifada, the blow-by-blow front line dispatches of Dahr Jamail, and the blistering analysis of Angry Arab News Service have continued to point the way to nightmarish truths.

As the Angry Arab News Service notes:

"At moments like this, the reality of the regimes is exposed. At a moment like this, you realize that ultimately there are no qualitative differences between Middle East regimes. I mean, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are not different from Syria and Iran. They all care about one thing, and one thing only: their own survival. What have Iran and Syria done to the Lebanese in this crisis? What have they done to the Palestinians? I mean aside from vapid speeches and silly Friday sermons? Sermons don't serve to protect civilians from Israel terrorism."

"This is an ideological measuring device. Watch their words. Those who speak about Israeli aggression in Lebanon or Palestine and use terms like 'disproportionate,' 'cycle of violence,' 'restraint,' 'overreaction,' 'excessive,' or those who call to 'resume the peace process' are merely providing political cover and legitimacy for Israeli terrorism in Lebanon."

"Notice that Hariri Inc. politicians are very careful about their rhetoric during those times. They strictly refrain from criticizing the US. And as Walid Jumblat has consistently made it clear: they disagree with Israel on the magnitude of aggression, and not on the aggression itself. Just as Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the collaboration of Lebanese Forces; Israel has the tacit support of House of Saud's clients in Lebanon (and the Nation magazine, let us not forget) during this aggression."

A final note for Americans who frequently require Hollywood movie analogies to understand this outbreak of terror: you are watching a Martin Scorsese gangster murder orgy, with Israel playing the violent sidekick Joe Pesci role. Only this Joe Pesci is wielding WMD.

Copyright 1998-2006 Online Journal

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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN

News * Analysis * Research * Action

________________________________________

- AFIB No. 739, July 16, 2006 -

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!

END THE OCCUPATIONS!

ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!

What of this vaunted peace process? What has it achieved and why, if indeed it was a peace process, has the miserable conditions of the Palestinians and the loss of life become so much worse than before the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993? And why is it, as the New York Times noted on November 5, that "the Palestinian landscape is now decorated with the ruins of projects that were predicated on peaceful integration"? And what does it mean to speak of peace if Israeli troops and settlements are still present in such large numbers? Again, according to RISOT [Report on Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Territories], 110,000 Jews lived in illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank before Oslo; the number has since increased to 195,000, a figure that doesn't include those Jews--more than 150,000--who have taken up residence in Arab East Jerusalem. Has the world been deluded or has the rhetoric of "peace" been in essence a gigantic fraud? -- Edward W. Said, "Palestinians Under Siege," in The New Intifada: Resisting Israeli Apartheid, ed. Roane Carey [London: Verso, 2001] p. 29.

Contents: Number 739

01. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [Oak Park, MI]: Israeli Attack on Lebanon Threatens to Engulf Entire Middle East in War.

02. GUSH SHALOM [Tel Aviv]: The Real Aim.

03. SUNDAY HERALD [Glasgow]: Shock & Awe. With Israel's missiles raining down on their streets, the Lebanese remain defiant in the face of sustained attack.

04. ZNET [Woods Hole, MA]: Funding MMA, Punishing Hamas.

05. MEDIA MONITORS NETWORK [U.S.]: 7/7: The British Terror Paradigm.

06. THE MOSCOW TIMES: Serpent's Egg.

* * * * *

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 742/July 26, 2006

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 740/July 19, 2006

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 741/July 23, 2006

01. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [Oak Park, MI]: Terrorist Atrocity in Mumbai.

02. THE GUARDIAN [London]: Israelis Invade Lebanon after Soldiers Are Seized.

03. THE PALESTINE CHRONICLE [Mountlake Terrace, WA]: Racism Plagues Western Media Coverage.

04. INTER PRESS SERVICE [Washington, D.C.]: Iraq: Another Face, Another Raid.

05. ASIA TIMES ONLINE [Hong Kong]: Taliban in Search of a Winning Formula.

06. ASIA TIMES ONLINE [Hong Kong]: Afghanistan Reels Under Bumper Harvests.

07. WAYNE MADSEN REPORT [Washington, D.C.]: Fitzgerald: Over His Head and Folding like a Two Dollar Suitcase.

08. THE NARCO NEWS BULLETIN [Latin America]: The Shot Heard Across Both Sides of the Border.

09. COUNTERPUNCH [Petrolia, CA]: The CIA Propagandist and Former Prankster Stewart Brand: John Rendon's Long, Strange Trip in the Terror Wars.

* * * * *

WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE

Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)

Web: http://www.wsws.org/

E-Mail: editor@wsws.org

- Saturday, 15 July 2006 -

_________________________________________________________________________

1. ISRAELI ATTACK ON LEBANON THREATENS

TO ENGULF ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST IN WAR

_________________________________________________________________________

News & Analysis: Middle East

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/mide-j15.shtml

Statement of the Editorial Board

The Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, with bombings and missile strikes and the imposition of an air and sea blockade, has brought the Middle East to the brink of all-out war. The attack on Lebanon, fully endorsed by the Bush administration, coincides with Israel's ongoing assault on the Palestinian population of Gaza, 1.5 million people who are enduring the fourth week of a siege, with electricity cut off and food supplies running low.

The Olmert government in Israel has seized on two incidents involving the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, first in Gaza on June 25, and then on Wednesday on the Lebanese border, as pretexts for an enormous military operation that was clearly prepared long in advance. It remains to be seen how far the Israeli offensive will go--to Beirut, or even to Damascus--but it is clearly aimed at accomplishing strategic objectives that have no relationship to the incidents that supposedly provoked it.

No one can seriously suggest that bombing Lebanese towns and villages, imposing a naval blockade and attempting to assassinate Sheik Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, are methods likely to win the freedom of the captured Israeli soldiers. The two soldiers taken by Hezbollah are far more likely to die as a result, killed either by their captors or by Israeli bombs.

Likewise in Gaza, the indiscriminate killing of dozens of Palestinians with bombs, shells and air-to-ground missiles will do nothing to win the release of Galid Shalit, the private seized by Islamic militants in their raid across the Gaza border into southern Israel.

There is a long history of Israel using such events as the excuse for carrying out military actions that have a far broader strategic purpose--going back to 1978, when a full-scale invasion of Lebanon was launched using the shooting of the Israeli ambassador to Britain by Palestinian militants as a pretext. Only much later did it emerge that the invasion had been long planned, awaiting only the proper incident to provide a suitable official justification.

The same pattern is repeated in Gaza and Lebanon today. The Israeli regime has made no secret of its desire to smash up the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. The economic blockade imposed in January, after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, has been escalated into a full-scale military blockade of Gaza, where Hamas has its main political support.

In Lebanon, the goal of Israel is, at a minimum, the physical destruction of Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic movement which dominates the southern third of the country. A full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon by Israeli ground forces is more than likely. Israeli Defense Minister Peretz said, "If the government of Lebanon fails to deploy its forces, as is expected of a sovereign government, we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel." In other words, if the Lebanese army does not suppress Hezbollah--and no one expects it too--then the Israeli army will do so.

US military intervention in Lebanon is also likely. US media reports Friday suggested that the initial planning for such an intervention was well advanced, with 2,200 Marines to be deployed as a helicopter-borne force that would land near Beirut on the pretext of protecting the 25,000 American citizens now trapped in Lebanon by the Israeli blockade.

Separate or joint US and Israeli air strikes against Syria and Iran, and even a ground invasion of Syria, are also possible. Certainly the main focus of the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media has been to blame Syria and Iran for the crisis, claiming that those regimes were pulling the strings in Hezbollah.

The US media has suggested that Hezbollah's kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers was specifically ordered by Tehran in retaliation for the referral of Iran to the UN Security Council earlier this week, in the ongoing dispute over its nuclear research program. The Bush administration has likewise blamed Syria for the ongoing insurgency in Iraq's Anbar province, since supplies and recruits have come across the Syrian border.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq have produced a holocaust for the Iraqi people: a mounting slaughter in which tens of thousands have been killed, by sectarian gangs and militia, by car bombs and other terrorist acts, and by bombs, shells, missile attacks, indiscriminate shooting or outright murder on the part of the American occupiers.

Last week it was reported that 1,595 bodies had been brought to the Baghdad morgue during June, the largest monthly death toll yet in the escalating civil strife. The US military death toll is well over 2,500. Combined with the death toll for US soldiers in Afghanistan, Bush will soon be responsible for the destruction of more American lives than the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

The Bush administration will not retreat from Iraq and cannot maintain the status quo, as the country slides deeper into civil war and popular opposition to the war mounts among the American people. A sizeable section of the US ruling elite, frustrated by the quagmire in Iraq, believes that the only hope of military success lies in "expanding the problem," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has put it. They believe that Iran is using its growing influence on the Iraqi Shiite parties and militias to undermine US control of the puppet regime established in Baghdad, and that a military confrontation with Tehran is inevitable.

The Wall Street Journal is the semi-official voice of these layers, and it published an editorial Friday, entitled "States of Terror," which openly advocated military action against both Syria and Iran. The editorial declared, "There will be no resolution in Lebanon and Gaza until the regimes in Syria and Iran believe they will pay a price..."

Criticizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her pro forma appeal that "all sides must act with restraint," the Journal said, "The White House has cited Syria and Iran as the culprits behind this week's events, but more forceful words and action are called for."

The mushrooming crisis in the Middle East is a predictable consequence of the massive military intervention by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the increasingly aggressive and reckless policy of American imperialism throughout the region. This includes the carte blanche given by the Bush administration to Israel to use its US-financed and US-built war machine against its neighbors and against the persecuted and oppressed Palestinian people.

The policy of United States and Israel is based on a never-ending cycle of war. The Bush administration rests its entire foreign policy on the belief that American military power and high-tech weaponry can solve every problem. The Zionist project is similarly predicated on unrestrained use of force against the Palestinians and other targets, such as Hezbollah. Both policies have proven to be disastrous for the people of the region, including the Jewish population of Israel.

As a US client state, Israel has long been dependent on a vast flow of economic and military aid from Washington. For the last decade, it has sought to exploit the unchallenged international supremacy of the United States, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, to reject any negotiations for a territorial settlement with the Palestinians and instead impose its dictates unilaterally on the Palestinian Authority.

This was the content of the Sharon government's withdrawal last year from Gaza, closing down a handful of unviable settlements in order to draw an international border with 1.5 million Palestinians on the other side, insuring a Jewish majority in Israel and the remaining occupied territories for at least another decade.

Similar concerns are driving the Olmert government's policy of wall-building and resettlement on the West Bank. While planning to abandon a handful of Zionist settlements, Olmert's government is drawing the new border unilaterally to give the best land to the Israelis, including all of Jerusalem, while the Palestinians are relegated to a rump state on barely 60 percent of the occupied territory.

In the last few days, the American media has been filled with denunciations of Hamas and Hezbollah, portraying them as terrorist organizations and fitting targets for a massive escalation of military force. But in the final analysis, the real target of the United States and Israel is not this or that organization, but the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East. They aim to destroy the will to struggle of the tens of millions of people who have never accepted the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinian people, and who will never accept the US conquest of Iraq and the establishment of a neo-colonial stooge regime in Baghdad.

There is a profound sense in which the policies of the United States and Israel appear counterproductive and self-defeating. The Bush administration played a major role in creating the current Lebanese government, and the forced withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon has been touted as one of its few foreign policy successes in the Middle East. Yet the Israeli attacks threaten to undermine and discredit the regime in Beirut, which is compelled to stand by impotently while Lebanese citizens are slaughtered, now in the dozens, soon perhaps in the hundreds and thousands.

Similarly, it might appear irrational that an administration which has been unable to subjugate Iraq (population 26 million), would attack Syria (population 18 million) and even Iran (population 75 million). But such attacks are the logical outcome of the imperialist perspective that it is possible for American imperialism to impose its will on the Middle East, and obtain control of the region's vast oil resources, through sheer force of arms.

In reality, the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq has proven a strategic disaster for American imperialism. It has aroused the population of the entire region, and literally billions of people throughout the world, dispelling illusions that the United States could be identified with democracy, freedom or opposition to colonialism.

It is now 58 years since the state of Israel was established, and 39 years since the Six-Day War which expanded Zionist control of Palestinian territory to include the West Bank and Gaza. These six decades have been an unending chain of violence--war, repression, terrorism, assassination, the expulsion of populations. Now a new and even more terrible war threatens.

The first premise of any solution to the crisis of the Middle East is the removal of American imperialism from the region. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party demand the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and an end to Washington's military and financial sponsorship of Israeli domination over the Palestinian people.

Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

*****

GUSH SHALOM

The Israeli Peace Bloc

POB 3322

Tel-Aviv 61033

Web: http://www.gush-shalom.org/

E-mail: info@gush-shalom.org

- Saturday, 15 July 2006 -

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2. THE REAL AIM

_________________________________________________________________________

By senior analyst Uri Avnery

THE REAL aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government.

That was the aim of Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It failed. But Sharon and his pupils in the military and political leadership have never really given up on it.

As in 1982, the present operation, too, was planned and is being carried out in full coordination with the US.

As then, there is no doubt that it is coordinated with a part of the Lebanese elite.

That's the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda.

ON THE eve of the 1982 invasion, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Ariel Sharon that, before starting it, it was necessary to have a "clear provocation", which would be accepted by the world.

The provocation indeed took place -- exactly at the appropriate time -- when Abu-Nidal's terror gang tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. This had no connection with Lebanon, and even less with the PLO (the enemy of Abu-Nidal), but it served its purpose.

This time, the necessary provocation has been provided by the capture of the two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah. Everyone knows that they cannot be freed except through an exchange of prisoners. But the huge military campaign that has been ready to go for months was sold to the Israeli and international public as a rescue operation.

(Strangely enough, the very same thing happened two weeks earlier in the Gaza Strip. Hamas and its partners captured a soldier, which provided the excuse for a massive operation that had been prepared for a long time and whose aim is to destroy the Palestinian government.)

THE DECLARED aim of the Lebanon operation is to push Hizbullah away from the border, so as to make it impossible for them to capture more soldiers and to launch rockets at Israeli towns. The invasion of the Gaza strip is also officially aimed at getting Ashkelon and Sderot out of the range of the Qassams.

That resembles the 1982 "Operation Peace for Gallilee". Then, the public and the Knesset were told that the aim of the war was to "push the Katyushas 40 km away from the border".

That was a deliberate lie. For 11 months before the war, not a single Katyusha rocket (nor a single shot) had been fired over the border. From the beginning, the aim of the operation was to reach Beirut and install a Quisling dictator. As I have recounted more than once, Sharon himself told me so nine months before the war, and I duly published it at the time, with his consen (but unattributed).

Of course, the present operation also has several secondary aims, which do not include the freeing of the prisoners. Everybody understands that that cannot be achieved by military means. But it is probably possible to destroy some of the thousands of missiles that Hizbullah has accumulated over the years. For this end, the army chiefs are ready to endanger the inhabitants of the Israeli towns that are exposed to the rockets. They believe that that is worthwhile, like an exchange of chess figures.

Another secondary aim is to rehabilitate the "deterrent power" of the army. That is a codeword for the restoration of the army's injured pride that has suffered a severe blow from the daring military actions of Hamas in the south and Hizbullah in the north.

OFFICIALLY, THE Israeli government demands that the Government of Lebanon disarm Hizbullah and remove it from the border region.

That is clearly impossible under the present Lebanese regime, a delicate fabric of ethno-religious communities. The slightest shock can bring the whole structure crashing down and throw the state into total anarchy -- especially after the Americans succeeded in driving out the Syrian army, the only element that has for years provided some stability.

The idea of installing a Quisling in Lebanon is nothing new. In 1955, David Ben-Gurion proposed taking a "Christian officer" and installing him as dictator. Moshe Sharet showed that this idea was based on complete ignorance of Lebanese affairs and torpedoed it. But 27 years later, Ariel Sharon tried to put it into effect nevertheless. Bashir Gemayel was indeed installed as president, only to be murdered soon afterwards. His brother, Amin, succeeded him and signed a peace agreement with Israel, but was driven out of office. (The same brother is now publicly supporting the Israeli operation.)

The calculation now is that if the Israeli Air Force rains heavy enough blows on the Lebanese population --paralysing the sea- and airports, destroying the infrastructure, bombarding residential neighborhoods, cutting the Beirut-Damascus highroad etc. -- the public will get furious with Hizbullah and pressure the Lebanese government into fulfilling Israel's demands. Since the present government cannot even dream of doing so, a dictatorship will be set up with Israel's support.

That is the military logic. I have my doubts. It can be assumed that most Lebanese will react as any other people on earth would: with fury and hatred towards the invader. That happened in 1982, when the Shiites in the south of Lebanon, until then as docile as a doormat, stood up against the Israeli occupiers and created the Hizbullah, which has become the strongest force in the country. If the Lebanese elite now becomes tainted as collaborators with Israel, it will be swept off the map.(By the way, have the Qassams and Katyushas caused the Israeli population to exert pressure on our government to give up? Quite the contrary.)

The American policy is full of contradictions. President Bush wants "regime change" in the Middle East, but the present Lebanese regime has only recently been set up by under American pressure. In the meantime, Bush has succeeded only in breaking up Iraq and causing a civil war (as foretold here). He may get the same in Lebanon, if he does not stop the Israeli army in time. Moreover, a devastating blow against Hizbullah may arouse fury not only in Iran, but also among the Shiites in Iraq, on whose support all of Bush's plans for a pro-American regime are built.

So what's the answer? Not by accident, Hizbullah has carried out its soldier-snatching raid at a time when the Palestinians are crying out for succor. The Palestinian cause is popular all over the Arab word. By showing that they are a friend in need, when all other Arabs are failing dismally, Hizbullah hopes to increase its popularity. If an Israeli-Palestinian agreement had been achieved by now, Hizbullah would be no more than a local Lebanese phenomenon, irrelevant to our situation.

LESS THAN three months after its formation, the Olmert-Peretz government has succeeded in plunging Israel into a two-front war, whose aims are unrealistic and whose results cannot be foreseen.

If Olmert hopes to be seen as Mister Macho-Macho, a Sharon #2, he will be disappointed. The same goes for the desperate attempts of Peretz to be taken seriously as an imposing Mister Security. Everybody understands that this campaign -- both in Gaza and in Lebanon -- has been planned by the army and dictated by the army. The man who makes the decisions in Israel now is Dan Halutz. It is no accident that the job in Lebanon has been turned over to the Air Force.

The public is not enthusiastic about the war. It is resigned to it, in stoic fatalism, because it is being told that there is no alternative. And indeed, who can be against it? Who does not want to liberate the "kidnapped soldiers"? Who does not want to remove the Katyushas and rehabilitate deterrence? No politician dares to criticize the operation (except the Arab MKs, who are ignored by the Jewish public). In the media, the generals reign supreme, and not only those in uniform. There is almost no former general who is not being invited by the media to comment, explain and justify, all speaking in one voice.

(As an illustration: Israel's most popular TV channel invited me to an interview about the war, after hearing that I had taken part in an anti-war demonstration. I was quite surprised. But not for long -- an hour before the broadcast, an apologetic talk-show host called and said that there had been a terrible mistake -- they really meant to invite Professor Shlomo Avineri, a former Director General of the Foreign Office who can be counted on to justify any act of the government, whatever it may be, in lofty academic language.)

"Inter arma silent Musae" -- when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent. Or, rather: when the guns roar, the brain ceases to function.

AND JUST a small thought: when the State of Israel was founded in the middle of a cruel war, a poster was plastered on the walls: "All the country -- a front! All the people -- an army!"

58 Years have passed, and the same slogan is still as valid as it was then. What does that say about generations of statesmen and generals?

Copyright 2006 Uri Avnery

*****

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3. SHOCK & AWE

With Israel's missiles raining down on their streets,

the Lebanese remain defiant in the face of sustained attack

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SUNDAY HERALD

International News

16 July 2006

http://www.sundayherald.com/56818

By Lucy Fielder in Beirut

The moment the Lebanese hoped they would never have to see again has arrived. "It is a war now," says Grazulita Miro, a hairdresser sitting outside the open but deserted Salon Tony in the eastern Beirut suburb of Achrafieh. "After four days of this Israeli bombing, what else should we call it?"

It's Saturday morning, and the sense of relief in Beirut is palpable after a night free of raids. But it is short-lived. A population glued to the radio or TV, when the rationed power comes on, soon learns that the bombing has spread east and north. Then the bombing starts in the southern suburb of Haret Hreik, then at Beirut's port -- a stone's throw from crowds of waiting escapees at Charles Helou bus station.

In the early evening an Israeli rocket hits the lighthouse on the capital's fabled sea-front. The destruction, or what the international community terms "excessive force", has come to Beirut proper.

The death toll has reached 99 in four days of bombing: all but three were civilians. The Lebanese are glued to televisions showing the carnage. In Saturday's bloodiest attack, 20 people were killed when an Israeli missile incinerated their van. Fifteen were children.

Panic has been mounting for days, but as cars clog the roads to the mountains and foreigners prepare to evacuate the city, Fatima Makki heads the opposite way: south.

"Most people are still here," she says. "They believe that even just by being here, they're sending a message to Israel: 'We're staying.'"

Makki, a 32-year-old teacher, is travelling south to check that her mother is unharmed, as she refused to leave her home in the mainly Shi'ite area. Makki doesn't stop her flow of anger as another bomb explodes nearby, loud and terrifyingly close. "Everyone goes out on the streets 10 minutes after a bomb to take a look," she says. "I don't know if it's religion that makes us strong, but we trust in God, we trust the resistance, and whatever decision [Hezbollah leader] Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah makes."

Israel's systematic destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and economy, still being painstakingly rebuilt after the last war, started early on Thursday morning. Repair work on the ruined airport road bridge began half an hour later at 5am, according to foreman Abu Hassan from the Hezbollah-run local municipality.

"Where's the world?" Hassan asks, balancing on a fallen stretch of tarmac and twisted metal. "Where are the Arabs? To hell with the Arab leaders -- it's up to us now to serve Lebanon, to get our prisoners back. That's why we're all with Hezbollah till the end."

A man the workers identify as a local Hezbollah official pulls up, wheels screeching. "I want this bridge up by the end of the day," he roars. There's a pause, then chuckles and high-fives all round.

At the Sahel Hospital across the road from the bombed bridge, nurse Nada Najdeh says they received two dead and 20 injured on Thursday night when the bombing started. When a rocket hit just 30 metres away, the windows shattered. "We all went down to the operation rooms in the basement and the children were crying. It was very hard for them," she says. "Who would do this? If you bomb the bridge, you're also bombing the hospital next to it."

Nobody blamed Hezbollah, Najdeh says. "We all spoke with one word. We were steadfast."

Past a row of destroyed shops and a pavement of broken glass, Ahmad Abu Alaa has kept his car park and refreshment kiosk open. A giant hand appears to have crumpled the neighbouring Airport Bridge Bakery kiosk, and a jagged strip of corrugated iron skewers the glass-fronted fridge.

Alla has six children; the youngest is 10. "The kids were scared but we explained everything," he says. "'These are Israeli planes, they don't like us, we have to trust in God.' We all read the Koran together for the sake of the little ones." He pauses and smiles. "And the grown-ups as well."

On nearby Ghobeiry Square, air- conditioning engineer Mohammad Qumati stands on the edge of a crater, the wave of his arm taking in a black plume of smoke from the airport fuel tanks bleeding across the summer sky. "All this is nothing, compared to our dignity," he says. Youths pull up on motorbikes and stand at the edge, taking photos with their mobile phones.

Not only Shi'ites support Hezbollah's seizure of the soldiers. Many others are glad to see an Arab movement standing up to Israel after the international community dithered in the wake of massive raids on Gaza.

A young man sitting on Beirut's corniche, a Sunni who doesn't usually support Hezbollah, says he's behind them this time. "I'm just glad someone's doing something, achieving something, about Israel's killing of Palestinians," he says. "Nobody else will."

After months of growing clamour within Lebanon and elsewhere for Hezbollah's disarmament -- or in the new terminology, finding a "national defence strategy" -- Hezbollah has brought the fight with Israel home to all Lebanese. Only last weekend, the main concern for many middle-class Beirutis was whether to sunbathe in Beirut or head to the now inaccessible private beach resorts in Jiyyeh, just south of Beirut.

The whole country is smaller than Wales, but it sometimes feels as though there are two Lebanons. The capital, the mountains and the north are populated by a mix of sects dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslims. And then there's the mainly Shi'ite south, beginning at Beirut's now battered suburbs. It was the south that Israel occupied -- parts of it for 22 years -- until pulling out in 2000 after losses to Hezbollah's guerrillas became too high.

A Lebanese friend inadvertently summed it up a few weeks ago when she mused aloud: "Half the time I forget the south was occupied."

Amal Saad-Ghoreyeb, a politics professor at the Lebanese American University and author of a book on Hezbollah, says the south has often seemed separate: "Shi'ite communities don't support Hezbollah just because they are Shi'ite. Because they have borne the brunt of Israel's attacks it's only natural they should be more radical."

The same is true today, but this onslaught affects everyone more than any Israeli attack since the 15-year civil war ended in 1990. The city awoke on Thursday to scores of casualties in the south and news that Israeli jets had bombed the runways of the country's only international airport. A surreal sense of panic mounted along with the civilian death toll. Streams of 4x4s clogged the mountain roads north and east to the Syrian border. By Saturday, the exodus is more widespread. Long queues form at petrol stations; shoppers stock up on bottled water, candles and canned food.

It was dawn on Thursday when the loud whine of an Israeli jet first shook Beirutis from their sleep. An explosion shattered the night air, a mile or so away but brought near by the city's silence. For an hour or two jets rumbled and circled, the bombs crashed and thudded in the nearby southern suburbs, frantic calls were made to relatives in the besieged Shi'ite areas. The sound barrier rented above us with a terrifying boom, not once, but many times. Then the missiles were launched from the battleship, fierce and sudden without the warning hum of a jet. Three were killed in those raids, and three main bridges were ruined. All escape routes have since been cut. Israel has destroyed the port, bridges and roads north and east to Syria.

On Friday night, besieged Beirut is a silent shadow of its usually vibrant self. Intermittent bombing punctures the air in central Beirut as the sun goes down, driving the remaining stragglers home. Streets are dark and silent but for the rumble of electricity generators and the occasional car tearing home to safety. In the central suburb of Ras el-Nabeh, a grocer tidies his shelves by the light of three candles. Nasrallah is giving a defiant speech, which blares from battery-powered radios.

Nearby Monot Street, the usually pumping main bar strip, takes 30 seconds to drive down instead of half an hour of jams and cursing the nightclubs' valet parking. No youths swig from bottles outside the off licence; no beats thud from behind the shuttered doors. "It feels like 5am and it's not even 11pm", says Roody, the DJ in Torino's cafe bar in nearby Gemmayze, jerking his head towards the subdued huddle at the bar. It seems an age since the only battle most young Lebanese cared about was between Italy and France in al-Mondiale.

At Ramlet el-Baida, at the end of Beirut's fabled seafront promenade, an impromptu celebration has just broken up, a few lingering middle-aged men say. Far out in the darkness is a stricken Israeli battleship, hit by Hezbollah's rockets and betrayed only when it sends up the occasional flare.

"It burned for about 10 minutes before they put it out," plumber Mohammed Munzir says jubilantly. He gestures to a snack bar over the road. "We were watching Nasrallah's speech, and as he said they'd hit the ship, we rushed outside to have a look and saw the rockets strike it, two of them. We were all shouting and clapping."

On cue, a car hurtles past packed with bellowing youths holding up the victory sign and the yellow Hezbollah flag.

Nobody in the Shi'ite southern suburbs denies that Hezbollah started the latest round by seizing soldiers on Wednesday morning, but to them, it's just the latest battle. The Islamic resistance struck a military target of a military enemy that's holding Lebanese prisoners in its jails and occupying the Shebaa farms, which the UN has ruled are on Israeli-occupied Syrian land, but which Lebanon claims as its own.

"We've learned not to count on the outside world to support us, because they will never do it," Makki says. "But it's a shame on us to live with Israeli aggression. For us, the war never ended."

Copyright 2006 Newsquest (Sunday Herald) Limited. All rights reserved.

*****

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4. FUNDING MMA, PUNISHING HAMAS

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ZNET

Asia

July 16, 2006

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=10575

by Farooq Sulehria

While the European Union and the United States have arrogantly denied the Hamas government any funding, they have been generously funding the coalition of fundamentalist parties ruling Pakistan's North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) for the past four years.

The Mutahida Majlis e Amal (United Action Council or MMA) is Pakistan's version of the Taliban. A coalition of six fundamentalist parties, its two major constituents are Jamiat Ulema Islam and Jamaat Islami. While Jamiat Ulema Islam has been patronising terrorist outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Jamaat Islami played a pivotal role in the anti-Soviet Afghan 'Jihad' in the 1980s and later in the Kashmiri 'Jihad' in the 1990s. Owing to its role as a recruiting agency for the Afghan 'Jihad,' Jamaat Islami has close relations with al-Qaida. Jamiat Ulema Islam, on the other hand, had distanced itself from the Afghan 'Jihad,' but later played an active role in Afghanistan since the Taliban were a product of madrassas (seminaries) run by Jamiat Ulema Islam.

In Pakistan's 2002 parliamentary elections, the MMA received 15 percent of the votes nationally, an electoral 'surprise' that rang alarm bells across the world. It was the MMA's fierce opposition to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that paid them electoral dividends, particularly in Pakistan's third largest province, NWFP. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the MMA chief and head of Jamiat Ulema Islam, once made headlines when he issued a fatwa legitimising the killing of any American sighted in Pakistan. In its election campaign, the MMA also promised to liberate the nation and economy from the IMF and the World Bank. While Hamas has never threatened the West or gotten itself involved in the al-Qaida network or so-called global Jihad, MMA's constituent parties have openly lent active support to global Jihad and al-Qaida. Not one but half a dozen al-Qaida militants arrested in Pakistan were nabbed from hide-outs provided by Jamaat Islami.

Jamaat Islami itself has been the main beneficiary of US largesse in Pakistan. But it has also delivered. It was pivotal in the US campaign back in 1977 to remove Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto from power. The coup that saw Bhutto off was an early version of the CIA-backed anti-Chavez coup of four years ago. Bhutto died, Chavez survived. Perhaps Jamaat Islami was the missing factor in Venezuela?

A Jamiat-Jamaat combo called MMA formed the government in NWFP in the wake of the 2002 parliamentary elections. Did the US Senate veto any money to the MMA government even when Jamaat Islami was harbouring al-Qaeda activists? No, not at all. On the contrary, Nancy Powell, the then-US ambassador to Pakistan, paid the MMA leadership a visit in the NWFP capital of Peshawar. The meeting details are not available, but during her visit she spoke at a Peshawar University seminar where she revealed that her government wanted a dialogue with Muslims to remove 'misunderstandings' that exist on both sides.

The 'misunderstandings' were removed through Washington's economic tool: the World Bank. An 11-member World Bank delegation, led by Country Director John Walls, met the NWFP chief minister and expressed satisfaction with the financial discipline enforced by the MMA government. The reward for this financial discipline was a promise of an early release of a $90 million tranche to the NWFP government for its Structural Adjustment Credit (SACIII).

There were a few other 'disciplines' that the MMA government had enforced that John Walls did not praise. Dress code for students, for instance. Western-style trousers were banned. Prayers at work places became mandatory for government employees. Music was banned and Peshawar's historic Music Market was destroyed. The weirdest 'disciplinary action' was a code for billboards. Women's images on billboards were banned. This ban was a reaction to Jamaat-style ad-busting: Jamaat activists destroyed all billboards with women images. The oddest sight as a result of this ban was cinema houses' billboards. Life size signs outside of cinema houses have been part of the Indian sub-continent's film culture for years and Peshawar was famous for its exotic film hoardings. Now, after the ban, women's faces cannot be displayed, so instead such things as bangles and peacocks show their presence in the films' cast.

A town with limited possibilities for women to go out, Peshawar now became a totally-male town. Women could not be seen even on billboards. If an alien happened to visit Peshawar these days, it would certainly wonder how people reproduce here.

None of this has bothered the World Bank or the US aid agency, USAID. USAID at present is funding 14 different projects in NWFP. One funny project entitled 'Democracy and Governance' at 'capacity building' and to 'strengthen the oversight capacity of provincial legislature.'

Meantime, World Bank benevolence keeps showering upon the MMA government. Since its formation in 2002, the MMA government in NWFP has been granted World Bank aid worth $378 million. At present, the World Bank is running five different projects with the NWFP government. On top of that, the NWFP received Earthquake Additional Financing worth $10 million for one of the projects, while another $50 million was granted as Supplemental Financing for yet another project: the NWFP Structural Adjustment Credit II (SAC II). The World Bank-funded SAC I and SAC II aim at implementing the neo-liberal agenda the donors have set for Pakistan. Under these adjustments, one of the key 'structural reforms' is to employ the state employees on an ad hoc basis in order to avoid future pension costs. The MMA has religiously implemented the 'structural reforms.'

After the NWFP government had enforced the 'structural reforms', MMA Chief Minister Akram Durrani was paid another visit, this time by Ryan Crocker who had replaced Nancy Powell as US ambassador to Pakistan. According to a newspaper report (published 12 April 2005), 'Ryan Croker along with his team, called on NWFP chief minister Akram Khan Durrani here at Frontier House and agreed to reinforce the existing developmental ties between US and NWFP. The American envoy sought long term developmental partnership with the Frontier government to bring the two governments close to each other.' Do they need any further closeness when the MMA is sheepishly lending support to the US 'war on terror' in bordering Tribal Areas? In fact, both are already close and have always been since Cold War days.

One might wonder why the USA is supporting MMA despite the fact that MMA has sheltered al-Qaida and threatened to kill Americans. Is US strategy to coddle some pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaida fundamentalists to prevent them from growing and taking over the whole of Pakistan?

In fact, this 'contradiction' owes to opportunism on both sides. The MMA keeps presenting itself to the public as anti-imperialist. On the other hand, it is always ready to compromise. For instance, MMA keeps opposing General Musharraf but also helped him amend the constitution to enable himself to continue in power another five years. Similarly, in the case of the USA, the MMA compromises when it needs US money. It co-operated in the 'war on terror' going on in the Tribal Areas (a buffer zone between NWFP and Afghanistan) where Osama bin Laden is most likely hiding. On the other hand, the USA has been very selective and opportunistic. Instead of fighting mullahs en bloc, some of them have been co-opted. For instance, certain Taliban were co-opted (Mullah Rockety is now a member of the Afghan parliament), while others were put on a hit list. MMA co-operation was important for US Afghan policy post 9/11.

Moreover, the six MMA components are not all united in their relation to the USA. The Shiite and Wahhabist components oppose or support US actions depending on the preferences of their Iranian or Saudi mentors.

However, what is very obvious is that the United States has a very selective policy regarding mullahs. It is not fundamentalism Washington is fighting, but certain fundamentalists (who refuse to co-operate). The fact that none of the Pakistani Islamist organizations were on the US terror list prior to 9/11 shows the selectiveness of US opposition to fundamentalists.

Uncle Sam has never been a miser while blessing beards with dollars. The very same Bush administration, which is so busy today launching crusades, formerly embraced the Taliban. It was Secretary of State Colin Powell who himself announced a gift worth $43 million for Taliban. Nor did the puritan Taliban have any qualms in accepting infidel money. This $43 million was a reward for the Taliban's declaration that opium growing was contrary to the will of Allah. Of course, to the Taliban a lot of other things were also contrary to Allah's will, but that did not bother the Bush administration pre-9/11.

Last but not least, noting that Washington has been funding the MMA while punishing Hamas does not imply that MMA funding should be cut too. As a matter of fact, the USA has got no right to dictate to other people their way of life. The US double standards regarding Hamas and MMA drive home one message: what actually is decisive for Washington's sanctions is definitely not whether a group is fundamentalist or not, but whether it is a threat to US hegemony or not.

Farooq Sulehria is a journalist based in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is also a member of Labour Party Pakistan and active in trade unions.

Copyright 2006 Z Magazine

*****

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5. 7/7: THE BRITISH TERROR PARADIGM

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MEDIA MONITORS NETWORK

Perspectives

Friday, July 14 2006

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/32546

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

On 11th May 2006 the British government published its two principal investigative reports on the London bombings, the first by the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), and the second being the government's own "official account" of the bombings.

The first problem with the official account is that it's not objective. Written entirely by an anonymous civil servant, based on unspecified official intelligence sources, and edited by the government before final release, there was little prospect that it might contain serious criticism of government policy, even if there were good grounds for such criticism.

The ISC report is similar. All members of the ISC are appointed by the Prime Minister, to whom they report directly, and who had the power to censor its contents on security grounds. Hence, its contents were subject to high-level government approval, and unlikely to offer a critical analysis of government policy.

These reports are fundamentally politicized -- that is, written in the context of obvious political constraints, which limit their scope and shape their conclusions.

Even allowing for these constraints, the reports are guilty of a litany of omissions and factual inaccuracies. Read against what we know about the attacks from other sources, it is difficult to see how these reports offer anything at all of value. Virtually no new information was offered, and much of the material purportedly based on intelligence sources has already been widely reported in the media.

The central thesis supported by the reports is as follows: This was an attack by a cell of four home-grown terrorists. There is no evidence that they were connected to a wider network, no firm evidence that they were radicalized by anybody else, no evidence of any al-Qaeda connection. These people were, we are told, most probably self-radicalized. The attacks were planned in isolation and the method of the attacks was relatively unsophisticated.

This account of the London bombings emphasises evidence that appears to support these claims, and suppresses evidence that contradicts them . In my view, a more impartial examination of the evidence in the public record reveals many ambiguities in official statements, some minor, some more fundamental, but all of which tend to undermine elements of the government's account.

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of anomaly. The first pertains to the technical and logistical aspects of the bombings. The second concerns the social and ideological background of the four bombers. The third concerns the intelligence surveillance of them and the networks they associated with. I'll discuss categories 2 and 3 together.

I'll very briefly discuss some of these anomalies. On the first category, we have anomalies about the types of explosives used in the attacks, the nature of the explosions, and even about the chronology of the movements of the bombers on the day, as well as other issues. There's no time of course to review these in detail. But it's worth mentioning a few examples here.

Many of us will be aware that Home Secretary John Reid has now admitted in parliament that the government's narrative of the attacks was incorrect on one point, the chronology. He admitted that the narrative states wrongly that Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay left Luton station at 7.40am on 7th July last year to arrive in time to be photographed by CCTV in Kings Cross at 8:26AM. In my book, I point out that in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, police officials issued two mutually inconsistent stories to the media, both purporting to be based on material evidence. The first was that the four had taken the 7:40am train. The second story was that they had taken the 7:48am train. Police cited CCTV and eyewitness evidence as the basis for both findings. The government uncritically repeated the 7:40am account. Both accounts are false. As we've all experienced, trains in Britain rarely stick to their assigned schedules. So it is not too surprising that in reality, the 7:48 am train on 7th July 2005 was delayed and reached Kings Cross well after 8:26AM. The 7:40AM train was cancelled. As Reid now concedes, they could only have taken one earlier train from Luton which departed at 7:25AM and arrived in Kings Cross at 8:23AM.

To his credit, Reid admitted that the error "may be of concern". He subsequently ordered a report from police into how this sort of inaccuracy was perpetuated for more than a year. But clearly, the problem goes deeper than this. As noted by Grahame Russell, whose son Philip died on 7th July, this inaccuracy on something as seemingly trivial as train times, raises serious concerns about the accuracy of the rest of the report.

The same sort of bizarre anomalies arise again in relation to accounts about the explosives. The government's narrative states that the bombings were relatively unsophisticated requiring "little expertise". The reports claim the attacks were "self-financed" with a relatively small amount of funds, and executed using easily available household ingredients in home-made bombs. The house of commons intelligence committee report says that the bombs were made from acetone peroxide also known as TATP.

But it seems that just under a year after the attacks, the government is still not a hundred percent clear about the composition of the bombs. The official account says that "it appears" the bombs were homemade from cheap, household commodities, rather than confirming the matter decisively. The report notes that forensic analysis of the bombs continues, implying that the current conclusion about their composition could change. Forensic science, however, tends to provide unambiguous answers within a matter of hours and days. The forensic examiners have surely found out all they can by now. Why does forensic analysis continue?

Indeed, the official account fails to acknowledge and does not explain why in the first week after the 7/7 terrorist attacks, intelligence officials, police officers and forensic scientists independently said that forensic examination had found "traces of military-grade C4 plastic explosive at the London Underground blast sites". Some of these sources suggest that the C4 most likely originated from jihadist networks in the Balkans. The Balkans connection, if true, raises further awkward questions regarding the international dimension of the plot. But after that week, the police said they found TATP in a bathtub in a Leeds flat linked to the bombers. Suddenly, the C4 finding was forgotten, and sources told the press that the explosives used on the London Underground and bus bombings were solely TATP. When I scrutinized the relevant reports I was dissatisfied. For instance, Janes Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, when reporting the TATP finding as late as 22nd July (about a week after the finding) said that forensic tests "had still to confirm whether TATP had indeed been found", and that further testing was still needed to get a decisive result. Meanwhile, the rest of the media was saying that TATP had definitely been found.

Perhaps it had. But why the inexplicable vagueness? And how can we make sense of this inexplicable shift in official statements? Are the government's forensic scientists horrendously incompetent? Or is the government being economical with the truth? We may never know without an independent public inquiry.

These sorts of legitimate questions extend to other central issues. In mid-May, for instance, the Sunday Times reported that: "MI5 had secret tape recordings of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the gang leader, talking about how to build the device and then leave the country because there would be a lot of police activity." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2179602,00.html) The article raises significant questions. It suggests firstly that Khan was monitored quite closely by British intelligence, and secondly that he may not have intended to kill himself in the attack, but had instead contemplated leaving the country afterwards. It is of course possible that after the MI5 recording, Khan changed his mind and decided to become a martyr. On the other hand, given the unfortunate lack of clarity in terms of detail here, at face value the Times report suggests the possibility that the bombers were not necessarily aware of all aspects of the terrorist plot. This would, again, imply the involvement of a wider veteran terrorist network.

I could go on and on detailing many other technical inconsistencies pertaining to other dimensions of the official account. The government has a duty to resolve these inconsistencies for the public, and to provide a more coherent and reliable account. But in the absence of an independent public inquiry empowered to review the evidence available to police and intelligence services about the attacks, this may never happen. Will we have to wait another year, or 2 years, or 3 years or more for the government to concede and rectify these other sorts of anomalies? Such a situation is simply not satisfactory.

I'll now briefly look at the next categories of anomaly, pertaining to the social and ideological background of Khan, Tanweer, Hussein and Lindsay and related issues of intelligence surveillance. The government's account downplays the notion that the bombers operated as part of a wider al-Qaeda terrorist network, insisting that there "is as yet no firm evidence to corroborate this claim or the nature of Al Qaida support, if there was any." Although speculating about the cursory liaison with al-Qaeda members during visits to Pakistan, the report focuses on the role of Mohamed Sidique Khan in indoctrinating and radicalizing the group.

This is perhaps the official account's most significant omission. The evidence I've reviewed demonstrates that the four had operated as part of a well established al-Qaeda terrorist network in Britain, whose key leadership is well known to British authorities. The official account excludes the fact, reported shortly after the attacks, that British investigators had identified likely collaborators with the four bombers in Central Asia, NW Africa and the Balkans.

Khan and his colleagues in particular were members of a UK-based al-Qaeda network that had been planning terrorist attacks on multiple targets in New York, London and elsewhere in Europe. The cells involved in this planning, which included Khan and his colleagues, were being directed by a senior al-Qaeda operative, Abu Faraj al-Libbi. Al-Libbi had been arrested and detained in Pakistan in May 2005. US investigators called into interrogate him told the press that al-Libbi admitted that "the London mass transit system was a likely target for an attack." That warning was reportedly passed on to British intelligence services. But the parliamentary intelligence committee report blandly insists that no warnings at all of the 7/7 terrorist attack was received by the security services. This is demonstrably false. Without an independent public inquiry, we may never know what happened to this, along with the many other warnings of the London bombings, that had been passed on to our government from various credible sources.

My research indicates that the networks under al-Libbi's jurisdiction overlapped strongly with al-Muhajiroun, a militant British group headed by Omar Bakri Mohammed who is now in Lebanon, debarred from returning to the UK. Although routinely derided as nothing more than a hothead and a loudmouth, two of Bakri's boys from al Muhajiroun had already conducted a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv years before the London bombings, which Bakri had openly praised. A Manchester businessman Kursheed Fiaz has told the BBC that Sidique Khan, described as the chief bomber, had personally known the Tel Aviv bombers and had visited Fiaz with them as early as the summer of 2001 to discuss recruitment tactics.

Numerous other al-Muhajiroun members and associates had repeatedly boasted in the years prior to the attacks that hundreds of them had undergone training in al-Qaeda camps with a view to return to Britain to carry out possible terrorist attacks against British targets. Khan and his colleagues were reportedly members of al-Muhajiroun. Compelling evidence indicates that Bakri himself had advanced warning of the 7/7 attack plans to target London, and may even have had a direct role in radicalizing the four, as well as facilitating their activities. In April 2004, Bakri declared that an al-Qaeda cell in London was planning an imminent attack. This is utterly ignored by the government. Now that Bakri is permanently outside of British jurisdiction, it seems that there is no prospect that he might be investigated in this regard, despite Scotland Yard's recent insistence that those who knew about the attacks might face prosecution.

Similarly ignored is the evidence from a Times investigation that some of the four had attended Finsbury Park mosque and were inspired by Abu Hamza's inflammatory preaching. And further overlooked is the connection to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, an al-Qaeda IT expert whose laptop contained details of these very plans to attack, among other targets, the London Underground. The four were associated with networks with whom Noor Khan had been communicating, which were known to British police.

Why is the government downplaying these issues? An inkling of the answer may come when we look at the way security officials have dealt with the case of Haroon Rashid Aswat. Aswat, who used to be Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, was believed by both British and US investigators to have been the key senior al-Qaeda operative who masterminded the London bombings. The connection was established through records of telephone conversations between Aswat and Sidique Khan, many of which occurred on the morning of 7th July 2005. Police officials described the contents of these conversations to the Times and other media in some detail, suggesting that Aswat had provided bomb-making expertise and other planning assistance. But British authorities quickly backtracked on these statements about Aswat's involvement in 7/7 after revelations from US intelligence sources that Aswat was, in fact, an MI6 double agent. The revelation first came from former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus. It has subsequently been corroborated by US and French investigators who even now continue to describe Aswat as the chief suspected 7/7 mastermind. Meanwhile British officials have said that they will not investigate Aswat in connection with 7/7.

The Aswat example seems to illustrate a wider problem here. American and French intelligence officials confirm that Aswat and his colleagues, Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri, were all used in an MI6 operation to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo in the 1990s. The Anglo-American strategy of using mujahideen networks had begun in Afghanistan, continued in Azerbaijan and was imported to Europe during the Bosnian War. The operation is described in detail in Dutch intelligence files reviewed in the official Dutch inquiry into the Srebrenica genocide. The policy continued in Kosovo, and continues today in Macedonia.

British foreign policy in the Balkans meant that terrorists at home were given considerable latitude, and only this explains the reluctance of police and security services to prosecute individuals like Abu Hamza (who still has not been charged for numerous al-Qaeda linked terrorist activities in the UK). The Balkans is not the only region where British foreign policy makes use of networks affiliated to al-Qaeda. In Central Asia and Northwest Africa, British and American covert operations have collaborated with extremist Islamist terror networks in the pursuit of specific strategic and economic interests, largely to do with protecting corporate interests and controlling energy reserves. These networks are closely associated with the UK-based operatives linked to the London bombings. For example, in the summer of 2000, Yousef Bodanksy, former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, reported that US and British intelligence had held a formal meeting hosted by Azerbaijan to discuss the supply of arms and funds to al-Qaeda mercenaries in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. There are many other reliable examples of this sort of collaboration.

There is now growing acknowledgement in the international intelligence community that Britain has operated within the framework of a "Covenant of Security" with these networks. Former Downing Street intelligence adviser Crispin Black, for instance, notes that the covenant was a tacit understanding between the security services and extremist terrorist networks inside the UK that they would be permitted to do what they liked on British soil as long as they didn't target British interests. But even this doesn't fully explain the phenomenon at stake. Omar Bakri, for instance, told his followers over the internet in January 2005 that the covenant of security had been broken by the British government in its arrest of people like Abu Hamza, whose trial had been originally scheduled for 7th July 2005, and that therefore Britain was now a legitimate target of al-Qaeda terrorist activity. The failure of the authorities to act can only be explained in light of the fact these extremist networks were not only tolerated, but were actively protected due to their utility to British foreign policy objectives in the Balkans and elsewhere.

The danger is that the government's overwhelming imperative to conceal these policies from the public are compromising the integrity of the criminal investigation. Many of these networks in the UK remain intact. People associated with Bakri and other UK-based operatives linked to terrorism whom I identify in my writing, and who by their own admission have undergone terrorist training and are willing to carry out attacks inside the UK, have not been pursued. Meanwhile, the clear flaws in the British national security system that made the 7/7 attacks possible, tied as they are to Britain's foreign policies, have yet to be rectified.

I've only touched the tip of the iceberg here. The full story of the London bombings will not be fully told or understood in the absence of an independent public inquiry.

It is not reasonable for the government to leave the public, including the 7/7 survivors and families, to speculate about these issues. The government has a duty to clarify reasonably and judiciously what happened, how and why, on 7th July 2005.

Public Address, House of Lords, 12th July 2006, Chaired by Lord Rea, Sponsored by CAMPACC

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, London, United Kingdom. He teaches courses in political theory, international relations and contemporary history at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom. He is the author of "The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry,""The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001" and "Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq". His latest book is "The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism". He is a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN) and his articles are archived at nafeez.mediamonitors.net.

Copyright 2006 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed and Media Monitors Network

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6. SERPENT'S EGG

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THE MOSCOW TIMES

Global Eye

July 14, 2006

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/169327/

By Chris Floyd

Over and over, the Bush regime and its media apologists have peddled the same mendacious line in defense of their war crime in Iraq: "We're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here." But in fact the occupation is breeding a cadre of vicious terrorists intent on bringing death and destruction back home to America's streets, using the deadly skills they've learned -- in the U.S. military.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of neo-Nazis and "white power" extremists have infiltrated U.S. forces in a deliberate strategy to get training in weapons, urban warfare and covert operations, the Pentagon's own investigators report. These homegrown terrorists -- avowed enemies of democracy, committed to sparking the same kind of horrific civil war in America that President George W. Bush has spawned in Iraq -- have wormed their way into some of most elite military units, as well as filling up the ordinary ranks with cretinous "race warriors."

This infestation is being actively abetted by the Bush regime. Who says? Well, Defense Department investigator Scott Barfield, for one. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," Barfield told the Southern Poverty Law Center in a report issued last week.

In the last year alone, Barfield identified 320 white power extremists at a single U.S. army base, Fort Lewis in Washington state; only two were discharged. Some were part of just one neo-Nazi cell that has burrowed into five bases spread across the entire country, Barfield said; many of its members have joined the hundreds of known neo-Nazis now schooling themselves in Bush's master class in carnage.

The infiltration is part of a concerted strategy by the neo-Nazi movement to use Bush's war for terrorist training -- much as their extremist brothers in al Qaida are doing. In magazines and web sites, they pass along handy hints and exhortations to their cloaked comrades in the field and potential recruits at home. "Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," writes Steven Barry, a former Special Forces officer now serving as "military unit coordinator" for the neo-Nazi National Alliance, The New York Times reports.

"[The race war] will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed,'" writes Barry, as if he were channeling one of the deadly Iraqi militias sponsored by the Bushists in their self-confessed "Salvador Option" -- an undercover program named for the right-wing Central American death squads armed and trained by the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s, as The New Yorker reports.

"Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people and our culture," says another all-American goosestepper, Army engineer and Iraq war veteran John Fain. "We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes."

But it looks like some big-time insiders are already opening those doors. The percentage of "moral waivers" being granted to recruits for past misdeeds -- and for previously disqualifying factors such as violent extremism or gang membership -- has "more than doubled since 2001," the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Some recruiters are even helping skinheads cover up their telltale Nazi tattoos to get them into the military, Barfield says. Meanwhile, officers in the field are routinely failing to report obvious neo-Nazi activity, and those now-uncovered tattoos, when they spot them.

It's a far cry from the crackdown on extremism in the last decade, after the first great white-power infestation of the military during the Reagan-Bush years. When skinhead troops from the elite 82nd Airborne Division randomly murdered a black couple in 1995 to earn their neo-Nazi "spider web tattoos" for killing non-whites, the Pentagon brass began turfing out hatemongers and banning racist associations; one general even ordered his 19,000 men strip-searched for extremist tattoos, the SPLC reports.

Now, the brass help hide those same inky taints of evil, and knowingly send "race warriors" to occupy an Arab land, to storm Iraqi homes. How many "spider webs" have been earned with Bush's blessing as these extremists lord it over the "non-whites" in their power?

The tacit acceptance of neo-Nazis in the military is part of a broader pattern at work in the Bush imperium: the "mainstreaming" of right-wing extremism in U.S. society, an alarming development well documented by journalist Dave Neiwert on his Orcinus blog. White-power advocates once stuck on the lunatic fringe now appear on network television as respected spokesmen on the "immigration question." High-profile Bush-backers in the mainstream media -- Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and other gasbags -- routinely tout "fantasies" of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and death for "traitors," i.e., anyone who opposes the hard-right line. Bush himself has openly embraced religious extremists like the "Dominionists," whose rabid doctrines of Christian nationalism are scarcely distinguishable from the religious perversions that undergird most neo-Nazi philosophies.

In its heedless lust for loot and dominion, the Bush faction will use anyone: neo-Nazis, neoconservatives, theocrats, dictators, death squads, nutballs. The blowback from this nest of vipers will poison American life for generations -- but of course the Bushists don't care. America is nothing to them but a cash cow and a billy club. Let the stupid rabble worry about war-trained Nazis in the streets; the Bush elite will be safe and cozy in their gated, guarded mansions.

Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

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In parallel with its covert operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, Pakistan's ISI has provided since the 1980s, support for several secessionist Islamic insurgencies in India's Kashmir. ... Although officially condemned by Washington, these covert ISI operations were undertaken with the tacit approval of the US Government. Coinciding with the 1989 Geneva Peace Agreement and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ISI was instrumental in the creation of the militant Jammu and Kashmir Hizbul Mujahideen (JKHM). ... The December 2001 terrorist attacks on the Indian Parliament--which contributed to pushing India and Pakistan to the brink of war--were conducted by two Pakistan-based rebel groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Mohammed), both of which are covertly supported by Pakistan's ISI. ... The timely attack on the Indian Parliament, followed by the ethnic riots in Gujarat in early 2002, were the culmination of a process initiated in the 1980s, financed by drug money and abetted by Pakistan's military intelligence. ... Needless to say, these ISI-supported terrorist attacks serve the geopolitical interests of the US. -- Michel Chossudovsky, America's War On Terrorism [Pincourt, QC: Global Research, 2005] pp. 32-33.

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- Wednesday, 12 July 2006 -

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1. TERRORIST ATROCITY IN MUMBAI

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News & Analysis: Asia: India

By the Editorial Board

The World Socialist Web Site condemns the coordinated bombing attack carried out yesterday in Mumbai, India's most populous city and financial center. At least 179 people were killed and 400 injured when eight bombs exploded, in quick succession, on or near seven commuter trains traveling along the Western Railway during the Tuesday evening rush hour.

The bombs were timed and placed to inflict maximum loss of life. They blew apart railway cars packed with passengers, sending blood and body parts in all directions. The huge number of head and chest wounds indicate, police investigators said, that many of the bombs were placed in overhead luggage compartments. The death toll is expected to rise, as rescue efforts are still underway and many of the injured are in critical condition.

Heavy rainfall, streets clogged with panic-stricken commuters trying to make their way home, and jammed mobile telephone networks all contributed to the chaos that prevailed in the wake of the bombings and hampered rescue efforts.

"The aftermath was televised across the nation," reported the New York Times, "with images showing the wreckage of mangled trains, torn limbs and stunned, injured commuters, some with blood-streaked faces."

Whatever the ostensible aims of the bombers, the deliberate wanton slaughter of commuters and other train travelers is a horrific crime and can only aid political reaction in India and around the world.

The Bush administration, as would be expected, seized on the events in Mumbai to try to promote its "war on terror"--the pretext it has invoked in seeking to establish, through military conquest, strategic dominance in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asian regions and in mounting sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home. "We will stand with India on the war on terror," declared Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Indian government has ordered security forces to go on high alert in all India's cities. In a statement released to the press, Prime Minister Manmoham Singh vowed that state authorities "will work to defeat the evil designs of terrorists and will not allow them to succeed."

As of early Wednesday morning (Indian time), no group had claimed responsibility for Tuesday's terrorist attack. But Indian media are reporting that unnamed high-level government sources have said that the bombings were "clearly" the work of Lashkar-e-Taiba (The Army of the Pure), an Islamicist terrorist organization that is opposed to the majority-Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir remaining part of the Indian Union. The bombings, according to these sources, were aimed at provoking communal strife within India, in the belief that a Hindu backlash against India's Muslim minority would rebound to the benefit of the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir and undermine peace negotiations between India and Pakistan.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Islamicist terrorist groups opposed to Indian control over Kashmir have repeatedly staged attacks on civilians and perpetrated communalist atrocities.

Earlier Tuesday, eight people were killed and more than 35 injured in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, in three grenade attacks that targeted tourists.

But if Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) was the author of the coordinated bombings in Mumbai, it would represent a new level of technical sophistication.

A spokesman for the organization has denied it had anything to do with yesterday's terrorist attacks in either Srinagar or Mumbai. According to the Hindu, LeT representative Dr. Abdullah, condemned both attacks as "inhuman and barbaric" in a telephone call to several media organizations in Srinagar. "Blaming the LeT for such inhuman acts is an attempt by the Indian security agencies to defame the freedom struggle in Jammu and Kashmir," claimed Ghaznavi.

By their very nature, terrorist acts make it impossible to determine where terrorist conspiracy ends and the machinations of intelligence agencies, security forces and right-wing provocateurs begin.

India's security forces have sought to crush the insurgency in Kashmir and separatist agitations in other parts of the country through ruthless repression. Torture, murder, infiltration and provocation, and campaigns aimed at uncovering "terrorists" through mass detentions are routine.

It cannot be excluded that yesterday's atrocity in Mumbai was organized or facilitated by agents provocateurs working for one of India's intelligence agencies or that elements within the security forces allowed the terrorist attack to take place, with the aim of panicking the public into accepting increased repressive powers for the state. It is also possible that the Mumbai bombings were the work of Hindu supremacist fanatics bent on stoking up anti-Muslim violence.

Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil has said authorities were warned that an attack was coming, but the "place and time was not known."

In December 2001, India's government, then led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), seized on a terrorist attack on India's parliament, blamed on the LeT, to push through a draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and to threaten war on long-time arch-rival Pakistan, which it accused of supporting the LeT. In an attempt to force Pakistan into making major concessions, India's government kept a million troops in battle formation near the Pakistan border for almost a year.

The United Progressive Alliance, which replaced the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, as India's government following the May 2004 elections, repealed POTA, but many of its anti-democratic provisions were included in the legislation that it introduced in its stead.

In contrast to the reaction of the BJP government in December 2001, the Congress Party-led UP government has--at least thus far--leveled no accusations of Pakistani involvement in either the Mumbai or Srinagar terror attacks. Islamabad, for its part, was quick to denounce the Mumbai bombings.

The Shiv Sena--the BJP ally and fellow proponent of Hindu supremacy that control Mumbai's municipal government and forms the official opposition in the state of Maharashtra--responded to yesterday's terrorist atrocity by demanding that the Congress Party-Nationalist Congress Party state government resign, since it had failed to ensure the safety of the citizenry.

Shiv Sena party boss Bal Thackeray sought to blame the bomb blasts on the Congress' pursuit of better relations with Pakistan. "The Centre is busy operating bus services to Pakistan and Islamabad, on its part, is busy pushing terrorists into India," Thackeray told the Times of India. "I wish to warn Congress that people's patience is wearing very thin. If the terrorists are not dealt with firmly, there will be an explosion of discontent against Congress governments not only at the Centre, but in the states as well."

For months, the BJP has been accusing the Congress Party-led UPA government of being "soft" on terrorism and agitating for the government to restore POTA in its entirety.

Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

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2. ISRAELIS INVADE LEBANON AFTER SOLDIERS ARE SEIZED

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THE GUARDIAN

World News

Wednesday July 12, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1818696,00.html

Conal Urquhart in Gaza City, Chris McGreal in Jerusalem and agencies

Israeli tanks and troops today invaded southern Lebanon after Hizbullah captured two soldiers and killed several others.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, described the capture of the soldiers an "act of war" by Lebanon, with today's developments compounding the ongoing political crisis over an abducted Israeli soldier being held in Gaza.

Palestinian militants holding Corporal Gilad Shalit have demanded that all Palestinian women and young people held in Israeli jails be freed in exchange for his release.

The Bush administration blamed Syria and Iran for today's kidnappings and violence, calling for the immediate and unconditional release of the two soldiers.

Hizbullah said it would not release them until Israel agreed to set free all Arab prisoners.

Its capture of the soldiers is a huge political embarrassment to Mr Olmert, coming only weeks after the seizure of Cpl Shalit last month.

He will be concerned that Hamas and Hizbullah could start working together to demand the release of prisoners as a condition for freeing the missing soldiers.

Several Israeli soldiers were killed in fighting after Mr Olmert ordered his forces into Lebanon in an attempt to rescue the abducted soldiers.

"These are difficult days for the state of Israel and its citizens," he said. "There are people ... who are trying to test our resolve. They will fail, and they will pay a heavy price for their actions."

The crisis facing Israel was compounded when its air force killed a family of nine, dropping a 550lb bomb on a house in a residential area of Gaza City early today.

Nabil Abu Salmiah, a lecturer at the Islamic University - who has been described by Israel as a Hamas activist - was killed, along with his wife and their five daughters and two sons.

Five of the dead children were aged between four and 11, and the other two were in their teens.

The deaths will be a severe embarrassment to Israel, which has killed around 40 civilians, many of them children, in missile and shell attacks over recent weeks.

Witnesses said the only members of the family to survive were two sons, one thrown out of the house by the explosion and another rescued from the rubble, and the eldest daughter, who was married and lived elsewhere.

The bombing is likely to be compared to a notorious attack in which an Israeli jet dropped a one tonne bomb on an apartment block four years ago, killing Salah Shehade, the Hamas military leader, and 14 other people, including nine children.

Sadullah Zant, 31, a relative and neighbour, said he had been asleep on his balcony when he heard two explosions within seconds of each other.

"My building moved up and down and I heard crashing and screaming," he said. "I ran out and I saw people emerging from the building covered in blood and dust. People were screaming, and you could still hear the jets overhead."

Witnesses said the second explosion came when a missile was fired from a helicopter at a car fleeing the area, suggesting that the men being targeted by Israel had already left the house when the bomb struck.

Israeli sources said they had been trying to kill Mohammed Deif, who had met other commanders of the Hamas military wing in the house.

A former leader of the Hamas military wing, he has been injured in three previous assassination attempts. Although he has been replaced as leader by Ahmed Jaabri, he remains an influential figure.

In a text message to the Associated Press, a Hamas spokesman wrote: "We deny the allegations that commander Mohammed Deif was wounded, and we confirm that he and his colleagues have survived."

The air strikes happened as the Israeli army entered new areas of the Gaza Strip.

Scores of tanks and armoured personnel carriers took up positions around Deir al Balah and Khan Yunis in central Gaza, blocking movement between the two halves of the strip.

Israeli troops killed at least 12 Palestinians, including one policemen and two militants, in four separate incidents in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical officials said.

Mr Olmert has been pursuing a drawn-out strategy to win the release of Cpl Shalit - who is being held by Hamas's military wing and other groups - and to end Palestinian rocket attacks.

He has initiated a series of assaults on the Gaza Strip, put Gaza's 1.4 million residents under pressure with the destruction of the only power station and other infrastructure, and arrested members of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian government and MPs.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

*****

THE PALESTINE CHRONICLE

P.O. Box 196

Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043-0196 USA

E-mail Editor: editor@palestinechronicle.com

Web: http://www.PalestineChronicle.com

- Wednesday, July 12, 2006 -

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3. RACISM PLAGUES WESTERN MEDIA COVERAGE

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By Ramzy Baroud

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-07120681746.htm

Racism is "the belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another and the practices of the dominant group to maintain the inferior position of the dominated group. Often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination."

This is how the British Library defines racism on its Web site. The above definition hardly deviates from the essence of almost all definitions of the ominous concept. And, indeed, the concept is being fully utilized with Israel's onslaught against the Palestinians, and the international community and media's mild, if not accommodating response to the onslaught.

The capture of Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit is an act of self-defense. According to international law and the Geneva Conventions, he can be considered a prisoner of war, but not according to CNN, Fox News and the increasingly spineless BBC, which presents the soldier as a victim, who was "kidnapped" by Palestinian "militants" who are "affiliated" with the Hamas government.

By not challenging the Israeli narrative in any meaningful way, the uncritical media has become a tool in the hands of Israel's war strategists and their eternal concoctions.

Consider this example. An Israeli military commander tells a BBC correspondent dispatched to the border area between Israel and Gaza, that Israel intends on opening the border for "as long as it takes" to offset the humanitarian crisis developing in Gaza. The Israeli Army representative in a barefaced lie declares that the border has always been open, despite the perpetual Palestinian threat on the state of Israel. The BBC correspondent thanks him and signs off.

Is it possible that the BBC is unaware of the fact that Gaza has been under a strict military siege since Hamas' democratic advent to power through the January 2006 elections? Could it be that the Western media has missed the dozens of shocking reports that have warned that the Israeli siege -- which began months before the capture of Shalit -- was soon to create chaos and panic among the already malnourished Palestinians in Gaza? Did they all miss statements by top Israeli officials vowing to carry on with the siege until the outset of Hamas?

Some reporters misrepresent facts out of ignorance, not by design. But if that indeed was the case, then how can one excuse the fact that the same media that coined the term "kidnapping" to describe the action of the Palestinian fighters who captured Shalit refused to use the same association to describe the kidnapping of most of the elected Palestinian Cabinet, mostly academics with no connection to any militant wing?

Israel's military spokesman insisted that they are "all terrorists" and Israel, "like any democratic" country has the right to protect itself against terrorists. If that was true, why did Israel refrain from kidnapping them until Palestinian fighters embarrassed the Israeli Army and captured their first prisoner of war in a long time? Is "rounding up" Palestinian ministers and scores of legislators the same as having a soldier captured in what has been for long a one-sided Israeli war?

If you are an avid viewer of Fox News or a reader of the New York Times, then Israel is yet to exceed its legitimate legal boundaries: that of a democracy opting to defend its citizens. But only racism can lead to such rationale. Only a racist media portrays the capture of a soldier whose army units have besieged Gazans for years, denying them food and medicine, as a violation of all that is holy. Only a racist media presents the kidnapping of 9,000 Palestinians, now in Israeli jails, as a just outcome of Israel's routine arrests of Palestinian terrorists or potential terrorists. Only racism can play down the Israeli destruction of Gaza's infrastructure, which is justified without question, for such actions are necessary to impede the militants' efforts.

And yet, Israel is praised for its "generous" act of allowing some food to be transferred to Gazans, who ironically have gone hungry because of the Israeli-spearheaded international campaign to punish Palestinians for electing Hamas.

Only racism can completely remove from the current discourse the murder of dozens of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Israeli Army (90 civilians in seven weeks) as the reason that led to the Palestinian raid on the Israeli Army post and the capture of Shalit, and instead depict the current escalation as if it was entirely the work of the Palestinians, with Israel's slate still clean.

Indeed, Israel's slate will continue to be clean as long as racism and inequality are the concepts according to which this conflict is explained. Israel has the right to do all the above actions without hesitation because Israel is not Palestine, and the lives and well being of the residents of Israel, at least some of them, cannot be equated with Palestinians. Turn the tables for a moment and you'll understand how repellent such racism is.

Inequality has always been at the heart of this conflict, the late professor Edward Said used to say. Racism is at the heart of inequality, I must add. The media can be ignorant, biased and self-serving, indeed, but it can also be utterly racist.

Ramzy Baroud's latest book: "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronology of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) is now available at Amazon.com.

Copyright 2006 PalestineChronicle.com.

*****

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4. IRAQ: ANOTHER FACE, ANOTHER RAID

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INTER PRESS SERVICE

International: Iraq

July 11, 2006

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33920

Dahr Jamail and Ali Fadhil

FALLUJAH, Jul 11 (IPS) -- It could be called perhaps just another raid.

Early in the morning on Sunday, Jun. 18, U.S. military helicopters landed near the home of Sinan Abdul-Ilah al-Mashadani in the al-Jughaifi district of Fallujah.

Within two minutes the doors of his home were blasted open and "a strange looking group of people" stormed inside, according to Said Walid Ahmed, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the neighbourhood.

"This force is not totally unknown to us here in Fallujah," Ahmed, who witnessed the incident from a nearby house told IPS.. "They are a special force of Americans that assassinates more people than it arrests."

Ahmed described the force from the helicopters as "big men with long hair and beards, some wearing earrings, and others with little black caps on the top of their heads at the back."

Sinan Abdul-Ilah al-Mashadani, who was a student at al-Mustansiriya University and the sole supporter of his mother and younger brother and sister, was killed in the raid, apparently by a special operations team supported by the U.S. military, according to witnesses.

"Their (special forces troops') dogs were biting everybody including children and women in the neighbourhood," Um Amar, a 63-year-old woman who lives three houses away from Sinan told IPS. "They killed the poor boy in cold blood and arrested his little brother." She burst into tears and began to pray.

Another neighbour, Jassim al-Jumaily, said Sinan's father Najim Abdul-Ilah al-Mashhadani was killed during Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004 when his house was bombed by U.S. warplanes.

The U.S. military assault on Fallujah then destroyed most of the city and killed between 4,000 and 6,000 people, according to Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI), an Iraqi non-governmental organisation based in Fallujah.

Sinan took responsibility for his family after the death of his father, Jumaily said. "He had to work and study at the same time. We did not notice any abnormality in his behaviour at all. When the helicopters came, we never thought Sinan would be the target, because we realise they only come after big personalities from al-Qaeda or leaders in the Iraqi resistance."

Jumaily said the long-haired bearded men from the special force "blasted the doors of Sinan's house open as if they were attacking an army headquarters."

People in the neighbourhood said they heard some of what was going on. "The screaming of Sinan's mother and sisters was frightening," Jumaily said. "All we could do was pray for their safety, trying to comfort each other that the worst possibility was that they would arrest Sinan."

After the men had been inside the house for three hours Jumaily and other witnesses said they heard Sinan's mother wailing, and saw the men leave with Amin, her 13-year-old son who was being beaten by the men and bitten by their dogs as he was taken away.

Many of the neighbours then went to Sinan's home, and found his body, covered with sheets and mattresses. There was a pool of blood on the floor, some was splattered on the walls.

"Three days after his detention, Amin was released," said Muhamad al-Deraji, director of MHRI. "The left hand of this orphaned child was bitten three times, and is now scarred and deformed."

The U.S. forces also raided other homes in the area, Deraji said. "One of the dogs attacked a woman who tried to protect her baby. The dog bit the mother's hand."

Deraji said the forces looted money and jewellery from several of the houses they raided.

IPS sent an email to Major Douglas Powell at the Combined Press Information Centre for the Multi-National Force in Iraq to request comment on the incident. There was no reply.

Later, IPS phoned the U.S. military spokesperson in Baghdad to request information on the incident. The spokesman, who declined to give his name, said "we have no information confirming this event ever took place."

Copyright 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.

*****

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5. TALIBAN IN SEARCH OF A WINNING FORMULA

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ASIA TIMES ONLINE

South Asia

July 12, 2006

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HG12Df03.html

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI -- The Taliban's spring offensive in Afghanistan is now three months old. It is the biggest ever mounted against foreign forces in the country since the Taliban's ouster in 2001, and it has taken a heavy toll on insurgency as well as coalition forces.

And, according to one of the Taliban's top 10 commanders who spoke to Asia Times Online, the rising spiral of death is just the tip of the iceberg and the coalition's "Operation Mountain Thrust" in the southwest of the country will be severely challenged.

Mullah Gul Mohammed Jangvi (the last name means warrior) said by telephone from Afghanistan the Taliban would once again alter their tactics. Jangvi is one of the 10 members of the command council of the Taliban. (For an earlier interview with Jangvi, see Taliban take the fight to the country, Asia Times Online, June 9.)

"We have had some initial successes, which boosted our morale. Tarood, Sangeen and Musa Qila districts in Helmand province are our recent victories," Jangvi said.

"We have set a few priorities, top-most of which is to fight only with foreign forces and avoid fighting Afghans. However, there are Afghans who are top of our [hit] list, like Gul Afghan Sherzai [governor of Nangarhar province], [President] Hamid Karzai and the members of parliament."

Jangvi dismissed a question that perhaps the Taliban were on the back foot as they were frequently changing tactics. "In the past few weeks we narrowed down our targets and we are aiming to hit those targets which give us optimum results.

"In the recent past we tried to attack Kandahar airport and US military bases. This is aimed at rooting out American air power in these stations so that they would not be able to shield their ground troops in a short span of time. In the coming days you will see more and more attacks on airfields, and once air cover vanishes from over the heads of coalition troops, they will be trapped everywhere like sitting ducks."

Despite Jangvi's optimism, though, the fact is that the Taliban have only inflicted about 100 casualties on coalition forces in the past three months, while the body count of Taliban and civilians in southwestern Afghanistan, most of them Taliban supporters, is estimated at more than 2,000.

And critically, in some areas the insurgency has degenerated into an unholy mess of internecine strife, so much so that even Karzai has decried the bloodshed and called on coalition forces to alter their tactics as "even the Taliban are sons of the soil".

As things stand, with the insurgency losing some of its focus as tribes fight each other, it only has a limited effect on the morale of the mighty American war machine and does not bode well for the chances of the campaign turning the Taliban into an emboldened force to make a comeback.

Hence the Taliban once again changed focus by concentrating solely on foreign forces, rather than engaging the Afghan National Army.

Jangvi explained his optimism: "The Taliban's command structure started off with 10 commanders, and now it is expanding. As soon as we get back into the villages, towns and cities, we will revive our old networks and our old command structures.

"At present I can only divulge that now we have commanders in all Afghan provinces from north to south. Last year we did not have that network. More successes bring more strength and in the coming days the Taliban command structure will reach up to all districts and village levels. And once we attain that it means that we will be returning to our old strength, that is, around 300,000 all across Afghanistan."

This number refers to those Taliban who were part of the regime's administration, police, army and other security apparatus during Taliban rule, and who after the Taliban retreat melted into Afghanistan's tribal population.

"Now use your imagination, once we negate American air power and regain our whole strength, why can't we seize control of Afghanistan?"

Nonetheless, losing Afghanistan is not an option for the Americans as even a limited victory of the Taliban up to southwestern Afghanistan would be a new base for an anti-US movement. This area would include the provinces of Urzgan, Zabul and Helmand, beside a few districts in Kandahar.

This would be a blow to the American war machine not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq as the Taliban would be in a position to establish a supply line of manpower from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq for the resistance there. Such a line could also be used to channel funds from Afghanistan's rampant opium industry to the Iraqi resistance.

This is the reason why coalition forces will keep up the pressure in the region, notably by increasing the number of troops on the ground -- especially from Britain and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Jangvi is unperturbed, though. "More foreign troops means more of their casualties. This would be the time for the world Muslim community to understand that jihad in Afghanistan has reached a significant level and it is time again to help the resistance with manpower and money."

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

*****

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6. AFGHANISTAN REELS UNDER BUMPER HARVESTS

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ASIA TIMES ONLINE

South Asia

July 11, 2006

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HG11Df01.html

By Jason Motlagh

Afghanistan boasts two bumper crops this season, and both could be lethal to the already fledgling authority of its government.

Western officials expect the largest-ever opium crop in the face of a toothless US$1 billion eradication campaign. And contrary to earlier pronouncements by military officials, the Taliban are gaining steam in the volatile southern provinces, where fighting has raged at levels not seen since the US-led invasion that toppled the al-Qaeda-allied Islamic fundamentalist movement five years ago.

Forty thousand tons of narcotics were burned last week at a ceremony in Kabul to show the state's determination to stamp out illegal drugs that now account for nearly half of its gross domestic product. This came just one week after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a five-hour pit stop for a meeting with President Hamid Karzai to affirm Washington's full support of his efforts to steer reconstruction and defeat a reconstituted Taliban.

But if US President George W Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad last month to look the new Iraqi prime minister "in the eye" and give reassurances is held to measure, gestures of this scale are exceeded only by the turmoil they betray.

As the war in Iraq usurps the brunt of US military might, the insurgent and narco threats in Afghanistan have arisen at the flank. After diminished harvests under the Taliban, the country now produces about 90% of the world's opium, making it the number one global heroin producer and trafficker. Recent estimates indicate that the poppy crop in Helmand province, a militant stronghold, will more than double from last year, despite the presence of 3,300 British troops.

This comeback is trumped by that of the Taliban, which is waging a fierce campaign to destabilize the south as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces complete a takeover of peacekeeping responsibilities there from the US by the end of July. Since mid-May, more than 700 people have been killed in sporadic clashes. Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, estimates there are 20-25 heavily armed militias operating in five southern provinces for a total of 3,000-5,000 men spoiling to test the resolve of Western security forces -- hardly a "spent force" as some officials have described.

Lieutenant-General Karl Eikenberry, head of US forces in Afghanistan, said at a Pentagon news conference last month he was "confident the situation will improve by the end of this year". This view is not shared by retired General Barry R McCaffrey, who last week issued a troubling report after his second trip to inspect US military operations in which he argued circumstances would grow worse before they improved.

According to his report, the Taliban operated in small units three years ago; last year, they grew to company-sized units of 100-plus men; and for this year's summer fighting season they are maneuvering in 400-strong battalion-sized units. When fighting broke out May 18 in Helmand, 300-400 militants bearing assault rifles and machine guns reportedly attacked a police and government headquarters, killing 16 officers, an American civilian and a Canadian soldier. "They appear to have received excellent tactical, camouflage and marksmanship training," McCaffrey noted. The militants have become "very aggressive and smart in their tactics".

That month, Taliban commander in Helmand, Mullah Mohammed Kaseem Farouqi, bragged to The Times of London newspaper by satellite phone of having "between 2,500 and 3,000 men" with "thousands more ... in their homes waiting for [his] message to fight". He also claimed to have "hundreds" of volunteers ready to become suicide bombers, a method new to Afghanistan that, along with a 30% influx of roadside bombs compared to last year, denote imitation of the Iraqi insurgency. More than suicide bombings have been recorded in the past three months.

Karzai is sometimes called the "mayor of Kabul" since his authority is tenuous at best in regions outside the capital. The pro-Western leader nominally heads a democratic regime with a stable currency, but fault lines plague the country. "Afghanistan has never had a stable government," Marina Ottaway, an expert on democracy and rule of law at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Asia Times Online. "An extremely weak government in a large country with a $600 million budget is just not capable of doing enough for the country in the foreseeable future."

Unconfirmed coalition death tolls reveal roughly 20 insurgents are killed for every Afghan or Western casualty, but the frequency of Taliban attacks has increased as it seeks to expand its influence in the northern and western provinces. Eroding security has scaled back UN operations to just six out of 50 districts nationwide. There are further reports that militants have crept within 25 miles of Kabul itself, which has experienced unprecedented spasms of violence recent weeks.

For the second day in a row, multiple bombs exploded in the capital last Wednesday, killing one bystander and wounding 47. The latest attack took place during rush hour, targeting government workers and security forces, according to witnesses. Such emboldened tactics indicate Kabul is no longer an exception to the turmoil that has paralyzed vast swathes of the country, as Afghans frustrated with a corrupt government's failure to deliver on promises of security and economic development look elsewhere.

In the absence of viable economic alternatives, some NATO officials and experts say the war on drugs has reinforced the Taliban's power. Militants have offered to protect lucrative crops, using kickbacks from drug smugglers to fuel their campaign. "Like it or not, the opium trade is a huge part of the Afghan economy," Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told Asia Times Online. "Warlords and farmers may support Karzai in the abstract, but not when he is compelled to target their only reliable source of livelihood.

"Even supporters of the war on drugs need to wake up and smell the coffee ... The anti-drug-effort needs to be put on the back burner at least until we can fight off the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces."

Jawad insists the Taliban relies on intimidation tactics to subdue Afghanis living in the countryside. They include killing moderate tribal leaders and clergy to create a climate of fear, and burning down schools and medical clinics. A United Nations report confirms that on average, a school is torched or a female teacher is killed every day somewhere in the country. In a recent bout of fighting near Kandahar, the US military said several insurgents "used innocent Afghan civilians as shields" to escape to nearby villages.

The latest counter-offensive waged by international troops, dubbed Operation Mountain Thrust, kicked off in mid-June to beat back Taliban forces. The effectiveness of the 10,000-man sweep has received conflicting reports, but Afghan Defense Minister Rahim Wardak recently said insurgents had been "coming out with bigger groups and confronting us directly" since the beginning of the operation. Afghan officials say the Taliban wanted to discourage the further deployment of NATO forces (now at 21,000 troops), spearheaded by Britain and Canada, as they take over security responsibilities from the US, which is drawing down its presence to 17,000 troops from 23,000.

Washington has spent $1.3 billion on reconstruction projects over the past four years and will remain Afghanistan's largest benefactor, but anti-Americanism continues to percolate at a grassroots level. The US military has relied heavily on air strikes to pound Taliban enclaves in rugged terrain, an approach experts say tends to backfire and foster support for insurgents in bombed areas. "Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren't your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesman to become your enemies," military analyst William S Lind wrote in a June 23 United Press International story. "In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42-centimeter siege mortars."

Fifteen innocent villagers were killed in a May air strike, setting the stage for mass riots that rocked the capital the following week when a US military truck hit civilians in a traffic accident. Official reports put the death toll as high as 20 people; aid agencies were burned and looted; and protesters shouted "Death to America" in the streets.

Karzai has long opined that the West has not provided enough resources to hasten economic and political reform in his country, while ignoring the alleged sanctuary given to Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives by Pakistan inside its lawless border region. Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, a key Washington ally in its global "war on terror", has been accused of allowing Islamist militants -- including Osama bin Laden -- to infiltrate and recruit from remote Pashtun tribal areas, a charge he denies.

Pakistan has already deployed more than 80,000 troops along its western border, adding 10,000 more during Rice's visit, and officials in Islamabad counter the Taliban are regrouping on the Afghan side.

According to McCaffrey's report, the Afghan Army is "miserably under-resourced" to be effective against a Taliban bent on "waiting us out" in the coming years. He said they possessed "shoddy small arms", if any at all, relaying that Afghan field commanders told him they tried to seize weapons from the Taliban for their own troops to use.

The national police, whose US-sponsored training program is three years behind schedule, is in tatters as well, "badly equipped, corrupt, incompetent, poorly led and trained, riddled by drug use" and without infrastructure.

The former Gulf War commander recommends the US provide "at least five years of continued robust ... military presence" or six ground combat battalions and extensive air and armored support, along with special forces permitted "unilateral action" in counter-terror operations.

"The Afghan national leadership," he writes, "is collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years -- leaving NATO holding the bag -- and the whole thing will again collapse into mayhem.

"They do not believe the US has made a strategic commitment to stay with them for the 15 years required to create an independent, functional nation-state, which can survive in this dangerous part of the world."

Other experts are less sanguine about the future and argue the US has already paid dearly. Indeed, half of the 141 American servicemen killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion died last year, Defense Department records show. The BBC has also reported that Pakistan-based foreign militants with links to al-Qaeda have been offering large bounties to Afghans to kill US soldiers.

"This becomes increasingly expensive in terms of blood and treasure," said the Cato Institute's Galen Carpenter, urging a 10-15 month timetable for the Karzai government to take responsibility for its own national security. "Otherwise this could become an endless mission where we're slowly bled. We can't make Afghanistan into a model of stability."

Jason Motlagh is deputy foreign editor at United Press International in Washington, DC. He has reported freelance from Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean for various US and European news media.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

*****

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7. FITZGERALD: OVER HIS HEAD AND FOLDING

LIKE A TWO DOLLAR SUITCASE

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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT

"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"

July 12, 2006

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com

By Wayne Madsen

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Robert Novak, like Karl Rove, has now been told by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that he is off the hook for the disastrous leak of the name of a CIA covert agent and her non-official cover (NOC) cover company. It is now time to focus on the politics being played by Fitzgerald. On Monday, June 12, Fitzgerald participated in an afternoon hearing before Judge Reggie Walton on the Scooter Libby perjury and obstruction of justice case (not the Espionage Act violation involving the outing of CIA agents). That same morning, Fitzgerald appeared before Chief Judge Thomas Hogan (who recently ruled that it was legal for FBI agents to search the offices of Rep. William Jefferson without restrictions). It was after that meeting that Fitzgerald, depending on what news source one believes, faxed or sent a letter or phoned Rove attorney Robert Luskin and told him he did not anticipate seeking criminal charges against Rove. Now, Novak writes that he has been informed by Fitzgerald's office that he is off the hook for the leak of the CIA information by the White House, although he names Rove as one of the sources for the leak. Rove, through Luskin, said Novak told Rove about Plame's work at the CIA. Luskin now says that Rove's and Novak's accounts do not differ greatly. That is an astounding claim. Either Rove told Novak or Novak told Rove -- there is nothing remotely similar about those two actions. However, given Rove's past as a political manipulator and master deceiver, this editor believes Novak is telling the truth. For years, Novak was teamed with the late Rowland Evans, someone with close ties to the U.S. intelligence community and someone who would have been livid about the leak of covert CIA agents as a form of political retaliation. Rove has no such background in prudent judgment nor has he been mentored by anyone who has had an appreciation for the dangers involved with such leaks.

On Friday, May 12, Fitzgerald reportedly had a sealed indictment of Rove for the CIA leak. That set in motion the most egregious White House interference in a criminal case since Watergate. However, in this case, Fitzgerald was not fired and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty did not resign in protest. Make no mistake about it -- Gonzales is not Elliot Richardson and McNulty is no William Ruckelshaus. Richardson and Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than fire Independent Special Counsel Archibald Cox. That ignominious distinction went to Solicitor General Robert Bork. That previous week, a cocky Rove was appearing at Republican events around the country, acting like someone who knew he was immune from any prosecution. Rove's spokesman, Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, participated as the middleman in a diversionary effort to criticize the only media that was paying serious attention to the details of the backstage developments in the Rove case. This week, Rove continues on the GOP political stump, acting as someone who has no worries about any indictment, even with Novak's recent disclosures that Rove was one of the sources of the CIA leak. These developments now put the spotlight on Fitzgerald and his seemingly endless investigation. If Fitzgerald were told by Addington and Gonzales that Bush intended to pardon Libby, the prosecutor's case against Rove would have been dead on arrival. The indictment would remained sealed. Was the pardon of Libby what Fitzgerald discussed with Judge Hogan on the morning of June 12 just before he informed Luskin that he had no plans to indict Rove? Was the afternoon hearing before Walton and Libby and his attorneys an effort by Fitzgerald to put on a happy face and keep up appearances that a case still existed?

It is clear that Fitzgerald, who was politically appointed by the Bush administration as the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois in 2001 and, therefore, had to pass a litmus test administered by the most extreme right-wing administration in the history of the nation, has politically manipulated the investigation of the CIA leak by dragging out the process with endless motions; sidebars with judges; questionable meetings with Bush's, Rove's, Libby's, and Cheney's attorneys; and the failure to nail Libby with Espionage Act violations. Fitzgerald earned his "crime fighter" stripes by indicting the Republican Governor of Illinois, George Ryan, for a bribery scandal committed while he was Secretary of State, not anything he did while Governor. But one thing that Ryan did as Governor was to commute the death sentences of Illinois' death row population. The reason: law enforcement and prosecutorial misconduct in Chicago and Illinois -- in other words, Ryan was accusing Fitzgerald's pals in the Illinois and Chicago police and the state prosecutors office of criminal malfeasance -- a criminal act. So, Fitzgerald, who originally worked for death penalty fanatic, John Ashcroft, decided to indict Ryan. Many knowledgeable sources saw that indictment as a politically-motivated retaliatory move. Fitzgerald is now pursuing criminal investigations of Illinois Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich and Chicago Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, Jr. Of course, getting indictments in Illinois and Chicago for bribery is much like shooting at fish in a barrel. That says more about Illinois politics than it does Fitzgerald's prosecutorial skills. Anyone want to indict a ham sandwich?

Fitzgerald has also been engaged in some fancy legal footwork in the case against Hollinger neo-con former Chairman and media mogul Lord Conrad Black. The Canadian-born member of the British House of Lords has the same circle of powerful Republican and neo-con friends as does Scooter Libby. Even if Fitzgerald were an Independent Special Counsel, he would likely face the same resistance as that experienced by past independent prosecutors: Archibald Cox, Leon Jaworski, and Judge Lawrence Walsh. Fitzgerald is clearly the kind of referee the Bush administration prefers in his role as a politically-vulnerable Special Prosecutor and U.S. Attorney -- primarily because he's someone who decided to run the clock on the Libby trial until after the November election, thus eliminating the trial as a campaign issue. But the trial, which is due to begin in January 2007, is scheduled just after Bush is expected to issue an end-of-the-year pardon for the Vice President's ex-Chief of Staff. By gaming the judicial process to favor the White House, Fitzgerald, who has reportedly been pressured by Cheney's uber-counsel and Chief of Staff David Addington and Attorney General, is giving the Bush administration a number of escape routes in the CIA leak case -- postponing the Libby trial until after the elections and after the expected Bush pardon of Libby at the end of December; running out the clock on three-year statute of limitations on a potential civil lawsuit by Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson, starting from the dates of the original wrongful actions by the Bush White House -- in July 2003, although there are indications that the "work up" on Wilson and his wife may have commenced as early as March 2003.

Fitzgerald, who has never served in the military or the intelligence community, appears to think that the CIA leak case is on par with white collar criminal and political corruption cases in Chicago. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the Ryan case, people received state business for political payola. In the Hollinger case, investors were defrauded. In the CIA leak case, agents and informants were tortured and executed. No one died from Illinois corruption and Hollinger rip-offs.

The original reason for the CIA leak was Ambassador Wilson calling Bush's major reason for invading and occupying Iraq -- that nation's supposed desire to obtain yellowcake uranium ore from Niger -- an outright misrepresentation of the truth. That White House lie, which Wilson called them on, has resulted in the deaths of over 2500 American military personnel, the wounding of 40,000 military members, the deaths of nearly 150,000 Iraqis, and the transformation of Iraq, the Cradle of Civilization, into a hell zone. That is not a case of mere political corruption and corporate fraud. Mr. Fitzgerald especially owes an explanation for his molasses-like investigation to the families of dead and wounded U.S. servicemen and women about his failure to carry out justice is a timely and forthright manner. Fitzgerald may be an honorable man. But he is dealing with the most dishonest and reprehensible people to ever hold public office in this country. The Special Counsel should stop giving the White House breaks or resign and provide a full explanation of what has transpired to the American people. For it is the American people, not Mr. Bush, not Mr. Cheney, not Mr. Rove, not Mr. Luskin, and not Bush's attorney Jim Sharpe, to whom Mr. Fitzgerald is ultimately responsible for his actions.

Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.

*****

THE NARCO NEWS BULLETIN

Reporting on the Drug War and Democracy from Latin America

Al Giordano, Publisher

E-Mail: publisher@narconews.com

http://www.narconews.com

- Issue No. 42, July 9, 2006 -

_________________________________________________________________________

8. THE SHOT HEARD ACROSS BOTH SIDES OF THE BORDER

_________________________________________________________________________

By Bill Conroy

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2006/7/8/21494/48015

The sun still burns hot in the May desert sky at about 6 p.m. along the Texas/Mexico border.

Under that sun, a high school student, all of 18 years old, is tending to some goats near his home in Redford, Texas. He is carrying an old single-shot .22 caliber rifle to ward off coyotes and rattlesnakes.

Some 200 yards in the distance, unknown to the 18-year-old, a group of four Marines are deploying to a clandestine hiding spot in the desert to keep an eye out for drug traffickers who might seek to traverse the border via car or on foot with backpacks.

The Marines are dressed in full camouflage, Ghille suits in fact, and are armed with potent M16A2 rifles and sophisticated radio equipment.

Suddenly, the kid with the antique .22 rifle sees something. Maybe it's a coyote; maybe it's just his imagination.

But he fires off a shot. A second later, he fires again.

The bullets whiz by the four Marines. They squat. One of the soldiers contacts his command by radio.

The high-school kid heads for a nearby abandoned church that is not too far from his family's home. He is still carrying his rifle and is still not aware that he has just fired his gun at a group of Marines carrying out a covert drug-war assignment.

In front of the weatherworn border church is an old stone well, now dry and packed with dirt.

The Marines maintain radio contact with their command operations.

6:06 p.m. Command: "If you move your position, try not to be seen. You should know what to do."

6:07 p.m. Marine: "We're taking fire."

6:09 p.m. Marine: "We have an individual spotted at the old Fort going to the rear of the building."

6:10 p.m. Marine: "We are pulled back to a tactical position. We are trying to our ... cover from our right flank. He is gonna be. Right now he is stationary, but he kinda knows the down vicinity, where two of my men are. He doesn't have a visual on me."

Command: "What side of the river is he on?"

Marine: "U.S. side, next to the old Fort. He is right at the old Fort."

6:11 p.m. Marine: "As soon as he readies that rifle back down range, we are taking him."

Command: "Roger. Fire back."

6:13 p.m. Marine: "I have visual on suspect in front of church. There is a brown building facing us. Standing in front he's got the rifle out."

6:14 p.m. Marine: "I have a visual on him. He is kinda moving behind some buildings; not really sure exactly where he is at right now. He is hiding; he's ducking down. Rifle, he knows we are out here; he's looking for us."

6:27 p.m. Marine: "We have a man down."

Command: "Did I hear you? You said you have a man down?"

Marine: "The man pointed weapon down range and we took him out."

This scene is not fiction.

The facts are drawn from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents that detail the May 20, 1997, shooting of Esequiel Hernandez Jr. by a U.S. military unit called Joint Task Force Six, or JTF 6 -- now known as JTF North.

The FOIA records were provided to Narco News by professor Keith Yearman of the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL.

Yearman is an expert in FOIA research and has taken a particular interest in border issues and the Hernandez case. (Links to the FOIA documents obtained by Yearman detailing the Hernandez shooting can be found at the end of this story.)

The four Marines who tracked and shot Hernandez were participating in a JTF 6 mission to assist the U.S. Border Patrol in capturing drug traffickers. The soldiers had been ordered to conduct surveillance along the border in order to spot drug smugglers, and to report that information to Border Patrol -- which was to then come to the scene to apprehend the smugglers.

The JTF 6 mission was all about fighting the so-called drug war, but that mission didn't matter in Hernandez' case. He was a goat herder, not a drug smuggler.

Hernandez was killed because that is what soldiers are trained to do in a war. They hunt down the enemy and destroy them. And in this case, because Hernandez had allegedly fired the first shot, even though he could have had no clue it was Marines he was shooting at, he triggered one of the primary rules of engagement for soldiers deployed in any mission.

From the FOIA documents:

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

1. FORCE MAY BE USED TO DEFEND YOURSELF AND OTHERS PRESENT.

So once Hernandez pulled the trigger on his gun, he might as well have been in a war zone as far as the Marines were concerned.

Hernandez fired his first shot at 6:07 p.m. He was killed by a single shot from a Marine's M16 at 6:27 p.m.

That means the four-man unit tracked him for 20 minutes before they "took him out."

In fact, based on the FOIA records, the approval to kill Hernandez was provided by military command at 6:11 p.m.

Border Patrol did not arrive on the scene until 6:45 p.m., some 18 minutes after Hernandez had already been fatally shot.

An ambulance was dispatched at 6:49 p.m. to the old church where Hernandez lay bleeding; his body sprawled inside an old well, with his feet pointing toward the sky.

The medics actually arrived on-site at 7:11 p.m., about 44 minutes after Hernandez' chest was pierced by a Marine's bullet. If there had been any hope that Hernandez might survive the shooting, that hope bled away in the desert before medical help arrived.

From all indications, based on the FOIA records, the four Marines who were responsible for killing the 18-year-old goat herder, who was a U.S. citizen, were in full battle mode at the time of the shooting. War is what they are trained to do well. And in the case of this assignment, sharpening the edge on that wartime training was part of the mission.

From the FOIA records:

Mission: HQ Battery, 5th Battalion, 11th Marines deploys to Marfa, Texas (from) 13 May to 30 May to conduct LP/OP training, increase unit combat readiness, improve individual and collective skills, and assist the United States Border Patrol by detection and monitoring of cross-border activities such as drug smuggling and movement of illegal aliens.

On May 20, 1997, the Marines were on mission and primed with "combat readiness," even to the point where they also were ready to pull the trigger on the Border Patrol agents who arrived at the scene in response to the Hernandez shooting.

The FOIA records include this testimony from one of the Marines concerning the aftermath of the Hernandez shooting:

"... I moved into the open brush and went towards the people with the weapons. When they were about half way up the hill, I stood up out of the bushes and aimed in on them and yelled 'United States Marines' several times. The first two people put their hands in air and yelled, 'United States Border Patrol,' and I recognized their green uniforms. I watched everyone go by and waited until they all cleared."

Unfortunately, the same warning was never extended to Hernandez, according to the FOIA records. In a statement provided by one of the Marines involved in the shooting, he makes it clear that prior to the shot that killed Hernandez, "There was no verbal warning told to the suspect."

If the Marines had identified themselves to Hernandez, or even fired a warning shot, the kid might well be alive today. If the Marines had only attempted to find defensive cover to secure the perimeter of the scene and waited another 18 minutes for the Border Patrol to arrive, Hernandez might be alive today.

But those are tactics that law enforcement would engage. Marines are taught to hunt down the enemy and eliminate him. That's what you get when you put soldiers on the border. They are trained to kill.

That fact is something to keep in mind as President Bush's directive of dispatching National Guard troops to the border is carried out over the next several months.

One federal agent with extensive experience along the border puts it this way:

"The training for law enforcement and the military is vastly different. Law enforcement is trained to apprehend, interrogate and prosecute. The military is trained to track and destroy the enemy.

"If you want to destroy the border, then send in the Marines."

For those in the leadership ranks of this country who are ignorant of the realities of combat training vs. law enforcement training, you are now informed, at the price of a dead U.S. citizen, a kid really.

For those in our government who already know the stakes and don't care that innocent people's lives hang in the balance, the blood on your hands will soon cause you to lose the grip on your power.

And for those of you who are already opposed to militarizing the border, do your best to keep the memory of Esequiel Hernandez Jr. alive.

His life, and death, is where all our worlds meet.

FOIA Records for the Hernandez shooting, File 1: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/6_26_2006_6_19_12PM.pdf

Narco News is funded by your contributions to The Fund for Authentic Journalism. Please make journalism like this possible by going to The Fund's web site, http://www.authenticjournalism.org, and making a contribution today.

Copyright 2006 The Narco News Bulletin

*****

COUNTERPUNCH

'Tells the Facts and Names the Names'

Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

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Tel: 1 (800) 840-3683

Web: http://www.counterpunch.org

E-mail: counterpunch@counterpunch.org

- Wednesday, July 12, 2006 -

_________________________________________________________________________

9. The CIA Propagandist and Former Prankster Stewart Brand

JOHN RENDON'S LONG, STRANGE TRIP IN THE TERROR WARS

_________________________________________________________________________

By JOHN STAUBER

http://www.counterpunch.org/stauber07122006.html

In his hippie youth as a Merry Prankster, Stewart Brand bounced around San Francisco in Ken Kesey's day-glo bus, dousing people with LSD-laced Kool-Aid at the legendary Acid Tests. Those were strange days, but his latest trip is also bizarre. Brand and his Long Now Foundation are bringing to San Francisco John Rendon, the elusive head of the Rendon Group, one of the CIA's favorite PR firms.

John Rendon is the self-described "information warrior" who, under contract with the CIA, named and nurtured the infamous Iraqi National Congress. INC leader Ahmed Chalabi was a Rendon protege embraced by the Project for a New American Century and other advocates of war with Iraq. Rendon and Chalabi probably did as much as anyone to deceive the US into war. John Rendon usually stays in the shadows, but he'll be riding high with Stewart Brand this Friday, July 14, 7:00 PM at San Francisco's Herbst Theater.

Sheldon Rampton and I described some of the Rendon Group's activities in our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception, and we go into further detail in our new book, The Best War Ever, which will be published in September. The Iraqi National Congress was the source for much of the false and deceptive propaganda on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which they planted in the press with help from Judith Miller of the New York Times and other obliging journalists. Ahmed Chalabi has subsequently fallen out of official favor with the US, but he is currently serving in the Iraqi government and is very friendly with Iran, a real bummer for his patrons in the Bush Administration.

Stewart Brand is a serious guy these days, and his endorsement of John Rendon as a guru in the "global war on terror" is for real. Brand finds Rendon "exceptionally informed, astute, and engaged. ... It should be a hell of a talk." Brand says Rendon wants the US "to deepen its thinking and activities against terror" and Rendon's talk is titled "Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short."

Some small bit of public enlightenment could occur at Rendon's appearance if he is thoroughly grilled by critics in the audience about his lucrative career as an information warrior before he slips back into the shadows. But Rendon is first and foremost a PR guy, and dodging questions and spinning an audience are his stock in trade.

His San Francisco gig looks like a set-up for more hallucinations, delusions and self-deceptions. Merry Prankster meets Mis-Information Warrior; what a long, strange trip it's been in the never-ending, secretive, dirty, spy-infested, mis-named and mis-handled war on terror.

John Stauber is Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin and author, with Sheldon Rampton, of Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever.

Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity.

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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN

News * Analysis * Research * Action

________________________________________

- AFIB No. 737, July 9, 2006 -

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!

END THE OCCUPATIONS!

ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!

In the half century since the Korean War the United States has been involved in four major wars in the Third World: in Vietnam (1961-1975), in the Persian Gulf (1990-1991), in Colombia (1991-present), and in Afghanistan (2001-2002). All four wars were fought in or near significant oil-producing areas. All four involved reliance on proxies who were also major international drug traffickers. The American habit of training, arming, and financing its drug-trafficking allies in order to help secure oil resources abroad has been a major factor in the huge increase in global illicit drug trafficking since World War II. ... This pattern is further reinforced when we consider two of America's major indirect interventions of the same period: support for the Nicaraguan Contras (1981-1988) and the Afghan mujahedin (1979-1991). The CIA contracted for Contra support in Central America with an airline owned by the ringleader of the largest cocaine network in the region. By providing funds for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a drug trafficker selected for support by Pakistani intelligence (the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI), the CIA helped propel Hekmatyar into becoming for a while, the largest heroin trafficker in Afghanistan and perhaps the world. -- Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003] p. 27.

Contents: Number 737

01. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [Oak Park, MI]: One Year On: Lessons of the London Bombings.

02. THE RAW STORY [Cambridge, MA]: Sources Say No Serious Threat for NYC, Just Hate Chatter.

03. ASIA TIMES ONLINE [Hong Kong]: Inside the Anti-U.S. Resistance.

04. WAYNE MADSEN REPORT [Washington, D.C.]: The Never-Ending Parade of Bush Family Slush Funds. Drugs, Guns, Neo-Confederates and the Far-Right.

05. THE MOSCOW TIMES: American Dream.

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 739/July 16, 2006

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 738/July 12, 2006

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/lond-j07.shtml

* * * * *

WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE

Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)

Web: http://www.wsws.org/

E-Mail: editor@wsws.org

- Friday, 7 July 2006 -

_________________________________________________________________________

1. ONE YEAR ON: LESSONS OF THE LONDON BOMBINGS

_________________________________________________________________________

News & Analysis: Europe: Britain

Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (Britain)

The official commemoration of the July 7, 2005, terror bombings in London, which killed 52 people, is being used by the Blair government to justify even greater powers of repression.

Behind the crocodile tears that will be shed today, the government is indifferent to the suffering of those involved. Nothing testifies more poignantly to this than the paltry compensation offered to the victims and their families. For example, Nader Mozakka, who lost his wife in the bombings, has received just Â£5,500 in compensation, while Martine Wright, who lost both legs, was awarded Â£110,000.

The government's commemoration is a shameful attempt to manipulate public grief, so as to suppress any critical discussion on the political lessons that must be drawn from the worst terrorist outrage ever committed on British soil. As far as the government is concerned, the silence on the circumstances surrounding July 7 and its political background will extend far beyond the two minutes set aside to commemorate the victims of the attack.

The Labour Party government of Prime Minister Tony Blair spent the days leading up to the anniversary opposing the demands of relatives of those killed and maimed for a public inquiry into the bombings. Blair maintains that such an inquiry would divert resources from the war on terror.

His cynical argument was backed by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, who is leading the commemoration on the government's behalf. She was caught out in a lie when she claimed that the official inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of civil rights demonstrators in Northern Ireland had cost Â£400 million. The actual figure was half that amount.

In any event, Blair's argument is spurious. How could a public inquiry divert from any genuine attempt to protect the population against terrorist attacks?

The government does not want an inquiry because, in the first place, it would raise political questions over the role that the illegal war and occupation of Iraq played in creating the conditions that produced the July 7 outrage.

Millions of people across Britain and internationally opposed the war and warned that, far from securing innocent people against terrorist attacks, the outrage felt around the world over the neo-colonial aggression would make the populations of the US and Britain more vulnerable. Blair, in his rush to carve out a sphere of geo-political influence for British capital in the Middle East on the coat-tails of the Bush administration, disregarded such concerns and placed the lives of every man, woman and child in Britain in danger.

Even now, the government insists that the Iraq war has nothing to do with any increased terror threat. Why, then, did Blair admit that he was "probably not the person to go into the Muslim community" and call on the relative non-entity Jowell to preside over the July 7 commemorations?

The government also opposes an inquiry because it does not want to answer awkward questions about the role of the security forces in the run-up to the July 7 bombings. It hopes that a stage-managed display of "national unity" will divert public attention from such questions.

Not a month has passed without accusations being made that the security forces had detailed fore-warnings of a possible terrorist outrage in London.

The Observer has revealed that in early 2005, Saudi intelligence had advised British officials that four Islamic militants, including at least some British citizens, were planning to bomb the London Underground within the ensuing six months. The newspaper has cited the Saudi ambassador and senior US National Security Council counterterrorism agents confirming the report.

The security forces have admitted that two of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were known to them for at least two years before July 7. On two occasions, MI5 placed both under surveillance in connection with other individuals who were under investigation. The pair had also been observed in Pakistan. MI5 had Khan's telephone number as a contact of a terror suspect, and also the phone number of a third bomber, Jermaine Lindsay.

This apparent failure to maintain surveillance of the future bombers was justified with the claim that Khan and Tanweer were believed to be only peripheral figures. However, according to American journalist Ron Suskind, Khan was refused entry into the United States on security grounds two years before the London attacks because he was regarded as a major figure within Al Qaeda circles. Suskind also claims that US authorities gave MI5 a detailed file on Khan at the time.

The bombers were subsequently proved to have acted under the leadership of Al Qaeda. In September 2005, a video was released of Khan in which he said he was inspired by Osama Bin Laden. The same tape contained a message from Al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, claiming responsibility for the blasts. Yesterday, a similar video was broadcast featuring Tanweer and including a statement by al-Zawahri and Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam al-Amriki, who is believed to be in charge of Al-Qaeda's propaganda.

Every allegation of the security services having information about the terror plot has been either denied or put down to "oversights" and "intelligence failings." If these explanations are true, then the British government must stand condemned for perpetrating a massive hoax on the British people, in the form of its so-called "war on terror." If the Blair government and the security services were truly involved in an intensive, daily struggle to protect the population against a terrorist threat that they define as immense and imminent, then such a monumental "lapse" could never occur.

At the very least, the so-called "intelligence failings" demonstrate that the "war on terror" is a fraud, employed to spread fear and panic and justify external military aggression and an unprecedented assault on democratic rights at home.

But another explanation is possible: that the bombings were the result not of official lapses or failings, but rather a deliberate decision to allow them to take place, so as to provide the government with a pretext for further attacks on civil liberties and new military adventures overseas.

It should be noted that there has still been no explanation for the decision taken in March 2005 to downgrade the national security alert, despite the pending G8 summit in Scotland, which was in session at the very time the suicide bombers struck the capital.

For the past decade and more, these gatherings of heads of state of the most wealthy and powerful countries have been held under military-type security, with entire urban centers placed under conditions resembling martial law and the most intensive and sophisticated anti-terror measures in place. Especially after the Madrid train bombings the previous year, Britain as the host country of the summit would have had to have been considered the prime target for an Al Qaeda attack. And yet, inexplicably, the government decided to lower the terror alert!

The bombings were certainly a political gift to the government, which had just suffered major losses in the general election and was facing significant opposition--including sections of the judiciary--to its latest raft of anti-terror legislation. After July 7, it was able to pass the Prevention of Terrorism Act--described by Blair as a "watershed" in legal history--with only minor amendments.

The government, the police and the security services thus acquired draconian powers of surveillance and detention based on the claim that they were necessary to combat terrorism. In the process, they have abrogated habeas corpus and the right to free speech, and secretly implemented a shoot-to-kill policy.

These measures have already claimed innocent victims. The cold-blooded execution of Jean Charles de Menezes last year has been followed by last month's raid on a house in Forest Gate in which another innocent man was shot.

De Menezes was falsely identified as one of the conspirators involved in a failed plot to bomb London again on July 21, 2005. After dozens of arrests, later that same month four men were arrested and have been charged with attempting to murder passengers. They are still awaiting trial.

In total, the police claim that 60 people have been arrested and face charges on terrorist-related offences since July 7, 2005. Extraordinarily little information has been made public as to their alleged crimes, and it is reported that most will not come to trial for two years. Hundreds more have been released without charge.

The threat of terrorism has been used in an ever more indiscriminate manner to ban or limit protests. Writing in the Observer, Henry Porter told of the case of Steve Jago, who was arrested in June for displaying a placard outside Downing Street and has been charged with mounting an illegal demonstration. When searched by police, Jago was found to have an article by Porter on civil liberties, entitled "Blair's Big Brother Britain." The article, published in Vanity Fair magazine, which has a circulation of more than 1 million, was described by the police as "politically motivated material" and used as part of the justification for charging Jago.

A picture emerges of practices usually associated with a Latin American dictatorship becoming commonplace in Britain. The anniversary of July 7 is being used to whip up a climate of fear in order to take these developments even further.

In the last days, there have been repeated warnings of a heightened terror alert, including allegations of plots to "release cyanide gas in a public place--even on the London transport system." Blair has said that the danger of terror attacks on Britain is "clear and active," while Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch, described the threat as "unprecedented." He added that "the flow of new cases shows no sign of abating--if anything it is accelerating."

Media reports state, without any substantiation, that large numbers of white Britons are being "lured" into joining Islamic terrorist groups, and Whitehall sources claim that Al Qaeda sympathisers have tried to infiltrate MI5.

The hysteria that characterises many of these proclamations is not only for public consumption. The manner in which the terrorist threat is used as a synonym for all forms of social and political opposition points to a ruling elite that is profoundly disoriented, and feels itself isolated and besieged by enemies on all sides.

The Blair government is pursuing policies that are diametrically opposed to the interests of the broad mass of the population. Acting on behalf of a financial oligarchy, it has aligned itself with the United States in a campaign of colonial plunder aimed at securing hegemony over vital resources and global markets. Domestically, it has set out to eliminate social provisions that are considered by its backers to be an impermissible drain on profits, facilitating a redistribution of wealth away from working people to the rich that has resulted in a historically unprecedented social polarisation.

Unable to countenance any retreat from its policy of imposing the dictates of big business, the government's only answer to rising opposition will be further provocations and attacks on democratic rights.

Every official report now stresses that the terror threat is "home-grown," implying a need for more domestic repression. To this end, Chancellor Gordon Brown has announced a further Â£40 million for the intelligence services to develop "specific new capabilities," taking their budget over Â£1.6 billion. MI5 is undertaking a massive recruitment campaign, aimed at doubling employee numbers to 3,500, and intends to set up eight regional offices throughout the country in its biggest deployment outside the capital in peacetime.

It cannot be excluded that Britain could face another terrorist attack. However, working people must not allow the government to corral public opinion behind its anti-democratic agenda by using a threat that its policies have fostered. Instead, they must inaugurate a mass political and social movement that links opposition to imperialist war with the defence of democratic rights. This must be waged as a struggle against the profit system that is the source of militarism, war and social inequality.

Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

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2. SOURCES SAY NO SERIOUS THREAT FOR NYC, JUST HATE CHATTER

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THE RAW STORY

Top Stories

Friday, July 7, 2006

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/No_Plot_for_NYC_Just_Hate_0707.html

Larisa Alexandrovna

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

"The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site," said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved -- "three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere -- are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

"They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him."

Two other intelligence officials with experience in the field on extremist operations concurred -- and expressed concern that what could have been an operation to eventually track known extremists (should they eventually make actual contact with funds and training,) seems to have been exposed for political gain.

Some see this latest "ploy" as a direct challenge to a New York Times report this week of the disbandment of Alec Station, the CIA unit responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden since before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Moreover, the article contends that officials say the unit was "disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center."

Some members of Congress have said that they were not informed of the unita's closure and expressed concern.

In response to reports that the unit was disbanded, Senator John Kerry (D-MA), who ran against President Bush in the 2004 election, responded earlier this week with a demand for the immediate reinstatement of the unit.

"I fully support efforts to adapt our response to the evolving nature of the threat," wrote Kerry in a letter to John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence Office of the Director of National, "but this is not a compelling rationale for curtailing efforts to bring this mass murderer to justice."

The alleged bomb plot, sources suggest, may have been to alleviate Bush administration concerns that the Alec Station story would make them appear to be "weak on terror." It is not clear this early on, however, how much of a real and immediate threat the bomb plot may have been.

Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertof seemed unconcerned earlier today, when the news first broke. Chertoff told the Associated Press earlier today that, "It was never a concern that this would actually be executed... We were, as I say, all over this."

The FBI, however, contends that the threat was very much real. "This is a plot that involved martyrdom and explosives," targeting the "tubes that connect Jersey and lower Manhattan," Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon told the Associated Press today.

Special Agent Rich Kolko, a spokesperson for the FBI, told RAW STORY in a late Friday phone call that, "Mr. Mershon clearly stated the position of the FBI in this case."

Giraldi, however, says, "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi, but none of them knew him or had any access to him."

Additionally, Giraldi stated that, "In sum, the plot, if that is what we would call it, was not well conceived, and there was no possibility of flooding Wall Street. There was no connection to a cell in the US. Finally, professional terrorists generally do not discuss targeting on open channels. As it was being monitored from the beginning of the open discussion, there was little chance anything concrete would have developed."

Copyright 2006 Raw Story Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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3. INSIDE THE ANTI-U.S RESISTANCE

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ASIA TIMES ONLINE

South Asia

July 8, 2006

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HG08Df01.html

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

Osama Bin Laden is ill and invisible, but five years after September 11, 2001, his al-Qaeda movement has become the fulcrum of a global, Islamic resistance against the United States.

Asia Times Online has learned from an operative close to the al-Qaeda leadership that bin Laden languishes on a dialysis machine, in rapidly declining health.

"Sheikh [Osama] was in a poor condition when my father last visited," said the operative, who uses the name "Abdullah". Abdullah's father, known as Sheikh Ibrahim, is number two after Tahir Yuldeshev in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IUM), a group closely allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and operating in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

Sheikh Ibrahim's meeting with bin Laden took place "a few weeks ago", Abdullah told Asia Times Online in an interview at the end of June in a northern Pakistani city. Abdullah had traveled there from North Waziristan, a Pakistani tribal agency on the Afghanistan border, to meet this correspondent.

"He [bin Laden] asked all of us to pray for his health. For the past many months he has been on dialysis and just cannot move. My father never told me where he was when he met Osama ... but he was worried about his fast-waning health."

Nevertheless, said Abdullah, the al-Qaeda leadership remains in Afghanistan and still serves as the nucleus of the movement.

"Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri [bin Laden's number two] is very active in Afghanistan and controlling affairs. Most of the Arab fighters left Afghanistan after the US invasion of Iraq and many went there to fight. But the main leadership of al-Qaeda continued to stay in Afghanistan," Abdullah said.

Abdullah is a tall, strongly built 23-year-old. He lived through some very hard times after the US invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban's subsequent retreat. His family moved to Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, and later went abroad. In 2003, when the Taliban regrouped in South Waziristan, his family returned to Karachi.

Abdullah has been in a position to observe the rise and fall of the Taliban over the past eight years, due to his father's senior position in the IMU as well as his own involvement with the movement.

"Until the end of 2003 Karachi was the focal point of all al-Qaeda, Taliban and other people who fled from Afghanistan. But constant intelligence operations forced us to leave Karachi and by the end of 2003 we reached South Waziristan, where my father joined hands with Sheikh Essa [an Egyptian] and Tahir Yuldeshev," Abdullah said.

He confirmed Asia Times Online reports that bin Laden had been short of funds, hampering al-Qaeda operations. Still, Abdullah maintained that the al-Qaeda leadership would remain in Afghanistan despite all difficulties, because of the country's identification with Bilad-i-Khurasan - a land, Muslims believe, where Muslim armies will finally regroup and go to liberate the "land of Abraham" from the Anti-God (Dajal).

"I have heard this notion since the days when Abu Hafs [the al-Qaeda number three who was killed in a US strike on Kabul in 2001] was alive. He often repeated that," Abdullah said.

Abdullah also revealed that international players are aligning themselves with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a global Islamic alliance to fight the US.

"The money is now with Tahir Yuldeshev, who organizes Uzbek youths in South Waziristan. Where the money comes from is a mystery, but a few years ago I personally witnessed two sources of his funding, one from Turkey and the other from Saudi Arabia. Both were private people. I was with Tahir and I personally saw him receiving money in Madina," Abdullah said.

"Many months ago, I learned about a delegation of Muslim youths from Russia who met with Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader] and offered to arrange a supply of Russian-made missiles and sophisticated weapons, for cash. Mullah Omar refused the deal.

"However, recently another development happened which once again reminded us that international forces are aiming at us.

"The development occur in the wake of differences between the Uzbeks. A group of Uzbeks, to which I belong, defied Tahir Yuldeshev because of his dictatorial behavior. We left South Waziristan and went to the North Waziristan town of Mir Ali. His dictatorial behavior aside, there were many other rumors in circulation about him. All put a question mark on Tahir's integrity."

(At this time, Yuldeshev was settled in South Waziristan and allied himself with local commander Abdullah Mehsud. Yuldeshev was not active on any front.)

"There were a lot of things published in the Russian press about Tahir's connection with Americans. We were not sure about that, but the way Tahir made himself aloof from al-Qaeda and the Taliban created doubts," Abdullah said.

Yuldeshev then "circulated a message through a CD, strictly for his Uzbek circle, in which he stated that a smear campaign was being run against him by Russia. Tahir said that Russians contacted him, and after he approved they came to see him in South Waziristan and offered him a deal to finance him and provide arms and ammunition to fight against the Americans in Afghanistan, on condition that he gave up his struggle in Uzbekistan.

"Tahir said on the CD that he refused the offer outright, after which a campaign was run to malign him and portray him as having CIA [the US's Central Intelligence Agency] connections."

Nevertheless, as Asia Times Online has reported, recently a greater alliance has been formed throughout North and South Waziristan. Yuldeshev has changed his reclusive behaviour and joined hands with Haji Omar, Biatullah Mehsud and other Taliban commanders in a new drive against the American-led forces in Afghanistan.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

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4. THE NEVER-ENDING PARADE OF BUSH FAMILY SLUSH FUNDS

Drugs, Guns, Neo-Confederates and the Far-Right

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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT

"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"

Special Report

July 8, 2006

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com

By Wayne Madsen

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Those who claim the Bush administration is a Nazi regime are not far from the truth. This story is a special investigation of Bush family slush funds, smuggling, and secret money conduits from and to various right-wing causes, including some that are extremely violent. The New York Times is running a story today about the U.S. military recruiting Aryan Nation, neo-Nazi, and other white supremacists into its ranks. The Times' report states that Neo-Nazi graffiti has sprung up in Baghdad, in quoting from a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The involvement of white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups with the Pentagon began in earnest during the administrations of Reagan and Bush I. According to informed sources who have tracked the neo-Nazis since the Reagan era, the surge in extreme right-wing elements in the Federal government was spurred on by the network of Nicaraguan Contra support activities created to facilitate going around the prohibitions enacted by the Congress. A key member of that strategy was Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington, who was with the CIA, the Iran-Contra Committee in Congress, and then signed on as senior Vice President for the American Trucking Associations (ATA). WMR reported yesterday on the involvement of a foundation set up by McLean Trucking Co., a member of the ATA, with covert Contra support.

The ATA is a hotbed of GOP activity as well past connections with support for covert CIA activities. Its chief lobbyist is Jim ("Whit") Whittinghill, a former aide to Sen. Bob Dole. Whittinghill's wife, Nancy Dorn, served as an assistant to Texas Representative Tom Loeffler and later served as Special Assistant for Legislative Affairs to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Nancy Dorn worked for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Affairs. While working for Cheney, Dorn became a close associate of Addington. Dorn was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. In 2001, Dorn returned to government after acting as a lobbyist for Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and China. She became special assistant for legislative affairs to Vice President Cheney. In 2002, Dorn became the Deputy Director for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where she served until 2003 before becoming Vice President for Government Relations of General Electric, the parent company of NBC and NBC News. (This puts into context the partisan pro-Bush editorial slants of the network's news division, particularly Nora O'Donnell, Campbell Brown, Brian Williams, Tim Russert, and Chris Matthews).

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Dorn was associated with the network of right-wing neo-confederates who were gaining tremendous influence in the Republican Party. While the Army's chief of civil works, Dorn had control over Arlington National Cemetery and issued guidance on how the Confederate Memorial Committee of the District of Columbia could hold its annual ceremony at the cemetery's Confederate War Memorial and pay for it with funds provided by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). According to John Edward Hurley, a one-time associate of White House correspondent Sarah McClendon and the head of the non-partisan Confederate Memorial Association (CMA), South Carolina GOP operative and Confederate Memorial Committee chairman Richard T. Hines, now a major lobbyist (RTH Consulting) in Washington, DC (whose clients include Gambia, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, and Nigeria), arranged with the UDC to have funds transferred for the Confederate monument and ceremony from sources in the South associated with far right-wing elements. Hines, who was close to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, saw to it money was transferred from Metrolina Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina (connected to North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms), to First American Bank in Virginia (then owned by the CIA-connected Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)), to the Mid-Atlantic Credit Union in Gaithersburg, Maryland. One of the officials involved in this money movement was the chief accountant for Edison Electric Institute, which was working closely with Enron and, along with Enron, was one of the largest contributors to the Bush and GOP campaign coffers.

The impetus for the Confederate revival at Arlington Cemetery was promoted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Jefferson Davis Camp Number 305. Its members included a number of individuals associated with white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which was the source of the New York Times article on Aryan Nation and neo-Nazi penetration of the U.S. military, the SCV has come under the control of racists and Ku Klux Klansmen. Denne Sweeney, on the urging of SCV Camp 305 member Kirk Lyons, an attorney for the Klan, took over as SCV commander in 2004. According to the CMA's Hurley, Lyons, who ran the Houston-based Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC) (a right-wing rival of the SPLC), was significantly funded by Hines. Lyons later moved the SLRC to Black Mountain in western North Carolina. According to Hurley and the SPLC, the SCV and SLRC are part of a vast network of far right organizations, including the Council of Conservative Citizens (a successor to the Klan-linked White Citizens Councils), the secessionist Southern Partisan magazine (for which Hines arranged an interview with then Missouri Senator John Ashcroft), the secessionist League of the South, the Aryan Nations, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and the National Socialist White Americans' Party).

With the recent news about neo-Nazi and Klan penetration of the U.S. military, it is noteworthy that Hines' wife, Patricia Mayes Hines, was the U.S. Army's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs during the George H. W. Bush administration. Mrs. Hines served under Cheney along with Dorn, who was permitting neo-Confederate penetration of Arlington Cemetery, and David Addington, who was continuing to help cover up the elder Bush's role in Iran-Contra as Cheney's General Counsel, and Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, who was Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Strategy and Resources and Deputy Undersecretary for Policy, and was also involved in senior Bush's covert operations abroad. Hines, who was an associate of the late Lee Atwater, Karl Rove's dirty tricks doppelganger, practiced his dirty tricks trade for George W. Bush in his home state against John McCain in the vicious 2000 GOP primary.

It is noteworthy that on the day he was arrested, Murrah Federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh was wearing a Southern Partisan magazine T-shirt bearing the Latin phrase, Sic Semper Tyrannis, along with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The phrase was shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he shot to death President Lincoln at Ford's Theater. Another violent connection to the neo-confederates is the FBI's VANPAC (Vance Political Assassination Conspiracy) case that involved white supremacist mail bombings directed against Federal judges. According to the Department of Justice, "four mail bombs [were] sent in December 1989 to different locations in the southeastern United States. One killed federal judge Robert Vance [11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals] in Alabama, a second killed a civil rights attorney [Robert Robinson] in Georgia, and two others [one at the U.S. Courthouse in Atlanta and the other at the NAACP headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida] were discovered before they exploded. A massive investigation ensued involving the FBI and several other law enforcement agencies. The FBI referred to the case as VANPAC because it involved the assassination of Judge Vance [at his home] with a bomb sent in a mail package. In June 1991, a federal jury convicted Walter LeRoy Moody, Jr. [a former Klansman] on charges related to the bombings." Louis Freeh, Jr. was appointed the Special Prosecutor in the VANPAC case. After moving the case from Birmingham, Alabama to St. Paul, Minnesota, and after introducing tainted evidence, Freeh won a successful conviction of Moody, who was sentenced to seven life sentences. An Alabama court sentenced Moody to death. In appreciation for his work, Freeh was nominated as U.S. District Court judge for the southern district of New York. In 1993, President Clinton named Freeh to be FBI Director, where he served during the McVeigh case and the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations of Clinton. Vance was a progressive Democrat in Alabama, having served as Democratic Party chairman for the state for 11 years. At the time of his death, several Alabama political figures cited "drugs" and "Colombian cartels" as the reason for the mail bombings directed at Federal judges. Vance, a Jimmy Carter appointee, had incurred the wrath of the neo-confederates who viewed him as too liberal and called him the "Daniel Ortega of Alabama." Because of the mail bombings directed against the Federal judiciary (Moody threatened to kill 17 judges), there were a number of judicial resignations around the United States, which allowed George H. W. Bush to replace them with his own people.

The threat against judges resumed under Bush's son, George W. Bush. In 2005, after being threatened with death by white supremacist and World Church of the Creator (now "Creativity Movement") head Matthew Hale, U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, discovered the bodies of her 64-year old husband and 89-year old mother at her home. They had been brutally murdered. In a bizarre development, a Chicago man named Bart Ross shot himself in a Milwaukee suburb after being pulled over by police for a traffic violation. Police said they found a suicide note in which Ross claimed responsibility for the murders of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother. However, Ross had no known connections to any white supremacist organizations. Hale had been convicted for threatening Judge Lefkow's life and obstruction of justice. Threatening judges was not confined to people like Hale. Then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay threatened judges when he stated, "the time will come for the men responsible for the death of Terri Schiavo to answer for their behavior." Senator Frank Lautenberg wrote to DeLay, stating he was "stunned to read the threatening comments . . . directed at federal judges and our nation's courts of law in general."

The involvement of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with U.S. Special Forces, reported by the SPLC and New York Times, also bears on the neo-confederate penetration of the Bush administration. Ashbury International Group, of Sterling, Virginia, a private military contractor (PMC) offering the services of its ex-Special Forces personnel to the government, lost a lawsuit brought against its plans to build a shooting range in Nelson County, Virginia on the plantation of Confederate Congressman William Portcher Mills, the man who designed the Confederate flag. Appearing as a witness for Ashbury was Michael Garcia, a former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and now the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, along with attorneys for the National Rifle Association. Another Special Forces link to the neo-confederates is retired Army Lt. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a former counsel for the US Special Forces assigned to the Pentagon and, who, according to the CMA's Hurley, was a close associate of top officials in the neo-confederate movement. Addicott is currently the Director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's College of Law in San Antonio, Texas and he chaired a panel at the National Defense Industrial Association's 2006 Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) conference, an event attended by every major PMC, including those making huge profits in Iraq. Hurley released the following statement on August 31, 2005, that implicates a number of Bush I and II officials in the neo-confederate movement and the Iran-Contra affair, including Chief Justice John Roberts:

A Washington association executive has called for an investigation into the role of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts when he represented the National Credit Union Administration, a regulatory agency of the federal government. He charged that there was a bizarre intervention by the NCUA to quash a subpoena for a personal account while Roberts was representing the group.

Hurley, president of the Confederate Memorial Association which owned and operated the only Confederate museum in the nation's capital, said that ongoing litigation against his association had been traced to Contra supporters and present and former employees in the general counsels office of the National Credit Union Administration. Moreover, Hurley said that evidence indicated that a $500,000 political slush fund was being covered up.

Hurley said a court order approving a $15,000 fraudulent legal bill, after being issued nearly two years ago, was mysteriously submitted to the bank last week. A two-year lapse in collecting court ordered fees is unheard of, and Hurley contends that this shows that the White House is concerned about illegal NCUA activities being exposed while Roberts represented the group.

A "Freedom Fighter" fundraiser was scheduled after Roberts had made several recommendations on the subject while he was in the White House Counsels' office. Moreover, Carl "Spitz" Channell and Richard Miller, who were raising private funds for the Contras, had met in the White House to ask support for the Contras (as the Walsh Iran/Contra Report noted). After the Roberts memos counseled that Contra fundraising should be held outside the White House, a "Freedom Fighter Night" was scheduled on July 12, 1986 to be held in October of 1986 at Confederate Memorial Hall. Hurley said that he cancelled the October event. However, prior to this, a previous reception at the Hall had been attended by White House personnel. Hurley added that the invitation to the October event was sent from the Capital Yacht Club.

Roberts represented the National Credit Union Administration when he was with Hogan and Hartson. In 1997, Roberts argued the NCUA case before the Supreme Court, which dealt with expanding the banking market for credit unions. In that case, Robert M. Fenner was listed as counsel for the NCUA with Roberts.

Hurley said that Fenner had employed David Eno as the head of his fraud hotline operation at NCUA. According to Hurley, Eno was a commander of the Jefferson Davis Camp No. 305 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization that sued the Confederate Memorial Association. Kirk Lyons, an attorney who has represented the KKK and the Aryan Nation, is an officer in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Eno and Richard Hines, another commander of the Jefferson Davis Camp and the husband of White House Domestic Policy advisor Patricia Hines, were behind the litigation against the Confederate Memorial Association.

Hurley said that the mysterious political funding that was used in the litigation against his organization was also used for the annual Confederate ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. He charged that the funds were part of a secret political slush fund that was wired overnight through a bank in Charlotte by Department of Energy attorney Stephen Page Smith. The funds were traced to the Mid-Atlantic Federal Credit Union in Gaithersburg, Maryland which was regulated by Roberts' client, the NCUA.

A subpoena for this account was quashed by D.C. Superior Court Judge John H. Bayly. The motion to quash was submitted to Judge Bayly by attorney Stephen Bisker, a former employee of NCUA's Robert Fenner and current contractor for the NCUA who works for a major credit union auditing firm.

Hurley also believes that another $500,000 of illegal political donations from the American Defense Institute may now be in the account, noting that attorney Thomas L. O'Neill was on the ADI board and was another attorney litigating against Mr. Hurley's association.

Alan Rothenberg, yet another attorney litigating against the Confederate Memorial Association, is the treasurer of the U.S. Premier Federal Credit Union. The president of the USPFCU was Randolph Earnest, assistant to Ambassador David A. Gross, U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy at the State Department and the former executive director of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney, a group that worked with Roberts during the 2000 election.

Roberts also represented the National Mining Association. Hurley say that Herbert Harmon, the chief lawyer in the massive litigation against the Confederate Memorial Association, uses his home as a contact address for the Rio Tinto mining operation, the largest in the world.

The high-profile Confederate ceremonies in Arlington National Cemetery are held in June and are attended by such notables as Richard B. Abell, a former Department of Justice Assistant Secretary in charge of the Office of Justice Programs and current magistrate for the U.S. Court of Claims; Nicholas D. Ward, who serves on the Probate and Fiduciary Rules Advisory Committee of the D.C. Superior Court; and Robert Wilkie, who currently serves on the National Security Council staff at the White House.

Another prominent lawyer supporting the legal action against Hurley is Col. Jeffrey Addicott, former senior legal counsel for the Special Forces and current director of the Center for Terrorism Law.

When Judge Bayly jailed Hurley in 1997 for objecting to the quashing of the subpoena for the Mid-Atlantic account which Hurley believes to be at the behest of the NCUA, Hurley sold the century-old D.C. museum. The strange motion to quash "by someone other than the holder of the account shows a massive fraud and an obstruction of justice in his case," Hurley said.

Hurley cited a Maryland trial that continues this week as an example of the perilous consequences of dealing with white supremacists. The trial involves the largest arson in the history of the state. All of the burned homes in Charles County belonged to blacks. The chief witness against the Confederate Memorial Association was Lewis Doherty, who is now listed as an organizer of the neo-Nazi National Alliance that was distributing white supremacist literature in Charles County prior to the arsons.

Hurley is calling for a complete investigation of John Roberts connection with the planned "Freedom Fighter" reception, the National Credit Union Administration, the National Mining Association and the Rio Tinto mining operation. He said that all the facts about Roberts in these matters should be known before there is "a secular canonization of this man for the highest court."

* * * * *

WMR has learned that under Bush I, the CIA's use of the trucking industry and cocaine shipments, blossomed. This was no where more apparent than in the state of South Carolina. In 1989, state Representative Ron Cobb was snared by the FBI in a cocaine bust. Cobb, a Democrat, was charged with trying to buy a kilo of cocaine for $20,000 from an undercover FBI agent. Cobb said he was entrapped to allow the FBI to obtain a covert operative inside the South Carolina legislature. Cobb was set up as the head of a phony Atlanta-based lobbying company -- Alpha Group -- and directed by his FBI handlers to bribe South Carolina legislators into pushing a bill to legalize horse and dog track betting in South Carolina. Rep. Robert Kohn of Charleston was brought in by Cobb to entrap white legislators while Rep. Luther Taylor was drafted to bring African American legislators. In all, 17 legislators pleaded guilty or were convicted of drug and racketeering charges. Kohn received a lighter sentence for testifying against his colleagues.

According to Hurley, Kohn's activities in trying to bribe a judge in South Carolina in order to get a Florence, South Carolina truck stop owner and major Republican contributor off the hook for a cocaine bust, were never adequately pursued by the FBI, mainly because of links between the South Carolina cocaine smuggling operations, trucking companies, and Ku Klux Klan and southern white supremacist organizations that were assisting in the distribution of cocaine in support of George H. W. Bush's Iran-Contra money-making scheme. According to the CMA's Hurley, Kohn's association with Hines, himself a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, was known to the FBI. But Hines, as a top GOP figure, was "off limits" as far as the FBI was concerned. The FBI told Hurley that "political influence" in the judge bribery case made it impossible for them to continue with an investigation, which was said to have involved cocaine.

Hines was certainly no stranger to the trucking business, having held a position under the Reagan administration with the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated the trucking industry, and the Department of Transportation. Trucking firms associated with the American Trucking Association were part and parcel with the national cocaine distribution network in the United States, according to sources familiar with the covert operation. The Iran-Contra smuggling operation also saw money from illegal drug sales and off-shore bank account caches making their way into the campaign coffers of a number of U.S. political candidates, mostly Republicans but also including a few Democrats.

Illicit campaign contributions were particularly targeted at Florida officials in the state's important Panhandle, a haven and nexus for drug and weapons smuggling involving the CIA and Latin America during Iran-Contra. According to Florida sources, Jim Appleman, the Florida State Attorney for the 14th Judicial District of Florida who was based in Panama City, Florida, gave protection to Bush Senior's Iran-Contra smuggling operations in northern Florida. Appleman's 2000 campaign treasurer, Gerald R. Stanton, was President of Mutual Development Corporation, a Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corporation entity that only existed on paper and eventually siphoned off the S&L proceeds confiscated by the U.S. government. Much of that money ended up in Bush family coffers. Two of the Bush sons, Neil (Silverado S&L) and Jeb (Broward Federal S&L) were intimately tied into the S&L collapse. George W. Bush, through his financial stake in Harken Energy, benefited from money provided by the defunct Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a major avenue for Iran-Contra weapons and drug money laundering activities. Marvin Bush served as Finance Chairman of the Virginia Republican Party until 1991, after the collapse of the S&Ls.

While Marvin's role in the S&L collapse and the Iran-Contra drug and weapons smuggling scheme at first appears sketchy, a detailed analysis of contributions to the GOP while Marvin served as the Virginia Republican Party's finance chair shows definite links between the youngest Bush brother and the CIA-led network. Farhad Azima, an Iranian expatriate who was close to the Shah's family, owned Global International, which was involved in transporting arms for the CIA along with an associated air company, Race Aviation. Azima was a major contributor to the GOP, including Virginia Senate and House candidates, when Marvin was in charge of finances for the Virginia Republicans. The contributions came from Aviation Leasing and LCA Partners, two of Azima's companies. Global's planes were maintained by Southern Air Transport, a CIA proprietary that flew weapons to the Contras and drugs back from Latin America. Azima was also involved with Mario Renda in Indian Springs Bank of Kansas City. Renda, who was convicted of bilking $16 million from the S&Ls and tax fraud, was a Long Island mob figure who brokered drug money laundering for the CIA and the National Security Council. Renda was associated with four collapsed Virginia Savings & Loans: Heritage S&L, Investors S&L, Virginia Beach Federal S&L, and First S&L. Indian Springs collapsed in 1984, a year after its president died in a suspicious car fire.

While the air transport segment of the Bush crime family's weapons and drug smuggling operation involved CIA proprietary firms and mob elements, the ground segment involved trucking firms, some of which were tied to white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. These are the organizations that are now infiltrating the U.S. military with a wink and a nod from the Bush administration. The money amassed by the Bushes from these operations also found their way into secret bank accounts abroad and blind trusts in the United States.

According to Insider-Magazine.com's John Caylor, the CIA used its proprietary airline companies in Florida to ship in drugs and distribute them nationally. According to Caylor, "former Lt. Col. Thomas Bledsoe, a former owner of Kenworth of Dothan, Alabama and past President of Alabama Truckers Association [and director of CIA proprietary Tepper Aviation, which was associated with Crestview Aerospace Corporation], supplied transportation and possible storage of the goods [cocaine and weapons]. Bledsoe also flew truck parts nationwide to truckers with his fleet of pilots and fixed wing aircraft.

U.S. Customs Intelligence reports I've laid my eyes on say the Tepper planes would land late at night with several armed masked men in black guarding the aircraft with sub-machine guns while supervising the on-loading of tractor trailer rigs and local law enforcement were told to stay the hell away. Bledsoe became irritated after Customs opened the cover-up investigation and moved his yacht from BayPoint, Florida to Fort Lauderdale. Chief Lee Sullivan was reportedly on his payroll. According to those same reports Tepper employed 17 pilots in 1992, was caught with stolen military tanks on board an aircraft and a gun-battle almost ensued between U.S. Customs and Tepper black ops people. Tepper was part of the Iran-Contra network and in its first air crash in Angola, Bub Petty, a Tepper owner from Dothan, was killed." Caylor, who has extensive sources inside the FBI, Customs, and DEA, reported that Tepper/Crestview maintained drug and weapons smuggling operations right alongside the DEA at the San Antonio, Texas airport. The Alabama Trucking Association is a member of the American Trucking Associations, where Cheney's Chief of Staff Addington used to hang his hat. The American Trucking Associations suffered the loss of its Vice President for Public Affairs, Michael Russell on June 15, 2006. The former Department of Transportation official, veteran newsman, press secretary for Michigan Democratic Senator Donald Riegle (whose Senate Banking Committee investigated George H. W. Bush's and Ronald Reagan's supply of weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein), Michigan Democratic Rep. William Ford, and Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review, and resident of Sterling, Virginia, died in a rafting accident in Colorado. Russell reportedly fell out of his raft and drowned.

Drugs moved into the United States and throughout distribution channels controlled by the Mafia, the Latin American cartels, and the Chinese. While most people know about Iran-Contra, few have heard about "China-Contra." The Reagan and Bush I administrations received a significant amount of arms for the Contras from the Chinese, who were paid back in cocaine. During the height of the Iran-Contra operation, the FBI conducted a huge cocaine bust in Belize. The arrests led to a route in which the Chinese were distributing their cocaine through drug routes that went by air from Belize to Mena, Arkansas and then to Chinese crime syndicates throughout the United States and Canada.

The drug smuggling business was a financial windfall for the Bush family. With slush funds in BCCI and the S&Ls, the Bush family could move large amounts of money to their friends in the Republican Party and fatten the campaign coffers for candidates and office holders who would be permanently beholden to the Bushes. But the mother lode for Bush money remained in off-shore secret bank accounts. Adler B. "Barry" Seal was a former TWA pilot who had flown marijuana and cocaine into the United States since the 1970s. When he was arrested in 1983, Seal had already flown 100 flights into the United States each carrying between 600 and 1200 pounds of cocaine, equating to a street value of between $3 and $5 billion. However, Seal became a witness and informant for the government and proved invaluable for grand juries investigating how drug smuggling worked in the United States. But that testimony came too close to certain top leaders who had been involved in the Iran-Contra and China-Contra scandals. On February 19, 1986, at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, Seal was murdered gangland style in Baton Rouge, Louisiana at a halfway house where he was assigned. Those who relied on Seal's testimony and cooperation in the drug war, including Louisiana Attorney General William Guste, Jr., were aghast that such an important witness and informant had no protection from the government. The government, of which the number two man was George H. W. Bush, top kingpin in the smuggling. According to those close to the Seal family, after Seal was gunned down, several Swiss bank account numbers were discovered on papers found in the trunk of Seal's car. They were all in the name of George H. W. Bush. The numbers were confiscated by Federal agents.

After the collapse of BCCI and the S&Ls, the Bush family required a new slush fund. It would not be a bank but something with which the Bushes were very familiar -- an energy company specializing in oil and natural gas. Enron, headed up by Bush friend and contributor Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay would fill the vacuum left by BCCI and the S&Ls. Enron, operating with dubious funds from Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other sources, would become the launching pad for George W. Bush's run for the governorship of Texas and the presidency of the United States. Enron's corporate jet was used by Bush in the 2000 campaign. Kenny Boy and George H. W. and W. Bush were close friends. But after Enron served its purpose, it, too, was allowed to collapse. Just as with BCCI and the S&Ls, Enron's employees and shareholders took a bath, while its corporate dons cashed out before the financial doomsday arrived.

However, another Bush "phoenix" would arise from the ashes of Enron. Northern Trust, a Chicago-based multinational financial firm, would assume control of Enron's pension plans, employee savings accounts, 401Ks, and Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) funds. After Enron's bankruptcy in 2002, Northern Trust and Enron's principals (including Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow, Lou Pai, and Cliff Baxter (who supposedly committed suicide before his appearance before a grand jury as a star witness for the government) were sued in the Houston U.S. District Court by ex-Enron employees.

Just before Lay and Skilling were convicted in the Enron case for fraud, Northern Trust submitted Form 10Q to the Securities and Exchange Commission stating the outcome of the suit against Northern Trust:

"One subsidiary of the Corporation [Northern Trust] was named as a defendant in several Enron-related class action suits that were consolidated under a single complaint in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Texas (Houston). Individual participants in the employee pension benefit plans sponsored by Enron Corp. sued various corporate entities and individuals, including the Bank in its capacity as the former directed trustee of the Enron Corp. Savings Plan and former service-provider for the Enron Corp. Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The lawsuit made claims, inter alia, for breach of fiduciary duty to the plan participants, and sought equitable relief and monetary damages in an unspecified amount against the defendants. On September 30, 2003, the court denied the Bank's motion to dismiss the complaint as a matter of law. In an Amended Consolidated Complaint filed on January 2, 2004, plaintiffs continued to assert claims against the Bank and other defendants under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, seeking a finding that defendants are liable to restore to the benefit plans and the plaintiffs hundreds of millions of dollars of losses allegedly caused by defendants' alleged breaches of fiduciary duty. In June 2003, after conducting an extensive investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) filed a civil action against numerous parties charging that they violated their obligations to the Enron plan participants. The DOL did not name any Northern Trust entity or employee as a defendant in its suit. On March 31, 2006, the Corporation announced that the Bank had reached an agreement with counsel for the plaintiffs in the Enron lawsuit to seek approval of a settlement of that class action at $37.5 million, all of which will be paid by the Corporation's insurance carriers. Before the settlement can be finalized, it will have to be approved by the court. On April 20, 2006, the court gave preliminary approval to the settlement. A hearing at which the court may give final approval of the settlement is scheduled for July 24, 2006. As part of the proposed settlement, the Corporation has agreed to give up any claim it might have against Enron, presently in bankruptcy, arising out of or relating to the Enron employee benefit plans."

Now, here is where we go full circle back to Bush and Florida. According to IRS Form 8872, filed by the Americans for Free Speech, a GOP Political Action Committee (PAC) located at 2020 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, DC, between Aug. 8, 2004 and September 30, 2004 -- right in the middle of the presidential election campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry, affiliated PACs, including Americans for Jobs, Families for Conservative Values [also located at 2020 Pennsylvania Ave.], and Taxpayers for Conservative Government and Floridians for Conservative Values [both located in Tallahassee, Florida] contributed a little less than $1 million to Americans for Free Speech. The Americans for Free Speech laundered the money to other right-wing political committees [South Florida Community Council in Coral Gables;Â People for Fairness and Equality and Citizens for Safer Streets in Tallahassee; and Alliance for Protecting Seniors in Washington, DC] which, in turn, made contributions to various candidates, mostly Republicans but also a few Democrats. One of these recipients was Stephen Meadows, a Democrat, but the Bush family's hand picked successor to Florida State Attorney Jim Appleman in the 14th Judicial District of Florida. Meadows would continue to look out for the interests of the Bushes in the Florida Panhandle as Appleman had for the Iran-Contra and S&L frauds. The Americans for Free Speech also listed an interesting recipient of its expenditures: a Northern Trust office in North Palm Beach, Florida received payment for handling the money wires from and to the GOP PACs.

On April 18, 2005, The Chicago Tribune ran a story on George W. Bush's 2004 Federal Income Tax Return. Bush listed his address as: Post Office Box 803968, Chicago, Illinois, 60680. The post office box is the downtown post office box of -- Northern Trust -- the financial group that held Enron's pension and other financial assets. It is also the holding company that maintains George W. Bush's blind trust. Bush money, Enron money, GOP right-wing PAC money, and God only knows what covert action funds, all handled by the same company. Its does sound all so familiar. Enron is dead and so is Ken Lay. Long live the new Bush slush fund -- Northern Trust. The question remains. What did Ken Lay know about Northern Trust? One can assume plenty. For the Bushes, its better that one dead man is now in a position to keep their secrets.

Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.

*****

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5. AMERICAN DREAM

_________________________________________________________________________

THE MOSCOW TIMES

Global Eye

July 7, 2006

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/169164/

By Chris Floyd

In the mystic haze of midsummer, a most unlikely Oberon stepped forth last week to fling a spray of fairy light across the murk, rousing the ill-enchanted sleepers with the hope that dawn had finally come again. But as the magic glow fades, the spell-struck victims will likely find they are still caught in a curse of perpetual night.

We speak of course of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the ludicrous and lawless "military tribunals" concocted by President George W. Bush to serve as meat grinders for the captives in his War on Terror. Led by the sprightly 86-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, a narrow court majority delivered a stinging rebuke to Bush's assumption of imperial powers over the past five years, clearly rejecting the fundamental principle underlying the Crawford Caligula's foul misrule: that the president's unbridled will is the law.

The ruling has been hailed as a "victory for democracy," the "light at the end of the tunnel," a "turning point" in the long struggle to reclaim the republic from the usurping junta of the Bush regime. But we have seen these lights before, and watched them fade. All the previous "turning points" -- scandals, atrocities, judicial rebuffs, investigations, convictions -- have only led to more depredations; every seeming defeat of unlawful power becomes instead a springboard for its further advancement. There is no reason to think it will be any different this time.

To be sure, Stevens and his allies fought a valiant rear-guard action on behalf of liberty. They could have restricted their response to the narrow technical points at issue in the case, but instead they took a broad scythe to the rank undergrowth of legal perversion spawned by the White House and its chief constitutional corrupter, David Addington, the ruthless vizier to Vice President Dick Cheney. As The New Yorker reports, all laws now pass through the hands of this unelected factotum, who feverishly screens them for any possible encroachments on presidential power -- then writes the "signing statements" that Bush appends to every major piece of legislation, declaring that he will follow the new law, or not, as it suits him. "I'm the decider," as Bush likes to say in his cretinous playground patois. But it is Addington and Cheney who have sown the noxious weeds of tyranny that Bush so happily grazes upon.

So there was rich irony in seeing their malevolent system chastised by Stevens, a conservative Republican whose 1975 appointment by President Gerald Ford was certainly handled by Ford's powerful chief of staff: an ambitious apparatchik named Dick Cheney. And the Stevens decision would indeed be a landmark ruling, a return to sanity -- if we were still in an era where the institutions of American government and society were actually functional, and officeholders felt bound by law. But if there is no political will in the American establishment to enforce the ruling, it will be nothing more than a pretty ornament for the republic's coffin.

And where does that will exist? Not in Congress, not in the media, not in the streets -- and certainly not in the confused, craven Democratic opposition. Yet the true nature of the regime's wide-ranging war on liberty has been glaringly obvious for years. We've been writing here about Bush's power grab since November 2001, when we noted that he had given himself the right to order the killing or incarceration of anyone on earth whom he arbitrarily deemed a terrorist -- or even a terrorist suspect. This was reported openly at the time, with approval from the gung-ho corporate media and the U.S. political establishment, with record-breaking poll numbers for Bush and with nary a peep from the Democrats. The first press reports of tortured captives quickly followed, again without controversy.

Indeed, for all its reputed obsession with secrecy, the Bush regime has been remarkably open about its usurpations. "Extrajudicial killing," torture, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, defiance of court rulings and Congress, employment of death squads, an unprovoked war of aggression -- all have been carried out openly, readily apparent to anyone with access to mainstream media sources. That the Supreme Court has only now challenged the essence of Bush's claim to authoritarian power is poignant testimony to how deep the rot of tyranny has spread.

Bush's reaction to the ruling is more evidence of the decay. After a vague, haughty promise to "look at the findings" -- rather than simply obey them, as the law requires -- Bush declared: "One thing I'm not going to do, though, is I'm not going to jeopardize the safety of the American people. People have got to understand that." Thus, in his mind, the circular reasoning that forms the core of his authoritarian philosophy remains intact: Any action that he arbitrarily declares necessary to ensure "the safety of the American people" cannot be restrained by laws or courts.

Already, the lickspittle, lock-step Congress is preparing to belch forth laws to retroactively legalize past Bush crimes and countenance future offenses. As legal scholar Mark Garber notes, this will likely satisfy at least one of the court's wavering moderates when the next test of Bush's tyranny comes around, sinking the razor-thin majority for liberty -- which will soon disappear in any case when the ancient Stevens shuffles off this mortal coil. His bold stroke for freedom was magic indeed, but it may prove, in the corrupted currents of this world, to be such stuff as dreams are made on.

Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN

News * Analysis * Research * Action

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- AFIB No. 736, July 5, 2006 -

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!

END THE OCCUPATIONS!

ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!

The crowning achievement of [President Carlos] Salinas's reign was his successful negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Salinas worked closely with both Bush and Clinton to navigate the agreement around opponents on both sides of the border. ... Questions about human rights, the environment, money laundering and drug trafficking were brushed aside. In fact, both the DEA and the US Customs Service were prohibited by the Bush and Clinton administrations from raising the subject of drugs during the NAFTA negotiations. "They said we could not make drugs part of the debate," said Carol Hallen, US customs commissioner during the Bush presidency. "I think it was a terrible mistake not to tie the two together." ... It would not have been hard to do. Evidence of the involvement of the Mexican police and military in the drug trade was glossed over by the US government... When seven Mexican drug agents were gunned down in an ambush by 100 members of the Mexican army on the payroll of a drug cartel, US Ambassador John Negroponte dismissed the slaughter as a "regrettable incident." The slaughter had been videotaped by the DEA from another plane, which had also been strafed by the army unit. -- Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press [London: Verso, 1998] pp. 359-360.

Contents: Number 736

01. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [Oak Park, MI]: Major Powers Complicit in Israeli War Crimes.

02. TRUTHOUT [Los Angeles]: Orwell in Iraq: Snow Jobs, Zarqawi and Bogus Peace Plans.

03. WAYNE MADSEN REPORT [Washington, D.C.]: Fortunate for the Bush Crime Family: Ken Lay Took Many Secrets to the Grave.

04. THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS [Venice, FL]: The Homeland Security Rackets. Mexico & U.S. Ruling Parties Ties to Blow Bust.

05. THE FINANCIAL TIMES [London]: Afghanistan Set to Harvest Record Opium Crop.

06. THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM [Arlington, VA]: CIA: Osama Helped Bush in '04.

07. RIGOROUS INTUITION [Canada]: Crimes of Opportunity.

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 738/July 12, 2006

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 737/July 9, 2006

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/isra-j05.shtml

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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE

Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)

Web: http://www.wsws.org/

E-Mail: editor@wsws.org

- Wednesday, 5 July 2006 -

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1. MAJOR POWERS COMPLICIT IN ISRAELI WAR CRIMES

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News & Analysis: Middle East

By Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland

Israel's actions in Gaza and on the West Bank constitute war crimes.

Few any longer believe that Tel Aviv is seriously concerned with securing the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit. Rather, Israel is, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared yesterday, waging "a long war" aimed at destroying whatever remains of the political infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority so as to bring about regime change.

Launching such a war of aggression is a "crime against peace," according to the Nuremberg Principles drawn up to determine what constitutes a war crime during the trials of Nazi party members following World War II, and incorporated into the Charter of the United Nations. It is a crime made worse by the grotesquely unequal character of the conflict now being waged, with Israel enjoying an overwhelming military superiority.

Israel has targeted leading Palestinian parliamentarians for arrest and detention. It has bombed the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and threatened to assassinate Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal and others who are exiled in Damascus.

Referring to the arrest of fully one third of the Palestinian cabinet and dozens of Hamas representatives, Israel's defence minister, Labour leader Amir Peretz, declared, "The masquerade ball is over.... The suits and ties will not serve as cover to the involvement and support of kidnappings and terror."

Israel's policy of regime change does not end in Palestine. Syria is also a target. In a deliberately provocative action, four Israeli fighter jets buzzed the summer palace of President Bashar al-Assad, while he was in residence. Olmert has said the key to solving the crisis lies in Syria, accusing Damascus of ordering recent attacks on Israel. Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres has insisted that Assad must expel what he claims is a "terrorist apparatus" working from Syria.

Tel Aviv intends to plunge the Palestinians into conditions of abject misery in order to extinguish any will to resist its dictates. To this end the incursion into Gaza has been the occasion for the imposition of collective punishments--a practice once again associated with the Nazi SS and Wehrmacht, and explicitly labeled a war crime and banned under the Geneva Conventions.

The first action taken by Israel in its present offensive was to destroy Gaza's only power plant, depriving almost 50 percent of Gaza's residents of electricity at a time when temperatures are hitting the mid-30s. Since then it has continued to shell civilian infrastructure, including bridges, roads, a university and a charity. Every night, jets fly over Gaza City and other major population centers, creating sonic booms and shattering windows. Olmert declared, "I take personal responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza."

These punitive measures are directed against a people who have already suffered terribly as a result of months of economic and military blockade. The Gaza Strip is home to one and a half million people, making it one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Most are refugees who still live in eight UN-administered camps, which lack even the most basic infrastructure. For five months Israel, with the backing of the major powers, has closed Gaza's borders, and denied it tax revenues. As a result, hundreds of thousands had been reduced to near starvation even before the present hostilities commenced.

Israel's political and military agenda is so naked that several commentators have been forced to disagree with the usual media claims that the attack on Gaza is aimed at freeing the captured solider.

The Financial Times leader July 1 stated, "The new Israeli government of Ehud Olmert says its sole purpose is to secure the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, seized last Sunday in a raid by Palestinian militants on an Israeli army post. But the disproportion between means and ends suggests this may be a pretext.... [Olmert] was elected on a pledge to set unilaterally new borders for an expanded Israeli state, by annexing large swaths of the Occupied Territory on which Palestinians had hoped to build their independent state. Getting away with this land-grab depends on the credibility of the Israeli government's claim that it has no Palestinian interlocutor and must therefore act to safeguard its security."

Will Hutton in the Observer wrote, "The dark interpretation of Israel's reaction in Gaza is that it does not want a politically viable negotiating partner in Palestine. It suits Israel to characterise Hamas as terrorist fundamentalists who are beyond the pale. Thus it can proceed with its unilaterally imposed settlement, wall and land grab, in turn fanning the flames of Palestinian extremism."

Shimon Schiffer wrote in Yediot Aharonot, "What we have here is not an attempt to rescue Corporal Shalit and bring him safe to his family and not an attempt to stop the firing of the Qassam rockets but a move aimed at destroying the Hamas government ..."

Minutes from last week's negotiations between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts, published in Ha'aretz, also confirm that the assault on Gaza was aimed at preventing an agreement by the Islamic groups to recognise Israel.

Abbas described the "road map" drawn up by the United States, Europe, Russia and the United Nations as "a life saver". No one could pressurise the Israelis "except the Americans" and no other course was possible, he insisted, adding that Palestinian Authority institutions in Gaza "are 75 percent destroyed, while in the West Bank they are 100 percent destroyed."

That is the perspective signed up to by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the day Israel invaded Gaza. It was the desperate hope of a regime teetering on the brink of collapse that currying favour with Bush would convince the US to rein in its regional client. But Tel Aviv did not want a capitulation on the part of Hamas that would deprive it of the excuse for its campaign against the Palestinian Authority. It mounted a rocket bombardment of Gaza in order to provoke an act of defiance that would provide a pretext for a full-scale invasion--and got its wish with the border raid by Palestinian commandos and the capture of Corporal Shalit.

These facts are well known within ruling circles internationally. Moreover, Israel's attacks are waged against a government that was popularly elected in January in a process insisted on by the Quartet of the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. Yet despite this, and after a week-long offensive that threatens to end in bloodshed, no Western government has issued anything but the most perfunctory appeals for restraint by Israel.

In the first instance this is because the offensive in Gaza has Washington's full backing.

At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on June 30, the US blocked the passing of a resolution criticising Israel. US ambassador to the UN John Bolton said the Security Council should "avoid taking any steps that would unexpectedly exacerbate tensions in the region" and insisted Shalit's release was the "best way to resolve the immediate crisis". He utilised the meeting as an opportunity to step up Washington's attacks on Syria and Iran, demanding that both "end their role as state sponsors of terror and unequivocally condemn the actions of Hamas, including this kidnapping".

The Bush administration initially toyed with the possibility of a negotiated settlement, accepting a Palestinian state within parts of the Occupied Territories in order to placate its Arab allies and make it politically easier for them to continue backing the occupation of Iraq in the face of domestic opposition. However, last spring, with the US intent on strengthening its grip on the Middle East, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was able to secure Bush's backing for his plan to unilaterally draw up Israel's borders. Sharon's successor, Olmert, knows that he has carte blanche in Gaza and the West Bank and that the US also welcomes the ratcheting up of tensions with Damascus.

The European powers are concerned that Israel's actions threaten to destabilise the Middle East. But they are not prepared to contemplate a direct confrontation with Washington in order to prevent this.

More fundamentally, the virtual silence of the world's major powers testifies to the degree to which basic standards of international law have been universally jettisoned since the US-led war against Iraq.

There is nothing that Israel is doing in Gaza that was not carried out by the US and its major ally Britain in Iraq. There too, war was declared on the basis of a manufactured pretext. And Washington had even fewer qualms about openly professing regime change as a war aim in violation of international law. As evidenced by the murderous US assault on Fallujah, the collective punishment subsequently inflicted on the Iraqi people for daring to resist occupation has been just as brutal and obscene as that now being imposed on the Palestinians.

In this, the Bush administration acts as a trail blazer whose path is followed by all the imperialist powers.

The European Union attempted to maintain a certain distance from the US over Iraq and called for continued respect for international law and multilateral institutions. But aside from direct military participation, the European powers did everything possible to facilitate the attack on Baghdad and subsequently backed the US occupation.

Just months after the war, the UN Security Council sanctioned the invasion and gave the occupying forces unlimited control of the country's oil wealth. In effect, the near unanimous vote not only justified the colonial subjugation of Iraq, but also future wars of aggression.

Prior to Iraq, the European powers' major criticism of the US focused on its doctrine of "preventive" or "pre-emptive war". But the subsequent draft European constitution--that fell only as a result of massive "No" votes in referenda in France and the Netherlands--advocated preventive war as the military doctrine of the European Union.

This descent into illegality includes the acquiescence of the European powers in the face of the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and collusion with CIA renditions. It also shapes Europe's own political agenda. All the measures attacking democratic rights pioneered by the US in the so-called "war against terror" have been adopted by the major powers--arbitrary detention, state surveillance and the criminalisation of political dissent.

The tragedy that has befallen the Palestinians is perhaps the most telling example of the collusion between the US and the governments of Europe.

America finances the Israeli war machine, while Europe agrees to fund the Palestinian Authority--providing that it abandons any resistance to occupation. This is the essence of the "road map" agreed by the Quartet. When Tel Aviv utilised Hamas's election to the leadership of the PA to call for an economic blockade, Brussels as well as Washington supported it.

Israel's offensive in Gaza cannot be opposed by the appeals to the "international community" now being made by the PA. Powers which themselves are seeking to legitimise a return to wars of colonial conquest and the installation of puppet regimes cannot protest too loudly when similar crimes are perpetrated by Israel. Rather, it necessitates the political mobilisation of workers, young people and intellectuals on a socialist and internationalist programme that places opposition to Zionism within a broader perspective for the liberation of the Middle East from imperialist domination.

Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

*****

TRUTHOUT

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Editor, Marc Ash

Tel: 1.213.489.1971

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Web: http://www.truthout.com

- Monday, 3 July 2006 -

_________________________________________________________________________

2. ORWELL IN IRAQ: SNOW JOBS, ZARQAWI AND BOGUS PEACE PLANS

_________________________________________________________________________

Perspective

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070306D.shtml

By Dahr Jamail

"My personal opinion is that the only way we will lose this war is if we pull out prematurely," said Colonel Jeffrey Snow, who commands a brigade of soldiers in Iraq. Snow, as reported by AFP on June 30th, fears losing public support in the US for the ongoing occupation of Iraq because of "negative perceptions" at home due to news that is "always bad."

Reuters reported, also on June 30th, Snow admitting that resistance attacks in Baghdad have risen despite the recent security crackdown that brought tens of thousands of American and Iraqi soldiers, new checkpoints and curfews in the capital city.

The same Col. Snow, unable (or more likely, unwilling) to provide statistics on the increased number of attacks, instead used the excuse that the steps the US military took to tell the Iraqi people about the new security measures kept resistance fighters informed of the military's plans. On that note, it couldn't be more obvious that someone in his position is there for his ability to follow orders, rather than his aptitude toward the application of logic.

In another dazzling flash of brain activity, Snow, who obviously thinks "war" is a suitable term for the illegal occupation of Iraq, commented, "We expected there would be an increase in attacks, and that is precisely what's happened." He also added, "I believe that these attacks are going to go down over time. So I remain optimistic."

Snow is obviously annoyed with the fact that select media outlets continue to report the increasing violence, ongoing deaths of Iraqi civilians and US soldiers, and that the country is, at this point, essentially as devastated as it was when Hulagu Khan's Mongols sacked Baghdad 748 years ago.

Just three days before the flash of brilliant analysis by Snow, the Iraqi health ministry announced it had received 262 corpses within the previous four days as the result of armed operations all over the country. It also reported that 580 people were injured in the same time period, and did not count people known to have been abducted and murdered but whose bodies have not yet been found.

But Snow seems to be less concerned with the reality on the ground than he is with public perception of the hell that Iraq has become. While he admits that his own troops have come under a greater number of resistance attacks, he preferred to offer his professional critique of media coverage on the failed state of Iraq.

"Our soldiers may be in the crosshairs every day, but it is the American voter who is a real target, and it is the media that carries the message back each day across the airwaves. So when the news is not balanced and it's always bad, that clearly leads to negative perceptions back home," said the leader of the 1st Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, which has been in Iraq nearly one year.

Determined to leave reporters with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside about the situation in Iraq, as well as to explain his obvious contradictions, Snow added, "The way I would answer that is that attacks here recently are up in our area. However, the overall effectiveness is down. So you may perceive that as double-speak."

While Snow was busy contemplating his gifts of double-speak the next day, July 1st, a car bomb attacked a police patrol in Sadr City, Baghdad, killing at least 62 people and wounding over 100.

With the plan to secure Baghdad, "Operation Forward Together," now three weeks old, and the so-called terror leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed, the security situation has only continued to deteriorate.

"Killing Zarqawi has not improved the situation in Iraq one bit," said Loretta Napoleoni, Fullbright Scholar at Johns Hopkins University, author of the books Terror Inc. and Insurgent Iraq. While speaking to an audience in Seville, Spain, where we both gave lectures about the situation in Iraq this past weekend, the expert about Zarqawi and terror groups now operating in Iraq added, "In fact, it might well have made things worse. There is evidence to back the claim that al-Qaeda gave information to the Multi-National Forces about Zarqawi to have him killed, since they had been having problems with him for quite some time. Thus, killing him may well have strengthened the link between al-Qaeda and Sunni resistance groups in Iraq."

When I interviewed Napoleoni, she told me that the image of Zarqawi portrayed by Western media outlets was basically the antithesis of reality. "He [Zarqawi] was not in control of the Sunni resistance. He was in control of a very small group of jihadists, predominantly foreign fighters. He was extremely unpopular among the other factions of Sunni resistance fighters. Some of the members of the resistance even tried two times to remove him because he was a negative political influence."

While talking with Napoleoni I wondered if Col. Snow truly believed his own rhetoric. I asked her what she thought of the constant assertions in Western corporate media outlets that Zarqawi was the "leader of the Iraqi resistance."

"Well it's not true. It's absolutely not true," she told me, "I don't know what they base these kinds of statements on. The resistance in Iraq is quite complex, including the Shia factions, and of course al-Zarqawi was not in control of that. Finally, al-Zarqawi was a foreigner. This is the key element. The Iraqi resistance would never follow a foreigner as a leader."

Hoping to shed some light on how people like Col. Snow, along with so many US citizens, remain so ignorant about the reality on the ground in Iraq, I asked Napoleoni, who lectures regularly on the financing of terrorism as well as being an economist, another question.

Who is actually conducting the terrorism in Iraq? "The majority of the suicide missions are carried out by non-Iraqis. There are lots of people coming from the Gulf. There is a jihadist web site that lists the names of the martyrs, and you can see that they come from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and even from the Emirates. This is the majority of the suicide missions. Some people come from Syria and Jordan, but the vast majority of people come from the Gulf."

So much for ongoing attempts by the Cheney administration to implicate Syria and Iran in collaborating with the Iraqi resistance. All Cheney needs to do is have his puppet, Mr. Bush, ask his pal, the King of Saudi Arabia, why they are allowing so many martyrs into Iraq.

Col. Snow take note, because if you really want to know what you are attempting to hide from people in the US, you should ask Napoleoni. According to her, the reason why Zarqawi and the few terrorist groups operating in Iraq are given so much media attention is because the Cheney administration "needs to personalize the enemy and needs to have a dichotomy between good and evil. This has been, very much, the Bush [Cheney] administration's policy right from the beginning. His [Bush's] first speech after 9/11 was "You are either with us or you are against us."

"So he clearly stated there is nothing in between. So al-Zarqawi had to be an evil individual the same way that Saddam Hussein was portrayed as an evil individual because, you know, there is a moral battle here."

Col. Snow and other gullible US citizens should heed her conclusion about why the myth of Zarqawi was blown so large and wide. "Of course this [moral battle] is the umbrella under which the economic battle and the hegemonic battles are taking place," she said.

While we were discussing the US-propagated myth of Zarqawi, I decided to ask Napoleoni to comment on the absurd statements made by Western corporate media outlets claiming that Zarqawi was in control of Fallujah during the November 2004 massacre in the city.

"Al-Zarqawi was never in control of Fallujah," she told me, "In fact, he was never in Fallujah." As we discussed the second US assault on Fallujah in depth, she mentioned that negotiations between resistance groups, tribal leaders and the US military were happening right up to the launching of Operation Phantom Fury against Fallujah.

"The reason why that negotiation failed was because after it was agreed, the Americans basically demanded to have al-Zarqawi, and of course the people of Fallujah couldn't give him to the Americans because he was not in Fallujah," she said, confirming what I'd been told by my sources in the city.

Another recent clue as to why resistance attacks against US and Iraqi forces have been on the rise as of late is the "failed" reconciliation plan put forth by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The vague plan offered by the Shia-dominated puppet government was flawed from the beginning, and when I asked Napoleoni what she thought of the "plan" she said, "I don't think it is going to work at all. I think it is a window dressing for the West. I think it is one of these political decisions in order to sell an image to the West saying, "Oh, the new government in Iraq is actually offering peace. But this peace is going to be rejected; therefore the new government has no other choice but to continue repressing the people."

She continued, "I don't think there was anything in that proposal that was written in order to bring a deal. Because if you look at this, it is impossible for any of those groups to accept it. It's too vague, for a start. Also, it basically prohibits amnesty for anybody who has done any activity motivated by political violence. So of course this was rejected because there was no way an amnesty is going to be accepted by the Sunni when we are in a situation where the government is in the hands of the Shia."

There is one thing that Col. Snow said about the US corporate media that he and I agree on. Napoleoni, who worked for several banks and internation?l organizations in Europe and the US as well as having brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combating the financing of terror networks, agreed as well.

And that is when Col. Snow told reporters, "It is the American voter who is a real target."

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.

Copyright 2006 Truthout

*****

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Fortunate for the Bush Crime Family

3. KEN LAY TOOK MANY SECRETS TO THE GRAVE

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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT

"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"

Special Report

July 5, 2006

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com

By Wayne Madsen

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Just as WMR was looking into reports from our sources that investigators were checking into the stashing of Enron money in off-shore secret bank accounts prior to Enron's collapse, comes word from Aspen, Colorado that Enron founder Ken Lay, who was convicted of various counts of fraud in the largest corporate collapse in history, died from a massive heart attack while vacationing at his Aspen home.

Ken Lay is taking to the grave a number of secrets that are politically and criminally embarrassing to the Bush crime family. A meeting held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan on September 7, 1996 is a case in point. According to U.S. intelligence sources, a meeting was held between 40 representatives from Enron, Uzbek President Islam Karimov, Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, and Taliban leaders from Afghanistan. Khashoggi reportedly represented Saudi government and business leaders at the meeting and periodically left the meeting, returning by private jet to Saudi Arabia, to obtain "permission" for certain agreements. Also involved in the Tashkent talks were representatives from UNOCAL, which had been negotiating with the Taliban on a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. UNOCAL consultants on that project included Bush administration resident Muslim neo-con Zalmay Khalilzad (a native of Afghanistan) and Hamid Karzai, who had good relations with the Kandahar-based Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar.

Prior to the Tashkent meeting, on June 23, 1996, $10 billion was wired by the Saudis from a Cypriot bank through Barclay's Bank in London and on to Houston. The Saudis needed to pump money into Enron to make the company a viable financial entity for negotiating the pipelines through both Iran and Afghanistan. Some of the money ended up in the hands of LJM1 (also known as LJM Cayman, LP), one of the corporate off-shore and off-balance sheet "partnership" contrivances set up by Enron with the help of its Chief Financial Officer, Andy Fastow. Two days after the Saudis wired the $10 billion to Enron, Saudi terrorists blew up the Khobar Towers, killing 19 U.S. military personnel.

The Tashkent meeting was held to discuss a natural gas pipeline that would go from Uzbekistan, through Afghanistan, to Iran's southern coast. CIA financial experts, working with Enron, began to work on rectifying Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and Iranian accounting methods. At the time, Iran believed it was better to do a deal with the United States rather than let the Uzbek gas go to China. However, things radically changed in the Spring of 1997 when Iran broke off negotiations with the consortium.

In the Spring of 1997, the Taliban sent envoys to Houston to meet with Enron and UNOCAL officials concerning the pipeline deal. Meetings were held at the Houstonian hotel but the Taliban studiously avoided any oil industry reception or dinners where wine was being served. After the US embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, attacks pinned on Osama Bin Laden who was practically running eastern Afghanistan, President Clinton ordered all pipeline talks with the Taliban halted.

Informed sources have told WMR that a major portion of the $10 billion wired by the Saudis to Enron passed through the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and was eventually used by Kinder Morgan to purchase major elements of Enron's natural gas pipeline system in the United States. To make the Iran and CentGas pipeline projects profitable, the Saudis wanted to hike the price of natural gas and that could only be accomplished by improving the natural gas pipeline network in the United States. The Saudis, who were major investors in Enron and saw the company facing a financial bath on the plan to pipe natural gas to India's Dabhol power plant, needed another firm to run the U.S. natural gas pipeline assets of Enron. And that company was Kinder Morgan. It was a great "inside" deal since Richard Kinder, who left Enron as President in November 1996, was an old college chum of Ken Lay and his partner at Kinder Morgan, Bill Morgan. Kinder, a native of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, once worked at the law firm run by Rush Limbaugh's brother, David Limbaugh. Although Kinder's break with Lay was said to be over Lay's failure to name him Chief Executive Officer in a deal where Lay would remain as Chairman of the Board, the truth is that Kinder was as ambitious as Lay and he saw a chance to profit from Enron's misdeeds and mistakes. The CEO position eventually went to Jeffrey Skilling, convicted with Lay on several fraud counts. Kinder is now one of Houston's wealthiest businessmen and he has been a major contributor to GOP coffers, including that of George W. Bush.

The mortality rate among those close to various Bush criminal enterprises is extremely high. Lay's death follows by a few weeks that of Phillip Merrill, Dick Cheney's handpicked President of the Export-Import Bank who served in that capacity during a period when questionable loans were made to the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. There will undoubtedly be questions posed about the circumstances of Lay's untimely (or timely?) death. Aspen, Colorado is a vacation playground for some of Bush's most ardent (and richest) supporters and access to the town and its records (including medical examiner records) is strictly controlled. Lay and Skilling were scheduled for sentencing on September 11 but, more significantly, according to Federal sentencing guidelines, Lay was to have submitted a sworn financial statement to Judge Sim Lake by August 1. That statement should have contained all of Lay's financial assets, including any that may have been squirreled away in off-shore accounts or other "partnerships." With Lay's death, his sworn financial statement for the Federal court will be transformed into the filing of a probate will in the Harris County, Texas Court, moving the process from the oversight of the Federal judiciary to a county court in Texas.

Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.

*****

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4. THE HOMELAND SECURITY RACKETS

Mexico & U.S. Ruling Parties Ties to Blow Bust

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"The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than the history of crime." -- Voltaire

THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS

Feature Story

July 5, 2006

http://www.MadCowProd.com

By Daniel Hopsicker

VENICE, FL--On April 10th an American-registered DC9 was caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S., the Mexican military announced, at an airport in Ciudad del Carmen. In the more than two months since, the incident has slipped into a black hole.

Beyond a few half-hearted stabs at pinning blame for the crime on scapegoats du jour like the FARC in Colombia or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, authorities in both Mexico and the U.S. have had little or nothing to say about the case.

The MadCowMorningNews has learned new details in what is becoming a growing drug trafficking scandal implicating elements in the ruling parties in both Mexico and the US:

* Released FAA registration records from the American-registered DC9 (N900SA) airline show that documents informing the FAA the plane had been exported to new owners in Venezuela were not submitted until after its seizure in Mexico.

* Several top executives of SkyWays Aircraft, the American firm which owned the DC9 in partnership with Royal Sons Inc. of St Petersburg, FL. including the company's President, James Kent, are former members of U.S. military intelligence, stated one of SkyWay's original employees, who contacted us after seeing a previous story.

* Mexican newspapers last week began openly speculating last week on the role of high officials in the ruling party of President Vicente Fox in the huge drug load...

* They are also reporting that the DC9's flight from Caracas to an airport in the western Yucatan was not a one-of-a-kind occurrence, but that the airliner had made at least seven previous flights along the same route.

* The DEA has made a deliberate effort to downplay the importance of the seizure, underestimating its value by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Crime doesn't pay... At least, not as well as politics

The DC9, which we have dubbed "Cocaine One," had an identical sister ship. In the most unusual detail of the case released so far, both airliners had been painted by their registered owners, SkyWay Aircraft and a partner with an interest in the company, Frederic Geffon of Royal Sons, Inc of St. Petersburg, Fl., to impersonate official U.S. Government aircraft from the Dept of Homeland Security, complete with an official-looking Seal.

We reported previously on close connections between the management of SkyWay and the Republican Party, including U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who toured the company's facilities, praised its (non-existent) products designed for sale to U.S. Homeland Security, and flew a SkyWay plane in his barnstorming finish in his successful 2004 campaign.

Recently we were contacted by one of SkyWay's original employees who passed on more intriguing details of top SkyWay executive's government and political connections.

"James Kent (President of SkyWay) is a real strong Republican with a lot of connections in Washington, like U.S. Senator Mel Martinez," the former SkyWay employee told us. "And he's also in tight with a lot of politicians in Tallahassee, like (Republican gubernatorial candidate) Charlie Christ."

"He was a mole for military intelligence during the Vietnam war. He was with Air America over there, and I guess he told some people he worked for the CIA."

According to SkyWay SEC filings, Kent "served in various government contract management positions supporting projects of the Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and Department of the Navy."

Kent also runs a company, Online Satellite Communication, which uses an address in Las Vegas which also houses Voters Outreach of America, a Republican Party operation accused of illegal activity and electoral dirty tricks, including destroying thousands of Democratic registration forms, during the 2004 Presidential election.

Closing the barn door after the horse is gone

More than ten weeks after the seizure in Mexico of a DC9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine the FAA finally released the ownership records of the plane.

Immediately reasons for the FAA foot-dragging became clear. Documents informing the FAA the plane had been exported to new owners in Venezuela were not submitted until the day after its seizure in Mexico.

FAA spokesman Roland Herwig told Howard Altman of the Tampa Tribune that the FAA received a copy of a letter from Royal Sons dated April 7, asking that the plane be exported to Venezuela, and that the FAA officially took Royal Sons' name off the books three days after the cocaine bust.

While this statement appears on its surface to support Geffon's protestation that he no longer owned the airliner at the time it was busted, a closer look at the FAA official's statement indicate he carefully avoided stating when the FAA received the change of ownership documents. Instead, he cites the date typed on the letter, as if that provided some sort of definitive proof. He also makes clear that the documents the FAA received were copies.

A day late and 5.5 tons of cocaine short

The significance of this statement became obvious as we studied the documents. Fax numbers at the bottom of the letter indicate it was faxed to Geffon and Corrales just minutes after being submitted to the FAA.

An FAA spokesman stated they hadn't faxed the document to anyone, indicating it was submitted by a title insurance company, a common practice, and then faxed by them to the principals, probably as proof it had been delivered.

Thus one possible Geffon defense, that the letter dated April 7 was in the mail for four days before reaching the FAA, is eliminated. And the only apparent conclusion is that the documents submitted by Geffon have been back-dated.

The FAA's stamp indicated they received the documents on April 11th.

However, the plane was busted April 10th.

The wages of sin... frequently go unreported

Another striking irregularity in the released FAA records is that the bill of sale indicates Geffon and his SkyWay partners bought the airliner in May of 2004.

But he did not record the sale with the FAA until August of 2005, over a year later.

Had the plane received the attention of U.S. law enforcement during the interim (for, say, having a tail light missing, or for smuggling tons of cocaine) SkyWay and Geffon's name would have appeared nowhere on the plane's registration.

The FAA has given no indication that it intends to frown on this, or that the Agency even views it as a legal faux pas.

Geffon came into sole possession of the DC9 after SkyWay Aircraft went bankrupt. But his claim to have paid for the plane is in doubt.

"At the time of the bankruptcy, Fred Geffon wanted to buy one of the planes. He had a charter pilot, a Venezuelan guy who lived in Venice, and they were going to use it for charters," said our source.

And that was how we learned that the plane's pilot, a slippery fellow who. as we earlier reported, managed to slip through the clutches of the Mexican military the day the DC9 was busted, may live in--of all places!--Venice, Fl. Of course, Geffon's company maintained an address at the Venice Airport in a hangar owned by terror flight school Huffman Aviation, as we've already seen, so if the DC9 pilot turns out to live in tiny bewildered Venice, the news will not be as much of a shock as it might otherwise.

"This life of ours, this is a wonderful life"

Apparently on his own authority, Geffon transferred the plane into the name of his company, Royal Sons Inc. This is certainly a plucky move, and at least potentially a neat trick. Like the pilot of the DC9, said to have escaped the clutches of Mexican justice at the airport in Mexico.

Maybe he didn't escape. Maybe he just "Released himself on his own recognizance."

A spokesman for a lawyer working closely with the Bankruptcy Trustee for bankrupt SkyWay states they can find no record that Geffon paid SkyWay for the plane.

Investors, of course, are crying fraud. (Perhaps they just lack pluck.)

The transaction is currently the subject of litigation in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Tampa. "The bankruptcy trustee said, 'these planes are grounded,'" the former SkyWay employee told us.

"But they're not there now. Strange, isn't it?"

7 X 5.5 tons = A lotta lotta blow

Among the major developments which came to light last week, one of the most interesting is the speculation in Mexico's feisty free press (so unlike our own!) on the role of high officials in the ruling party of President Vicente Fox in the huge drug load.

It had been learned almost immediately that two pilots, arrested in a corporate jet waiting for the DC9 to land, were employees of the Mexican federal government.

But the fact that both pilots previously spent time in prison for drug trafficking was new and startling information...

That they were apparently not hampered by their drug cartel connections when landing jobs flying for Mexico's National Water Commission was also startling.

The Mexican Agency they work for is headed by a personal friend of President Fox, a man who had also served with Fox as a director of Coca-Cola in Mexico.

Although the Mexican press pretended to be startled, it must have been difficult... Because this is just business as usual.

Citing sources in the Mexican Dept. of Civil Aeronautics, Mexican newspapers reported last week that the "Cocaine One" DC9 made at least seven previous flights along the same route before being caught.

If crime didn't pay...there'd be no crime

Both the DC9, dubbed "Cocaine One," and its sister ship, an identical DC9, had been painted by SkyWay Aircraft to resemble U.S. Government aircraft from the Dept of Homeland Security, complete with official-looking Seal...

Masquerading as official aircraft from U.S. Homeland Security would provide excellent "cover" for a drug trafficking operation.

"I read what you wrote about having two planes tricked out to look like they belonged to Homeland Security," stated the longtime SkyWay employee.

"Everyone working there thought, there ain't no way they're going to get away with that. We couldn't believe it. How in the hell is the government letting us get away with that?"

"They also had a half-dozen black hummers tricked out the same way," he said.

"Big seal on the side, lights and sirens on the top. Finally some local cops pulled the hummers over, and made them take the seals and lights off."

"But nobody ever said anything about the planes."

"Homeland Security been berry berry good to me"

The former SkyWay employee also indicated that government officials went out of their way to assist the company. "I was one of Skyways' first ten employees, there from the start in the communications division, and I participated in the installation at the FDOT (Florida Department Of Transportation) mentioned in your article," he said.

"The guy in charge there told us that airports in Florida were all told that the state of Florida would reimburse them 100% for any airport upgrades that had to do with security."

The State of Florida created a ready-made market for SkyWay's non-existent "Homeland Security" products by subsidizing their purchase by local governments.

Why would they want to do that?

"They got the first plane in the middle of 2003, and it was sent up to an airport in Chicago to get turned into an executive jet, with a marble bar and leather couches," our SkyWay source explained.

"They had it in Chicago 8-9 months before it came back. Then they got the second plane in mid-2004."

"They wrote it up in a press release, touting how they'd just received a big investment from the DuPont foundation. Which turned out to be bogus, just some guy at a desk in Costa Rica."

Twin airliners give you that crucial margin for error

DC9's cost money. But the twin airliners weren't being used to demonstrate SkyWay's products, for the simple reason that the company never had a product to demonstrate.

The fact is both inescapable and mind-boggling at the same time.

Two DC9's painted to impersonate U.S. Government planes were being used for an as-yet unknown purpose... for almost two years.

Like the FAA, the attitude of the DEA toward a drug trafficking case involving 5.5 tons of cocaine seems remarkably laissez faire. A call to the DEA to inquire whether the Agency had mounted an investigation of an American-owned airliner busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine elicited a terse "no comment."

The duty officer at the Tampa Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed no indication that the DEA has taken any interest in the case. Two days of phone calls to the Agency's Public Information Officer in Miami yielded nothing but busy signals.

Without Asa, the DEA just hasn't been the same

Moreover, the DEA, in an apparent effort to downplay its importance, has deliberately underestimated the value of the massive cocaine seizure...

Initial wire reports quoted the DEA as estimating the value of the 5.5 tons of cocaine at $100 million.

But news accounts of a seizure of the same amount of cocaine two weeks earlier stated that 5.5 tons of cocaine is worth in excess of a half billion dollars.

In a press release March 16, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) congratulated Ecuador on the seizure of more than 5.5 tons of cocaine in the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador. The UN said the load had a street value of $556 million.

Street value is how the DEA figures the worth of a load in its own press releases...except in those rare cases when its trying to minimize things.

The DEA's estimation is low by a whopping $446 million.

The Miami Herald owes us all an explanation

Mexican newspapers have been clamoring for officials to come forward to explain their curious silence.

"Where are the results of the investigations of the airplane seized with cocaine?" asked Expreso.com.mx on June 28. "Why is there nothing but silence?"

"How is it possible that this confiscation, as important as it is, has not been explained? When will there be information about this?"

Sharp questioning in the Mexican press is in marked contrast to the tepid response of the mainstream media in the U.S.

In news accounts of the massive cocaine bust, The Miami Herald sounded like Pravda during the height of the Cold War. They dealt with the facts of the case by completely ignoring them... Perhaps they found it inconvenient to mention--because of space limitations?--that the busted DC9 airliner was American-owned and registered.

Their story on the massive cocaine bust imaginatively placed the blame for the flight on Venezuela. They no doubt miss not having the Medellin Cartel to kick around anymore. The paper quotes an anonymous senior U.S. government official, perhaps too embarrassed to give his real name...

"The more traditional traffickers have discovered, from an interdiction and law-enforcement perspective, that Venezuela has now become a giant black hole where they have the least amount of resistance, the least amount of problems, the cheapest route to get their product to market."

America's Drug Lord Gap

So...what's going on? The Herald has a bit of experience in stories about the movement of illegal substances across interstate lines, do they not?

In fact, The Miami Herald is to news of narcotics trafficking what The Sporting News is to box scores in baseball. The paper cannot be said to be unaware of the absurdity of the statement they offer to their readers with such a straight face.

So, the answer must be something else. Something, no doubt, worse.

For several decades it has been the considered and unchallenged opinion of American drug enforcement officials that there are no American Drug Lords.

Drug trafficking into the U.S. is the province of unsavory "foreign elements," according to the DEA.

If this were true, it would be major bad news for our balance of payments deficit. We would see Senators take to the floor of the Senate, decrying the fact that America has a "Drug Lord Gap."

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE FOLKS. MOVE ALONG.

This same nonsense has kept Americans from holding elements in the American government responsible for trading guns-for-heroin with Osama bin Laden before 9.11.

The answer, both here in the U.S. as well as in Mexico, appears to be: Damage Control, for what clearly appears to have been officially-sanctioned drug trafficking.

The silence in the U.S. and Mexico is a tell-tale sign of clandestine activity gone horribly awry. The bust was a mistake.

Once again, low-level personnel just hadn't been "clued-in" to the protected nature of the trade. Because of the sensitivity, everything is on a need to know basis. This creates a continuing problem.

You can't tell just anyone.

Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow@gmail.com. The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com.

Copyright 2006 Daniel Hopsicker

*****

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5. AFGHANISTAN SET TO HARVEST RECORD OPIUM CROP

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THE FINANCIAL TIMES

World: Asia/Pacific

July 4 2006

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/cc6c18fc-0b56-11db-b97f-0000779e2340.html

By Rachel Morarjee in Kabul

Afghanistan is set to produce its largest ever opium crop, with the biggest increase in Helmand province where British troops are engaged in bitter combat with the Taliban, western officials said.

The $1bn campaign to eradicate the crop has been "an absolute disaster", a top western counter-narcotics official said.

Stemming poppy cultivation in Helmand, which accounts for over a third of Afghanistan's opium crop, was seen as essential to the programme's success.

Recent estimates by western counter-narcotics officials suggest that Helmand's poppy crop may more than double to 77,000 hectares, up from 26,500 in 2005. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimated in February that the province would see this year's crop rise by more than half compared with the year before.

For Britain, which has deployed 3,300 troops in and around the province and is the lead nation for Afghanistan's counter-narcotics programmes, the bumper harvest will be deeply embarrassing.

Five British soldiers have been killed in Sangin district, a major drug-producing region of Helmand, in the past three weeks. There are concerns that drug money is fuelling the insurgency.

"Drugs intensify and exacerbate the existing conflicts in a society," said Doris Buddenberg, head of the UNODC mission in Afghanistan.

In Taliban-held areas of Helmand, farmers were encouraged by insurgents to grow poppy and letters were sent ahead of the sowing season threatening them with violence if they did not comply.

However, corruption has also been a big problem in bolstering the drugs harvest.

"We really need to start focusing on corruption. There are up to 10,000 hectares of government land being used to grow poppy in Helmand," a US official said.

The booming poppy crop has opened up divisions within the international community.

A Nato official told the Financial Times that military officers were mulling a grace period for Afghan farmers so that reconstruction efforts could be rolled out by incoming forces across the south. "A grace period is being discussed. We have to get things done in the right sequence," he said.

Lieutentant General David Richards, who will take command of Nato forces in southern Afghanistan from the US at the end of this month, said at present Afghan farmers have no viable alternatives to opium.

To help create other options, he said Nato aimed to provide a security umbrella so that progress could be made on reconstruction, which has stalled due to rising levels of violence. The impact of "creating a secure environment in which the government and NGOs feel it is safe to restart their work ... would be felt very quickly," he said.

However, the UN has warned that focusing efforts on areas that cultivate the most poppy is not the best strategy. Boosting development in parts of the country where poppy cultivation was not the main earner "would build a line of defence against the spread of the crop", the UNODC's Ms Buddenberg said.

Since 2001, poppy cultivation has spread from its traditional growing regions of southern and northeastern Afghanistan to the rest of the country.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

*****

THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd.

Arlington, VA 22201

E-mail: consortnew@aol.com

Web: http://www.consortiumnews.com

- Tuesday, July 4, 2006 -

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6. CIA: OSAMA HELPED BUSH ON '04

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By Robert Parry

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/070306.html

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry." But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office.

According to Suskind's book, CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ...

"Their [the CIA's] assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today's conclusion: bin-Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.

"At the five o'clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: 'Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.'"

McLaughlin's comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, suggested that the al-Qaeda founder may have come to Bush's aid because bin-Laden felt threatened by the rise in Iraq of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; bin-Laden might have thought his leadership would be diminished if Bush lost the White House and their "eye-to-eye struggle" ended.

But the CIA analysts also felt that bin-Laden might have recognized how Bush's policies -- including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq -- were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

"Certainly," the CIA's Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years," according to Suskind's account of the meeting.

As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them -- such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin-Laden would want Bush reelected -- remained untouched," Suskind wrote.

One immediate consequence of bin-Laden breaking nearly a year of silence to issue the videotape the weekend before the U.S. presidential election was to give the Bush campaign a much needed boost. From a virtual dead heat, Bush opened up a six-point lead, according to one poll.

Symbiotic Relationship

The implications of this new evidence are troubling, too, for the American people as they head toward another election in November 2006 that also is viewed as a referendum on Bush's prosecution of the "war on terror."

As we have reported previously at Consortiumnews.com, a large body of evidence already existed supporting the view that the Bushes and the bin-Ladens have long operated with a symbiotic relationship that may be entirely unspoken but nevertheless has been a case of each family acting in ways that advance the interests of the other. [See "Osama's Briar Patch" or "Is Bush al-Qaeda's 'Useful Idiot?'"]

Before al-Qaeda launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks against New York and Washington, Bush was stumbling in a presidency that many Americans felt was headed nowhere. As Bush took a month-long vacation at his Texas ranch in August 2001, his big issue was a plan to restrict stem-cell research on moral grounds.

Privately, Bush's neoconservative advisers were chafing under what they saw as the complacency of the American people unwilling to take on the mantle of global policeman as the world's sole superpower. The neocons hoped for some "Pearl Harbor" incident that would galvanize a public consensus for action against Iraq and other "rogue states."

Other senior administration officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, dreamed of the restoration of the imperial presidency that -- after Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal -- had been cut down to size by Congress, the courts and the press. Only a national crisis would create a cover for a new assertion of presidential power.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda militants were facing defeat after defeat. Their brand of Islamic fundamentalism had been rejected in Muslim societies from Algeria and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Bin-Laden and his lieutenants had even been expelled from the Sudan.

Bin-Laden's extremists had been chased to the farthest corners of the planet, in this case the caves of Afghanistan. At this critical juncture, al-Qaeda's brain trust decided that their best hope was to strike at the United States and count on a clumsy reaction that would offend the Islamic world and rally angry young Muslims to al-Qaeda's banner.

So, by early summer 2001, the clock ticked down to 9/11 as 19 al-Qaeda operatives positioned themselves inside the United States and prepared to attack. But U.S. intelligence analysts picked up evidence of al-Qaeda's plans by sifting through the "chatter" of electronic intercepts. The U.S. warning system was "blinking red."

'Something So Big'

Over the weekend of July Fourth 2001, a well-placed U.S. intelligence source passed on a disturbing piece of information to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who later recounted the incident in an interview with Alternet.

"The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up," Miller said. "The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of al-Qaeda. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the [destroyer USS] Cole [which was bombed on Oct. 12, 2000].

"And one al-Qaeda operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'"

In the Alternet interview, published in May 2006 after Miller resigned from the Times, the reporter expressed regret that she had not been able to nail down enough details about the intercept to get the story into the newspaper.

But the significance of her recollection is that more than two months before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA knew that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack with the intent of inciting a U.S. military reaction -- or in this case, an overreaction.

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat on Aug. 6, 2001, with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. The CIA sent analysts to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, "All right, you've covered your ass," according to Suskind's book.

Then, putting the CIA's warning in the back of his mind and ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

Al-Qaeda's Gamble

For its part, al-Qaeda was running a risk that the United States might strike a precise and devastating blow against the terrorist organization, eliminating it as an effective force without alienating much of the Muslim world.

If that happened, the cause of Islamic extremism could have been set back years, without eliciting much sympathy from most Muslims for a band of killers who wantonly murdered innocent civilians.

After the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda's gamble almost failed as the CIA, backed by U.S. Special Forces, ousted bin-Laden's Taliban allies in Afghanistan and cornered much of the al-Qaeda leadership in the mountains of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border.

But instead of using U.S. ground troops to seal the border, Bush relied on the Pakistani army, which was known to have mixed sympathies about al-Qaeda. The Pakistani army moved its blocking force belatedly into position while bin-Laden and others from his inner circle escaped.

Then, instead of staying focused on bin-Laden and his fellow fugitives, Bush moved on to other objectives. Bush shifted U.S. Special Forces away from bin-Laden and al-Qaeda and toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Many U.S. terrorism experts, including White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, were shocked at this strategy, since the intelligence community didn't believe that Hussein's secular dictatorship had any working relationship with al-Qaeda -- and had no role in the 9/11 attacks.

Nevertheless, Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, ousting Hussein from power but also unleashing mayhem across Iraqi society. Soon, the Iraq War -- combined with controversies over torture and mistreatment of Muslim detainees -- were serving as recruitment posters for al-Qaeda.

Under Jordanian exile Zarqawi, al-Qaeda set up terrorist cells in central Iraq, taking root amid the weeds of sectarian violence and the nation's general anarchy. Instead of an obscure group of misfits, al-Qaeda was achieving legendary status among many Muslims as the defenders of the Islamic holy lands, battling the new "crusaders" led by Bush.

Back in the USA

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the 9/11 attacks had allowed Bush to reinvent himself as the "war president" who operated almost without oversight. He saw his approval ratings surge from the 50s to the 90s -- and watched as the Republican Party consolidated its control of the U.S. Congress in 2002.

Though the worsening bloodshed in Iraq eroded Bush's popularity in 2004, political adviser Karl Rove still framed the election around Bush's aggressive moves to defend the United States and to punish American enemies.

Whereas Bush was supposedly resolute, Democrat Kerry was portrayed as weak and indecisive, a "flip-flopper." Kerry, however, scored some political points in the presidential debates by citing the debacle at Tora Bora that enabled bin-Laden to escape.

The race was considered neck-and-neck as it turned toward the final weekend of campaigning. Then, the shimmering image of Osama bin-Laden appeared on American televisions, speaking directly to the American people, mocking Bush and offering a kind of truce if U.S. forces withdrew from the Middle East.

"He [Bush] was more interested in listening to the child's story about the goat rather than worry about what was happening to the [twin] towers," bin-Laden said. "So, we had three times the time necessary to accomplish the events. Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked."

Though both Bush and Kerry denounced bin-Laden's statement, right-wing pundits, bloggers and talk-show hosts portrayed it as an effort to hurt Bush and help Kerry -- which understandably prompted the exact opposite reaction among many Americans. [For instance, conservative blog site, Little Green Footballs, headlined its Oct. 31, 2004, commentary as "Bin Laden Threatens U.S. States Not to Vote for Bush."]

However, behind the walls of secrecy at Langley, Virginia, U.S. intelligence experts reviewed the evidence and concluded that bin-Laden had precisely the opposite intent. He was fully aware that his videotape would encourage the American people to do the opposite of what he recommended.

By demanding an American surrender, bin-Laden knew U.S. voters would instinctively want to fight. That way bin-Laden helped ensure that George W. Bush would stay in power, would continue his clumsy "war on terror" -- and would drive thousands of new recruits into al-Qaeda's welcoming arms.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Copyright 2006 The Consortium for Independent Journalism

*****

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7. CRIMES OF OPPORTUNITY

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RIGOROUS INTUITION

"What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them'

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

http://rigint.blogspot.com/

By Jeff Wells

"It's a hard world for little things" - Night of the Hunter

Last December, Pfc Steven Green was the face of the Army's happy news story, "Coalition forces keep streets of Iraq safe." (And sure thing, there he is, preparing "to blast a lock off the gate of an abandoned home.") Six months later, he's charged with the rape of an Iraqi girl possibly as young as 14, her murder and the murder of her family, including her seven-year old brother Hadeel. (Her name was Abeer Qasim Hamza. It seems most reports don't bother with that detail. Nor that she was a child, and not a young woman.)

It was self-evident from the moment the story broke, despite the military's insistence to the contrary, that the subsequent abduction, execution and mutilation of two soldiers from the same platoon were acts of retaliation. (There's no indication the soldiers were themselves involved, though prior to his arrest Green attended one of their funerals.) And it's just as likely that, despite the official denials, his honourary discharge on account of a "personality disorder" was intended to preempt this particular embarrassment.

A Pentagon spokesperson called the slaughter of Abeer and her family a "crime of opportunity." There's a lot of that going around these days.

Iraqi children are disappearing at an "alarming rate," many being sold into Europe, particularly the Netherlands and the UK. "However, there is no detailed information on who is buying them and for what reason." This can't help but remind me of the recent human trafficking scandal in Azerbaijan - very quietly received stateside - which saw the US embassy implicated in an operation "organized on a truly American scale," and ambassador Reno Harnish reassigned, perhaps alarmingly, to "the fight against bird flu."

There's a fractal component to the crimes and the tragedies of the United States in Iraq. The rape of a nation is more than a metaphor when it's repeated recursively in the rape of a young girl. Green and the rest - there are said to be three others accused, and more still who had foreknowledge of the attack and those who meant to cover it up - are simply the apes of power, emulating at scale the atrocities of their commanders and their Commander in Chief. And it's only the copycats, who mistake their license for entitlement, who are held accountable. Like conservative Judge Donald D. Thompson, convicted of indecent exposure, who masturbated in his courtroom during a grandfather's tearful testimony about a toddler's murder, and Republican consultant Carey Lee Cramer, convicted of abusing the child he used in a 2000 campaign ad to smear Al Gore. While, for the gangster lords of corruption to whom the system is beholden, planes will be made to fall from the sky, evidence disappear, and witnesses conveniently put themselves to death.

When Vladimir Putin impulsively lifted a shy boy's shirt and kissed his stomach last week, CNN posted it beneath the banner "Offbeat News." Now it may have been innocent, but the significance can't be entirely cultural, because it appears lost on Russians, too. (The most popular question selected for a forthcoming webcast interview amounts to Whatever were you thinking?)

Early in The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum's murderous preacher gives thanks, saying "Lord, you sure knew what you were doing when you brung me to this very cell at this very time. A man with ten thousand dollars hid somewhere, and a widow in the makin'." If he were simply a hypocrite he wouldn't be nearly so frightening. Or dangerous.

Jeff Wells is a cautiously pessimistic Canadian author and satirist. His first novel, "Anxious Gravity," is published by Dundurn Press.

Copyright 2006 Jeff Wells

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- AFIB No. 735, July 2, 2006 -

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!

END THE OCCUPATIONS!

ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!

The dual loyalists in the Bush administration have given added impetus to the growth of a messianic strain of Christian fundamentalism that has allied itself with Israel in preparation for the so-called End of Days. These fundamentalists see Israel's domination over all of Palestine as a necessary step towards fulfillment of the biblical Millennium, consider any Israeli relinquishment of territory in Palestine as a sacrilege, and view warfare between Jews and Arabs as a divinely ordained prelude to Armageddon. These right-wing Christian extremists have a profound influence on Bush and his administration, with the result that the Jewish fundamentalists working for the perpetuation of Israel's domination in Palestine and the Christian fundamentalists working for the Millennium reinforce each other's policies in administration councils. The Armageddon that Christian Zionists seem to be actively promoting (and that Israeli loyalists inside the administration have tactically allied themselves with) raises the prospect of an apocalyptic Christian-Islamic war. The neo-cons seem unconcerned and Bush's occasional pro forma remonstrations against blaming all Islam for the sins of Islamic extremists do nothing to make this prospect less likely. -- Kathleen and Bill Christison, "The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalists," in The Politics of Anti-Semitism, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair [Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003] p. 142.

Contents: Number 735

01. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [Oak Park, MI]: Israeli Assault on Gaza Threatens Wider Middle East Conflagration.

02. GUSH SHALOM [Tel Aviv]: Agatha in the Rain.

03. INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE [U.S.] Is This the Beginning of "Transfer" in Gaza?

04. THE RAW STORY [Cambridge, MA]: Methods Questioned in Investigation Leading Up to Sears Tower Arrests.

05. LOS ANGELES TIMES: State Tracked Protesters in the Name of Security.

06. BLOOMBERG NEWS [New York]: Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records before 9/11, Lawyers Say.

07. SALON [San Francisco]: Torture Teachers.

08. THE MOSCOW TIMES: Insanity Defense.

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 737/July 9, 2006

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 736/July 5, 2006