- Signs of the Times for Tue, 21 Mar 2006 -

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• Pissed Off Patriots
• Bush's Iraq Attack
• Spring Cleaning
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• War Drums
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• Fascist Fun
• Let Us Prey
• Weird and Wacky

According to Reuters, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will call today (Tuesday) for a global, interventionist approach to confront terrorism head on and win a battle over values and ideas. In his speech Blair will state that:

"This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization.'We' is not the West. 'We' are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. 'We' are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts. The only way to win is to recognize this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas in which it operates as linked and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists"

Right here, we have the core of the myth of Islamic terrorism. Blair and Bush are merely the spokesmen for the real strategists in their respective government "think-tanks". These are the people who are behind the current headlong dash towards global war that uses the myth of Islamic terrorism as its rationale. Blair states that this terrorism is a "global ideology", which leads us to believe that there are masses of organised Islamic terrorists all over the world, armed to the teeth, that want to impose a world-wide Islamic regime that eschews "religious tolerance, openness to others, democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts." So tell us, where are these terrorists? Where is the administrative center of this monstrous campaign to turn the world into dark planet living out an Islamic Orwellian nightmare?

Of course, there is no such thing. At most, as Blair would have to agree, there is a small band of fundamentalist Islamophiles who are entirely dependent on nation states for their survival, and it just so happens that the nation states that have been sponsoring such types over the years are the same nation states that want us to believe that there is a global threat to Western civilisation. In short, it is all a bunch of horse hockey, big lies to fool the people in a big way through the use of the age-old mechanism of problem-reaction-solution. Bush and Blair create the problem, provoke the reaction from Western populations, and then provide the solution.

The proof of this is evident from the lies that have already been exposed over the invasion of Iraq and the alleged threat that Saddam posed. Saddam posed no threat at all, and Bush, Blair et al knew it, yet they lied big time to convince us otherwise.

It is interesting to note that the alleged threats to Western civilisation posed by this bogus global Islamic terrorist ideology are all already on the wane in both Britain and the U.S. Religious tolerance is at an all-time low, Muslims in both countries are now being eyed with suspicion and are treated as potential terrorists by state authorities and Western civilians alike. "Openness to others" is therefore soon to be a thing of the past. Western "Democracy" is headed in the same direction, with new government anti-terrorist laws stripping British and American citizens of their fundamental civil rights and freedoms, go and read the Patriot Acts I and II and the British "glorifying terrorism" law if you do not believe me.

Under these laws "liberty and human rights administered by secular courts" will also be consigned to the dustbin of Western political history. The supreme court in America is dominated by Bush-appointed judges who share his elitist and racist 'Christian' beliefs. One need only to look at the type of "freedom and Democracy" that is being bestowed on Iraq by American troops to understand that to Bush and Blair, freedom and democracy are just catch phrases designed to lull the public into a state of complacency while Iraq is pillaged and plundered and divided up among the ravening hyenas that make up the Western government-industry complex.

Consider these two BBC reports on where the money from Iraqis oil reserves have ended up. Here and here.

As a further example of how the 'anti-terrorism' policies of Bush and Blair are either facilitating terrorism or helping the alleged terrorists to achieve their alleged goals, the Scotsman today carries the following report:

Identity cards a 'present' to terrorists and criminals, spy heroine says

A National identity card scheme will be a "present" to terrorists, criminal gangs and foreign spies, one of Britain's most respected former intelligence agents has told ministers.

The warning from Daphne Park, who served for 30 years as a senior controller for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, came as the parliamentary power struggle over the identity cards bill dragged on. [...]

The former MI6 agent passed a withering verdict on the proposed cards, ridiculing ministers' suggestions that the system will make people safer. In fact, she said, the complete opposite is true.

"The very creation of such an enormous national identity register will be a present to terrorists; it will be a splendid thing for them to disrupt and blow up," she said.

"It will also provide valuable information to organised crime and to the intelligence services of unfriendly countries. It will be accessible to all of these," she said.

Baroness Park is not the first former intelligence officer to question the value of a national ID card. Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, last year said she did not believe the cards would make Britain any safer from terrorist attack; they would quickly be copied, she said.

It is all but impossible that the policy makers in Blair's cabinet are unaware of these facts, yet they insist on pushing forward with attempts to have a national 'biometric' ID card introduced. Ask yourself, why? If such a measure has no relevance to the job of keeping British citizens safe from terrorists, then why would Blair want to impose these restrictions on civil liberties? How can it be that, while Blair is claiming that the "terrorists" goal is to destroy Western freedoms and Democracy, Blair himself is systematically denuding British citizens of these same Western freedoms?

In his speech, Blair will also say that:

"nations must recognize extremism is deep rooted - with 40 to 50 countries subject to regular terrorist attacks loosely linked to its ideology - and that an interventionist stance was the precondition for future prosperity and stability."

What Blair will not admit is that many of these terrorist attacks are carried out or financed by Western governments which is simply part and parcel of the problem-reaction-solution mechanism and designed to create the 'reality' of deep-rooted global terrorism which then necessitates Blair's "interventionist stance" aka bombing the hell out of a foreign country on the basis of the existence of a bogus threat to the West from within that country.

Can you see it? How, with the resources and reach of a nation state - specifically the most powerful country on earth - it becomes very easy to engineer a global crisis and kick-start a military rampage that could well end with the deaths of millions upon millions of people? Make no mistake, this is what is happening, right under our noses, the evidence is there for all to see, all that is required is for people to face that evidence and give up their dependency on the diet of lies and disinformation fed to them by their governments and their government's hired prostitutes - the mainstream media.

Speaking from his cell at Nuremburg in 1945 to Gustave Gilbert, a Jewish German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist, Nazi Reichmarshall Herman Goering stated:

"Of course the people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Today, this manipulative strategy as defined by Goering in 1945 is being used by Bush and Blair to, yet again, manipulate the people of the world to support a war of aggression on countries of the Middle East. Over 60 years ago, our own fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers succumbed to the propaganda and the big lie and supported a needless world war that left 65 million dead. Are we prepared to allow history to repeat itself?
Comment on this Editorial

Presidential candidates in the U.S. usually have an official trip to Israel on their agenda before starting their campaign in earnest. George W. Bush did it in December 1998 (his first trip outside the U.S.), while potential Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney did it last September (2005).

Such pro-Israel talk is music to the ears of American Christian evangelicals and Bible Belt Christian groups who support Israel's far right and are the domestic strategic political allies of AIPAC. One of their spokesmen is former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, a Republican who has made several trips to Israel and was the first recipient of the American Israel Committee's annual Friend of Israel Award in 2003. -An example among thousands of the type of political pressure that the so-called Amen Corner brings to bear on politicians is the declaration last January (2006) by televangelist Pat Robertson that the felling of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a massive stroke was punishment from God "for dividing the Land of Israel."

In order to have instant access to senators and congressmen, AIPAC supplies them with embedded "free interns."

It is not known if that type of "free" service extends to the White House. What is known is the obligation for leaders in Congress and important political fundraisers to attend the annual Hanukkah receptions at the White House.

We have an indication of how solidly fixed this system of corruption and influence peddling is, when we consider that a new anti-corruption lobbying bill being studied in Congress would outlaw free meals from lobbyists, but not lobbyist-paid junket trips abroad, for senators and representatives. -Now, many of these political overseas trips are sponsored and financed by AIPAC to visit Israel and influence American policy making.

One also got a glimpse of how things work in Washington D.C. when it was recently divulged that nearly three dozen members of Congress, including leaders from both parties, pressed the government to reject a Louisiana Indian casino, in 2001, while they were collecting large donations from rival tribes and their chief lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The latter, one of George W. Bush's main fundraisers, is presently involved in a major influence-peddling scandal.

Ever since the 1917 Balfour Declaration that paved the way for the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine, the political establishments in both Great Britain and the United States have had a special relationship with Israel. It is now known, for example, that the UK was the country that provided Israel [illegally under the 1968 treaty on Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)] with the plutonium and technology that it used to build its first atom bombs. It is also well known that the U.S. government treats Israel as its "uniquely special ally" for nuclear programs, again, an illegal cooperation under NPT.

All this put together creates a picture that goes a long way in explaining how things are shaping up in the Middle East. In particular, anybody interested in geopolitics has to be knowledgeable on how the political systems function in the United States. If you read a book by any author on the subject and the index does not include the acronym 'AIPAC', you know that the book is, at the very least, incomplete.



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The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel's nuclear arsenal on the IAEA's agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel's side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy 'step-by-step' process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: 'Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel's lawyer.' Finally, the Bush administration's ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel's strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America's proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America's relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel's armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by 'rogue states' that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America's enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

'Terrorism' is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or 'the West'; it is largely a response to Israel's prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel's nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.

A final reason to question Israel's strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from 'targeted assassinations' of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called 'a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers'. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also 'conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally'. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Israel's strategic value isn't the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel's conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, 'the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.' If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel's opponents.

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a 'neglectful and discriminatory' manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country's creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel's early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians' national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that 'there is no such thing as a Palestinian.' Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak's purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel's backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel's record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel's subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that '23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.' Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha'aretz to declare that 'the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.' The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that 'neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.'

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn't surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he 'would have joined a terrorist organisation'.

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel, how are we to explain it?

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use 'the Lobby' as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that 'the Lobby' is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either 'not very' or 'not at all' emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party's expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.

Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, 'it is routine for us to say: "This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think." We as a community do it all the time.' There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of 'perfidy' when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial 'security fence'. His critics said that 'it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.'

Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as 'irresponsible': 'There is,' his critics said, 'absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.' Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that 'the word "pressure" is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.'

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington 'muscle rankings'.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel's rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God's will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby's task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker's own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the 'smart' choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby's effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: 'My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.' One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel's interests.

Another source of the Lobby's power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, 'there are a lot of guys at the working level up here' – on Capitol Hill – 'who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.'

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby's influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff's shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had 'displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns'. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: 'All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.'

AIPAC's influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, 'it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.' More important, he notes that AIPAC is 'often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes'.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, 'you can't have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.' Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, 'when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: "Help AIPAC."'

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates 'depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money'. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more 'even-handed role' in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was 'irresponsible'. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean's remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that 'anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.'

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to 'bring the sides together', Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn't tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton's closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were 'negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag'.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis ('Scooter') Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

The Lobby doesn't want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The Lobby's perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is 'dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel'. He lists 61 'columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification'. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

'Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,' Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper's former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: 'I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.'

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel's actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston's NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel's friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a 'balanced and realistic' perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel's agenda.

The Lobby's influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings's coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre's director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo's collapse and Sharon's access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.

The Lobby moved immediately to 'take back the campuses'. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel's case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to 'vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort'.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report 'anti-Israel' activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. 'One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,' Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia's Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had 'responded heatedly' to a student's question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel's image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the 'Arabic [sic] point of view' that he thinks is prevalent in NYU's Middle East programmes.

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America's 'Jewish Lobby'. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It's a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are 'getting to a point', the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, 'where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s'. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.

The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that 'France is not more anti-semitic than America.' According to a recent article in Ha'aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim's memorial service to show their solidarity.

No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel's conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.

Israel's advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a 'new anti-semitism', which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would 'have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain', while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: 'There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.' But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.

Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.

In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel's expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the 'politically active'. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.

Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel's own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: 'Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.' The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.

The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat's leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying 'to appease the Arabs at our expense', warning that Israel 'will not be Czechoslovakia'.

Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon's remarks 'unacceptable'. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians' elected leader and have nothing to do with him.

The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter 'stemmed' from a meeting two weeks before between 'leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators', adding that AIPAC was 'particularly active in providing advice on the letter'.

By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby's efforts, but also to America's initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.

In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel's actions would damage America's image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon 'halt the incursions and begin withdrawal'. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to 'withdraw without delay'. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, told reporters: '"Without delay" means without delay. It means now.' That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.

Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president's office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having 'virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists'. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.

The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was 'a man of peace'. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell's return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.

Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration's objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States 'stands in solidarity with Israel' and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, 'now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism'. The House version also condemned 'the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat', who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.

In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv, reported that Sharon's aides 'could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell's failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush's eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.' But it was Israel's champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on 'disengagement' from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon's strategy contributed directly to Hamas's electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon's actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.

US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush 'wrapped around his little finger', the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

Maintaining US support for Israel's policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration's policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the 'real threat' from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The 'unstated threat' was the 'threat against Israel', Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. 'The American government,' he added, 'doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.'

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that 'Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein.' By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached 'unprecedented dimensions', and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, 'Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq's non-conventional capabilities.'

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. 'The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,' Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. 'Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.'

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that 'the greatest risk now lies in inaction.' His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: 'The Case for Toppling Saddam'. 'Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,' he declared. 'I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam's regime.' Or as Ha'aretz reported in February 2003, 'the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.'

As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel's leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, 'Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.' In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel's behalf.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby's major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. 'As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,' the Forward reported, 'America's most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.' The editorial goes on to say that 'concern for Israel's safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.'

Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that 'a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.' Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on 'Jewish influence'. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby's influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.

The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam's removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.

Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don't have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: 'Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,' it read, 'any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.' The letter also reminded Bush that 'Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism.' In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: 'The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,' when we finish off 'the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world'.

This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell's now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous 'Clean Break' report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu 'focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right'. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle 'are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests'.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as 'the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration', and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who 'have consciously pursued Jewish activism'. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as 'devoutly pro-Israel', named him 'Man of the Year' in 2003.

Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives' prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: 'The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein's regime.'

Given the neo-conservatives' devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn't surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was 'pervasive' in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that 'the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.' The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It's a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: 'President's Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.'

Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an 'off-shore balancer' in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept 'over the horizon' and out of harm's way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of 'dual containment'. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz, noted at the time, 'Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.'

By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment wa



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Jimmy Carter sez: It's not too late for lasting peace in the Middle East

By Jimmy Carter
The Guardian
20 Mar 06

For more than a quarter of a century, Israeli policy has been in conflict with that of the US and the international community. Israel's occupation of Palestine has obstructed a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land - regardless of whether Palestinians had no formal government, one headed by Yasser Arafat, or one with Mahmoud Abbas as president and Hamas controlling the parliament and the cabinet.
The unwavering US position since Dwight Eisenhower's administration has been that Israel's borders coincide with those established in 1949, and, since 1967, the universally adopted UN resolution 242 has mandated Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories. As part of the Quartet, including Russia, the UN and the EU, George Bush has endorsed a "road map" for peace. But Israel has officially rejected its basic premises.

With Israel's approval, the Carter Centre has monitored all three Palestinian elections. They have all been honest and peaceful, with the results accepted by winners and losers. Hamas will control the cabinet and prime minister's office, but Abbas retains all authority exercised by Arafat. Abbas still heads the PLO, the only Palestinian entity recognised by Israel. He has unequivocally endorsed the Quartet's road map. Post-election polls show that 80% of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel and nearly 70% support Abbas as president.

Israel has announced a policy of destabilising the new government (perhaps joined by the US). The elected officials will be denied travel permits, and every effort is being made to block funds to Palestinians. In the short run, the best approach is to give the dust a chance to settle and await the outcome of Israel's election this month. Hamas now wishes to consolidate its political gains, maintain domestic order and stability, and refrain from contacts with Israel. It will be a tragedy if it promotes or condones terrorism.

The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel's colonisation of Palestine. There were just a few hundred settlers in the West Bank and Gaza when I became president, but the Likud government expanded settlement activity after I left office. Although President Bill Clinton made strong efforts to promote peace, a massive increase of settlers occurred during his administration, to 225,000 [not including East Jerusalem], mostly while Ehud Barak was prime minister. Their best official offer to the Palestinians was to withdraw 20% of them, leaving 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 5% of the occupied land.

The 5% figure is grossly misleading, with surrounding areas earmarked for expansion, roadways joining settlements with each other and to Jerusalem, and wide arterial swaths providing water, sewerage, electricity and communications. This intricate honeycomb divides the West Bank into fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable.

Recently, Israeli leaders have decided on unilateral actions without involving either the US or the Palestinians, with withdrawal from Gaza as the first step. As presently isolated, without access to the air, sea, or the West Bank, Gaza is a non-viable economic and political entity. The future of the West Bank is equally dismal. Especially troublesome is Israel's construction of huge concrete dividing walls in populated areas and high fences in rural areas. The wall is designed to surround a truncated Palestine completely.

This will never be acceptable either to Palestinians or to the international community, and will inevitably precipitate increased tension within Palestine and stronger resentment from the Arab world against America, which will be held accountable for the plight of the Palestinians.

The acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and others pointed out years ago that Israel's permanent occupation will be increasingly difficult as the relative number of Jewish citizens decreases demographically both within Israel and in Palestine. This is obvious to most Israelis, who also view this dominant role as a distortion of their ancient moral and religious values. Over the years, opinion polls have consistently shown that about 60% of Israelis favour withdrawing from the West Bank in exchange for permanent peace.

Casualties have increased during the past few years as the occupying forces imposed tighter controls. From September 2000 until March 2006, 3,982 Palestinians and 1,084 Israelis were killed in the conflict, and this includes many children: 708 Palestinian and 123 Israeli.

There is little doubt that accommodation with Palestinians can bring full Arab recognition of Israel and its right to live in peace. Any rejectionist policies of Hamas or any terrorist group will be overcome by an Arab commitment to restrain further violence and to promote the wellbeing of the Palestinian people.

Down through the years, I have seen despair evolve into optimism. Even now, we need not give up hope for permanent peace for Israelis and freedom for Palestinians if three basic premises are honoured:

1. Israel's right to exist - and to live in peace - must be recognised and accepted by Palestinians and all other neighbours.

2. The killing of innocent people by suicide bombs or other acts of violence cannot be condoned.

3. Palestinians must live in peace and dignity, and permanent Israeli settlements on their land are a major obstacle to this goal.

© Project Syndicate and The Council on Foreign Relations, 2006

· The former US president Jimmy Carter led the Carter Centre/National Democratic Institute observation of the Palestinian elections in January
www.project-syndicate.org

Comment: A better idea is for Palestine to be given their stolen country back and to then decide if they want to accept the Israeli refugees from WW II IF there is room for them...

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Palestinians losers in Mideast water war - Israel Monopolizes 75% of Palestinian Water

Agence France Presse
19 Mar 06

NAZLET ISA, West Bank - Israel's vast separation barrier slices Nazlet Isa off from one of the richest water sources in the arid northern West Bank where the fight for water is a fight for survival.

Israel is believed to monopolise around 75 percent of Palestinian water resources in a region where rainfall is infrequent and water a strategic asset.
In the agriculture-dependent Palestinian territories, hemmed in by Jewish settlements, the lack of resources causes havoc for farmers, while pollution and inadequate waste disposal create manifold sanitation and health problems.

In the northern West Bank town of Nazlet Isa, giant concrete slabs 10 metres (33 feet) high -- lambasted as an apartheid wall by the Palestinians -- have left six homes stranded on the Israeli side along with the rich underground aquifer.

A special system of pipes to access the water was finally built with Israeli permission but immediate access and control has passed into other hands.

"The route of the wall matches that of water resources, the latter being conveniently located on the Israeli side," said Elisabeth Sime, director of aid organisation CARE International, in the
Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The Palestinians are adamant that the wall -- which they see anyway as a land grab designed to delimit the borders of their promised future state -- was built deliberately to siphon off the aquifer.

Israel says it was built for security reasons to prevent suicide bombers infiltrating Israel or Jewish settlements.

"With the wall, the Israelis clearly sought to commandeer water resources," charges Hind Khury, a former Palestinian cabinet minister responsible for Jerusalem and now the government's representative in Paris.

"Without water, there is no life. Israeli policy has always been to push Palestinians into the desert," he added.

Abdul Rahman Tamimi, director of the non-governmental Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), said the coincidence of the route of the wall with the layout of the region's aquifers was no accident.

"The wall cuts some communities off from their only source of water, prevents tanker trucks from getting around and puts up prices," he said.

In Qalqilya, in the northern West Bank, around 20 wells, or 30 percent of the town's resources, were lost because of the wall, Tamimi says.

While agriculture accounts for nearly a third of Palestinian gross domestic product, only five percent of Palestinian land is irrigated.

On the other hand, 70 percent of Israeli and Jewish settlement land is watered, even if agriculture amounts to barely two percent of Israeli
GDP.

"The fact that Israel confiscates and overexploits water affects every sector of Palestinian economic life and causes problems for the chances of development in the region and therefore chances of peace," Tamimi said.

More than 220 communities in the West Bank -- around 320,000 people -- are unconnected to mains water.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are therefore forced to buy water from trucks -- an expense many can ill afford -- to supplement local supplies that often fall woefully short of requirements.

One such consumer is weather-beaten 76-year-old Nazmi Abdul Ghani. Clutching clumps of soil and turning to the heavens, the grandfather of 100 is desperate. "I can't go on like this. My land is parched and I'm ruined."

One of the doyens of the northern West Bank village of Saida, he uses expensive water tankers to irrigate his tomatoes, onions and potatoes.

"The Israelis stole our land and took our water," he rages.

In the small town of Attil, at least a third of the local drinking water is contaminated by sewage and pesticides. Nine-year-old Fatima, her eyes misted with fever, routinely falls sick.

Waste and faeces from neighbouring houses run down the hill and seep through the floors and walls of Fatima's home. They slowly eat away at its foundations and emit a hideous stench.

"I often get stomach ache. I throw up. It's the same for all the children here," she says looking feverishly at her mother Awa.

Doctor Hossam Madi says diarrhoea, gastroenteritis, fever, kidney failure, infection and dermatological problems blight most Palestinian children and persist into adulthood because of poor water supplies.

"The quality of water is getting worse and worse," said CARE's Sime.

"A high proportion of new-born babies die of water-born infections. In the long run, Israelis will be affected by the pollution of water in the Palestinian territories."

In villages such as Jalbun, household, agricultural and industrial waste from Israeli settlements speed up the process of water pollution.

Tamimi accuses some Israeli businessmen and settlers of dumping toxic waste on Palestinian land in an act of "environmental terrorism".

Water supply problems faced by Palestinians are unfortunately typical of those hoping to be dealt with at the World Water Forum, which opened in Mexico City on Thursday.

The March 16-22 forum hopes to help shape global strategy to improve distribution and eradicate waste of the precious resource that increasingly leads to conflict.



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Food runs low in Gaza after Israel closes key crossing

BEN LYNFIELD IN JERUSALEM
The Scotsman
20 Mar 06

A "PUNITIVE" shortage of basic foodstuffs in Gaza overshadowed a meeting last night in which the Hamas movement was due to present its cabinet list to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president.

Bread supplies in Gaza were running out yesterday because of Israel's closure of the Karni crossing, through which imports and exports flow to and from the crowded coastal enclave, according to UN officials and Gaza residents. Israel said the closure was due to security reasons.

Sugar and oil were also reported to be in short supply.

Palestinians claim the closure for a total of 46 days this year - more than three times as many as last year - is a "collective punishment" following Hamas's victory in the January legislative elections.
There were reports last night that the United States had brokered an arrangement whereby emergency relief supplies would flow into Gaza from Egypt.

Israel has offered that Palestinians use an alternative crossing, at Kerem Shalom, to bring in supplies.

But the Palestinians say agreeing to that would mean allowing Israel to nullify a signed agreement brokered by Washington specifying that Karni is the transit point for goods to and from Israel.

That, they say, would set a precedent for the cancellation of other signed agreements as part of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan.

Mr Abbas said before a meeting last night with Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister designate, that he expected the legislative council to convene soon for a vote of confidence in the cabinet, comprised entirely of Hamas members.

Aides to Mr Abbas said he would not reject the cabinet.



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Baruch Marzel: IDF must assassinate left-wing activist Uri Avnery

By Nadav Shragai
Haaretz Correspondent
21 Mar 06

National Jewish Front leader Baruch Marzel, now campaigning for the March 28 Knesset election, said Monday the leaders of the Kadima party are "traitors" and "criminals" and called on the Israel Defense Forces to assassinate the far-left leader of the Gush Shalom movement Uri Avnery.
Speaking Monday in Jerusalem and Ramle, Marzel said left-wing activists are bringing destruction upon themselves and said they sometimes harm the interests of Israel no less than do the country's external enemies.

In response to comments by Avnery calling the 2001 assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi a Palestinian "targeted killing" - a term generally reserved for IDF strikes on terror leaders - Marzel said the IDF needs to target Avnery.

Marzel also said, "Traitors sit in Kadima. They betrayed their own principles, Judaism and Zionism."

On Monday evening, Peace Now called on Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to examine Marzel's statements for suspected illegal incitement.

"Marzel forgot that he receives immunity only if and when he is voted into the Knesset - not before. Marzel is doing everything he can to make headlines and to shock people," Peace Now said.

In addition to attacking his political opponents, Marzel also launched an offensive against Israel's legal system and system of rule.

"Israel is ruled by the junta. In the army, in the courts and in government there joint thinking, joint voting and joint decision making," Marzel said. He said the state prosecution and the High Court of Justice make decisions that cause "Jewish bloodshed." He also said that "if polling stations were placed in the Supreme Court, it is reasonable to assume that a coalition of MK Ahmed Tibi and Meretz would win."

The far-right extremist also expressed anger at attacks by National Union and the National Religious Party that he said increase the chances he won't obtain the minimum number of votes to allow him to enter the Knesset.

Marzel maintained Tuesday that polls conducted on behalf of his party indicate the National Jewish Front would secure five seats in the coming election.

Non-partisan polls predict Marzel's party won't receive any seats.



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"To Hell With All of You"- The Power of Saying No

By JEFF HALPER
CounterPunch
20 Mar 06

As the new Hamas government is sworn into power in the Palestinian Authority, we might ask: What would bring a people, the most secular of Arab populations with little history of religious fundamentalism, to vote Hamas? Mere protest at Fatah ineffectualness in negotiations and internal corruption doesn't go far enough. While warning Hamas that their vote did not constitute a mandate for imposing an Iran-like theocracy on Palestine, the Palestinians took the only option left to a powerless people when all other avenues of redress have been closed to them: non-cooperation.
Gandhi put it best: "How can one be compelled to accept slavery? I simply refuse to do the master's bidding. He may torture me, break my bones to atoms and even kill me. He will then have my dead body, not my obedience. Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done. Non-cooperation is directed not againstthe Governors, but against the system they administer. The roots of non-cooperation lie not in hatred but in justice."

Non-cooperation, perhaps the most powerful means of non-violent resistance, arises in situations when the oppressed have no other avenues to achieve their freedom and their rights. Since it is the international community, the US, Israel and, yes, Fatah, who have closed all avenues of redress to the Palestinians, they carry the "blame" for the rise of Hamas. It is to them that the message of the Palestinian electorate is aimed: "To hell with all of you!"

To hell with the international community that closed off Palestinians' appeal to international law and human rights conventions. Had only the Fourth Geneva Convention been applied, Israel could never have constructed its Occupation in the first place. International law defines an occupation as a temporary military situation that can only be resolved through negotiations. Therefore an Occupying Power such as Israel is prohibited from taking any unilateral action that makes its control permanent. Besides its military bases, every single element of Israel's Occupation is patently illegal: settlements and the construction of a massive system of Israel-only highways that link the West Bank settlements to Israel proper; the extension of Israel's legal and planning system into occupied Palestinian areas; the plunder of Palestinian water and other resources for Israeli use; house demolitions and the expropriation of Palestinian lands; the intentional impoverishment of the local population; military attacks on civilian populations -- to name but a few. Even when Israel's construction of the "Separation Barrier" was ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in the Hague and its ruling ratified by the General Assembly, nothing was done to stop it.

To hell with the United States that closed off negotiations as an avenue for redressing Palestinian rights and for enabling Israel to make its Occupation permanent. At the very start of the Oslo "peace process," at Israel's urging, the US reclassified the Palestinian areas from "occupied" to "disputed," thus removing international law as the basis of negotiations and pulling the rug out from under the Palestinians. Had international law been respected, the Occupation would have ended under the weight of its own illegality. But once power became the only basis of negotiations, Israel easily overwhelmed the Palestinians. Until today Palestinians have nothing to look for in negotiations. With the Americans supporting Israeli unilateralism, with the US veto neutralizing the UN as an effective avenue of redress, and with European passivity, they have been cut adrift.

To hell with Israel that has closed off even the possibility of a viable Palestinian state by expanding into Palestinian areas. The world ignored the Palestinians' "generous offer" to Israel: recognition within the 1967 borders in return for a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories. Or in other words, an Israel on 78% of historic Palestine with the Palestinians--today a majority in the country--accepting a state only on 22%. Israel is now posed, with American support and international complicity, to make its Occupation permanent and reduce the Palestinians to a prison-state truncated into five "cantons" all controlled by Israel. No borders, no freedom of movement, no water, no viable economy, no Jerusalem, no possibility of offering a hopeful future to the traumatized, brutalized, undereducated, unskilled, impoverished Palestinian youth.

And to hell with Fatah that, in addition to enabling corruption, did not effectively pursue the Palestinians' national agenda of self-determination. The Palestinian Authority ran its affairs removed from the people, failing to provide material and moral support to victims of Israeli attacks and policies of house demolitions. Most Palestinians did not vote Hamas (only 44% did), so the door was not closed on Fatah which, most Palestinians seem to hope, will learn its lesson from this setback.

Indeed, the vote for Hamas was not a closing of the door at all, but a rational, intentional and powerful statement of non-cooperation in a political process that is only leading to Palestinian imprisonment. Hamas, if anything, stands for steadfastness, sumud, the refusal to submit. This conflict is too destabilizing to the entire global system to let fester, the Palestinians are saying. You can all impose upon us an apartheid system, blame us for the violence while ignoring Israeli State Terror, pursue your programs of American Empire or your notions of a "clash of civilizations," we the Palestinians will not submit. We will not cooperate. We will not play your rigged game. In the end, for all your power, you will come to us to sue for peace. And then we will be ready for a just peace that respects the rights of all the peoples of the region, including the Israelis. But you will not beat us.

As an Israeli Jew who sees how the Occupation has eroded the moral foundations of my society and, indeed, my entire people, and as a resident of Israel-Palestine who knows that my fate is intricately intertwined with that of the Palestinians, I pray that such an end will come sooner rather than later.

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.



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War Drums

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War Pimping: Iran set to step up enrichment

From correspondents in Vienna
March 21, 2006

IRAN is about to run a 164-centrifuge cascade to enrich uranium, a step that would increase urgency for UN action on Teheran's nuclear program, diplomats said.
"Iran is on the verge of operating a 164-centrifuge cascade with UF6 (uranium hexafluoride gas)," a Western diplomat said, referring to machines arrayed in series, known as cascades, used to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors or material for the explosive core of an atom bomb.

A second diplomat - who, as others, asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue - said Iran was set to go ahead with the cascade work and was doing some last-minute "piping connections".

Iran in mid-February reversed its earlier suspension of enrichment work by putting the feedstock UF6 gas into single centrifuges at a facility in Natanz and has moved on to running a 10-centrifuge and now a 20-centrifuge cascade.

The next step would be a 164-centrifuge cascade, a research-level operation to learn about techniques used in running thousands of centrifuges.

The first diplomat said Iran's rapid progress in uranium enrichment might come up when the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany meet in New York today.

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The 15-member council is considering issuing a statement calling on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment over fears the Islamic Republic is secretly developing nuclear weapons.

The diplomat said Iran's move towards operating its 164-centrifuge cascade was "further evidence of the need for urgent UN Security Council action".

"Iran is making faster progress at Natanz than expected," the diplomat said.

Iran is seeking to run more than 50,000 centrifuges in Natanz, an operation that could potentially produce enough highly enriched uranium for up to a dozen atom bombs a year.

A third diplomat said Iran could run the 164-cascade "whenever they want", adding: "Don't underestimate the Iranians."



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Iran: Time To Leak - Where are the whistleblowers about Iran?

Katharine Gun
TomPaine.com
March 20, 2006

It is exactly three years since the United States and Great Britain invaded Iraq, and a little over three years since Martin Bright and his colleagues at the London Observer quietly tested the veracity of an e-mail passed to them anonymously, whilst I nervously waited to see if the e-mail I leaked would appear in a newspaper. All this for the purpose of slowing down, if not derailing, a war that many felt was being rushed into by gung-ho politicians Bush and Blair.
Looking back, we have an ever-clearer picture of what was going on behind the scenes. Since my leak, there have been more; all because civil servants are disgusted by the manipulation of truth, even outright lies.

Yet, here we are, three years on, with all the knowledge we have about the lack of WMD in Iraq, about the intent on regime change all along, about the lives destroyed, the untold misery of thousands, the renditions, torture, secret prisons and beatings-and still we remain silent about U.S. intentions toward Iran.

Do we believe that the Bush administration is too bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan to dare go anywhere near Iran? Or do we just not care about the mini-nukes, so called low-yield, ground-penetrating nuclear bombs that Bush and his advisers are ready to unleash on its next Middle East target? Even if Bush does not declare all-out war on Iran, the bombing of key installations, with or without a nuclear payload, is an act of aggression and threatens to plunge an already angered and turbulent Middle East into further chaos.

Iran may be saber-rattling, it may even have an extremist government, but so does North Korea, yet we choose the diplomatic route with them always. Of course, North Korea doesn't have that precious commodity, oil. Iran is surrounded by nuclear powers, no wonder she twitches nervously. Little mention is made of India, Pakistan, China or Israel; these countries can arm themselves to the hilt, but it is absolutely out of the question for Iran to possess sources of nuclear energy, let alone means to defend herself.

We must face facts; nuclear nonproliferation as a practical solution is defunct and useless. A blind eye is turned to those we call friends, whilst our foes face the threat of war. A true solution would be gradual decommissioning of all nuclear weapons globally-so why is that never advocated by the leaders of our "peace-loving" nations? How ironic is it that the solution to Iran's nuclear ambition is the threat of nuclear weapons? Since when did two wrongs make a right?

Truth telling and whistle blowing are crucial after a war as ill advised as Iraq-at least it allows us to piece together the facts-but it's too late to save lives. Where are the memos and emails about Iran now?

I urge those in a position to do so to disclose information which relates to this planned aggression; legal advice, meetings between the White House and other intelligence agencies, assessments of Iran's threat level (or better yet, evidence that assessments have been altered), troop deployments and army notifications. Don't let "the intelligence and the facts be fixed around the policy " this time.

Such government activities are not paper-free endeavors. It is not unreasonable speculation to assume that documents are being drafted now or already exist. As the political momentum builds towards a military "solution," it would be wrong to wait until bombs have fallen on Iran and families destroyed before finally informing the public.

I was asked recently about how I chose between the public interest and the national interest when I made my disclosure. I believe there was no choice, because in essence, the two are the same.

The Iraq war has cost the United States and Great Britain dearly, in both financial and human terms. It has cost us credibility around the world. Not only does the majority of world opinion believe the invasion of Iraq was illegal; it also sees us, through the medium of video footage, acting aggressively and cruelly during the occupation of Iraq.

Surely, avoiding all of the above would have been in the public and national interest. As Vietnam War whistleblower Dan Ellsberg said, "Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else-above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong." Don't put your loyalty above truth and the law; help us avoid this unnecessary evil.

Five years into the 21st century and there has been little but conflict and destruction. Is this how we envisaged the new millennium? Is this the future we want for our children, one of fear and conflict? It is time to turn the course of events and start building a new consensus, a consensus of peace and dialogue, of truth and understanding. We cannot and must not rely on others to speak truth to power.

There are many brave and honest individuals working for the U.S. and U.K. governments. This message is directed to you. Look at the enormous deficit your government has created, the billions of dollars used to dominate countries in the Middle East-would this money not have been better spent on education, health, communities and the environment? I urge you to contact the National Security Whistleblowers Association in the United States or other alternative media organizations such as TomPaine.com. Know that you are not alone.

Katharine Gun was a translator at the Britain's communications spy agency, General Communications Headquarters. In 2002, she leaked a top-secret memo to a British newspaper, revealing the U.S. was spying on U.N. Security Council members before their vote on the Iraq war.



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FBI weaving web in Pak to launch attack on Iran

Pak Tribune
March 19, 2006

ISLAMABAD: In order to accomplish its evil designs against Iran United States of America has established Federal Bureau of Intelligence office in Pakistan.

FBI is working in Islamabad for last one and half year. The FBI agents are working as Finger Print Staff at Inspector General of Police Islamabad Office under the guise of Immigration Wing, Weekly Pulse reports.
Interior Ministry has given proper permission to FBI agents and it has been disclosed in some circles that a Finger Print department has been set up under the supervision of National Police Bureau at IG Office.

If one looks at emerging political scenarios US who wants to attack Iran under the guise of Tehran's uranium enrichment program, these FBI agents will be used against Iran and for the time being they have been given the task to keep an eye on all such organizations and people who are working for Iranian interests in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Sources have also confided to the said scribe that US authorities also think that people who want to travel to US on forged identity might be terrorists therefore FBI Immigration Wing thoroughly investigate all such people who want to travel to US whether legally or illegally.

The US intelligence agencies have also launched a Satellite system to transfer all gathered information from Pakistan to US in wink of an eye. Whereas these agents have also been assigned another task and that is to keep a vigil on the activities of Chinese embassy.

US, which used the incident of 9/11 for its advantage as it not only romped the Islamic states of Afghanistan and Iraq and killed hundreds and thousands of innocent people under the hollow and so called slogan of war against terrorism and to restore its imposed democracy in both states.

The establishment of FBI network by US at Pakistani soil for accomplishing its nefarious designs against China and Iran also helped Washington to label Pakistan as a "den of terrorists".

When Inspector General of Police Iftikhar Ahmed Chaudhry was contacted and asked about the FBI agents and their proper office, he said there are no FBI agents at his office and only a finger print wing has been established there, which is working under National Police Bureau.

We have no idea and knowledge about FBI activities, he concluded.

When Pulse Contacted Mr Shoaib Suddhal, Chairman National Police Bureau to get his view on the FBI office in IG Office, he said in 2003 Pakistan signed an agreement with US to set up a state of the art finger prints department in the country. Initially US provided Rs 10 million and latest equipment and we have received all these things. The wing is working efficiently and has helped a lot in investigations, he added.

Mr Suddhal said that the department will be made digital from next year.

He also said that digital finger prints departments will be established throughout the country initially these centers will be set up at provincial headquarters and later these will be established at district headquarter level.

He also said that entire network will be made Online and the entire finger print record will be available Online at federal level. The entire system will be established with an estimated cost of 1.5 billion rupees. The new system, he said has improved the surveillance and investigation from suspects.



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Who is the rogue state really?

By Asghar Bishbareh
Information Clearing House
20 Mar 06

A brief history of Iran since 16th century
Iran is one of the few countries in the world that has never become a colony of any of the imperialist powers. However, during the reign of Kajar dynasty from 1795 to 1925, Iran plunged into a deep cri-sis, and to some extent, colonial powers dominated Iran both economically and politically thanks to inept and corrupt monarchs.
In 1514, Ottoman Turks invaded Azerbaijan (northwest provinces of Iran) and by the treaty of Chaldran occupying some of the area until Nadir Shah expelled them in 18th century. In 1801, Rus-sians annexed Georgia. By the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkomanchai (1828), Russia deprived Iran of its Caucasian provinces, including the territory north of the Aras River, together with a strip of land along the Caspian Sea that is now part of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Russian expansion into Central Asia continued, and finally, by the conquest of Transcaspia in 1884, Iran lost Bukhara, Khiva, and Merv.

In 1920, the Soviet Union invaded Gilan, the coastal province on the west of the Caspian Sea, and set up an independent pro Russian state. During the World War II, (1941) although Iran had stayed neutral, allied forces led by the British and the former Soviet Union) attacked Iran occupying the southern and northern provinces respectively. Subsequently, British removed Reza Shah, the foun-der of the Pahlavi dynasty from power and replaced him with his son, Mohammed Reza Shah.

In 1953, the U.S.'s CIA and UK's MI-6 staged the military coup and toppled Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mossadegh's government, which by any Western standards was much more democratic than that of Americans under the Bush -Cheney administration. In fact, the anti-American revolution of 1979 was the direct consequences of US's policy of regime change in Iran in which US brought down the democratic government and restored the absolute monarchy.

In spite of that, Bush-Cheney administration frantically pursuing the policy of regime change advocated by Israel, who has been exerting intense pressure through its U.S. supporters to launch war of aggression against Iran under the false justification of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

In 1980, the US and England in conjunction with their supinely obedient rulers, kings, emirs, and sheiks in the Persian Gulf encouraged Saddam to invade Iran, financed Iraq's war machine, and supplied Saddam with technical, logistics, intelligence, chemical and biological weapons.

To safeguard the great nation's territorial integrity and its sovereignty, Iran had no choice but to rebuild and modernize its defense forces. Despite its military might in the region and the geostrate-gic importance of Iran in the world, which stretches from Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, Iran has always played by the rule and abided by the international law and has never attempted to exploit or impose its will on the neighboring countries or any other sovereign nations for two centuries.

Iran even stayed away from reclaiming its lost territories, which was historically and legally part of the Persian Empire. For example, Bahrain Island is an archipelago consisting of about thirty-three islands situated midway in the Persian Gulf with historical connections to Iran. In the year 1521, the Portuguese colonial forces swept into the island ferociously beheading its king, and ruled the island up until 1602.

During the Safavids dynasty, in 1603, the Portuguese were expelled from the Persian Gulf, including Bahrain by the Iranians naval forces. As a part of Persian Empire, since then the island adminis-tered and governed by the Iranians until 1783, and subsequently, the island occupied and run by the British until 1971. Before the British's withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971, Iranian parlia-ment in November 1957 unanimously passed a legislation decreeing Bahrain, as the 14th Province of Iran. However, because of the peaceful and non-confrontational manners of Iranians in nature, the issue was referred to the UN for peaceful solution.

The UN held a referendum in the island for independence or reunification with Iran. Since the out-come of the referendum favored independence, Iran accepted the outcome immediately. As a result, the UN decided to allow the Bahrainis to form an independent state. Based on the UN decision and backed by Iran, Bahrain, with 70% of Shiite population declared its independence on August 15, 1971.

Ironically, the same very island is now turned out to be a launching pad for the US Fifth Fleet Head-quarters. From whence they break into the neighboring countries terrorizing and attacking the sov-ereign nations based on the fabrication of lies and deceptions in order to steal their natural re-sources, which is the reminiscent of Hulagu Khan's Mongol forces in Baghada and Kublai Khan's armada in the Mediterranean Sea.

Even though British ended its physical presence in the Persian Gulf's sheikhdoms, its influence re-mained strong in the region. Nonetheless, right after the former protector's withdrawals, US took over the region and became the new protector of the states. In 1981, six Persian Gulf Arab states, which are comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emir-ates, created the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf (CCG), formerly named Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC).

Qatar is the largest staging post for the U.S. imperial forces in the region, and became the Central Command Headquarters for the US military aggressions against the entire Middle East, and from whence they have already invaded two sovereign nations namely Afghanistan and Iraq based on the hit list, that Israeli mentor had handed Bush even before 9/11. It appears that, the hit list also in-cludes Iran and Syria for Bush-Blair future adventures.

In the recent meeting, the GCC Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Bin Hamad Al Attiyah hypocriti-cally expressed his concern over Iran's civilian nuclear program and declaring that it posed what he called a threat to member countries of the GCC, U.S., and NATO. This statement emanating from a council that has provided the colonial powers and foreign aggressors with the launching pad in their soils to destroy and occupy their Arab brothers homeland in Iraq in the past three years, and now, allowing foreign invaders to do the same to Iran.

UAE, which is another member of the GCC, who obtained the rights to self-governance from England just in 1971 (35 years ago), misleadingly, repeated his claims over the three Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf. Since they have never been masters of their own destinies in the past, therefore, it fol-lows that their foreign protectors need new bases in the region for possible unprovoked confrontation with Iran or as a part of their psychological warfare against Iran designed to destabilize the region. Moreover, in order to create tension in the region, US and England encouraging the states of the GCC to use a bogus name for the "Persian Gulf", which is the only common and internationally recognized term that accepted by the UN.

Election Process in Iran and the US & a tale of the two presidents
Had not been for the Supreme Court (his daddy's old friends') decision in Florida 2000 campaign, Bush would not be able to assume his dictatorial powers by rigging the 2004 election in Ohio in which, thousands of black voters were disfranchised, and foreign observers were barred from over-seeing the election process.

Ahmadinejad and Bush speak for the two different constituencies. While the neocons' cabal has backed Bush's rise to power to represent the corporations like Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, and Halliburton, on the contrary, working class, unemployed, the rural, urban, and religious poor voted for Dr. Ahmadinejad.

During the eight-year imposed war of Iraq against Iran, Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran served voluntarily deep inside the enemy's territory. On the other hand, during the patriotic Viet-nam War, George W. Bush, joined the near home Champaign division of National Guards in Texas architected by his daddy and went AWOL for an entire year to escape the war. Furthermore, at the defining moment and at the time of needs, the self declared war president, along with his VP, Che-ney, who is the real president did not raise up from their nuclear proof bunkers for couple of days. 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina events were the examples.

Bush's media trying to portray Ahmadinejad as an absolute dictator, while in fact, he does not enjoy the same power as George W. Bush does. Ahmadinejad is not even the commander-in-chief. Meaning that he cannot declare war, and unlike the US weak Congress who made Bush an emperor by giving him carte blanche, the real power in Iran rests with the parliament (Majlis), the parliament that in the past, impeached one president and many cabinet ministers of governments.

Even Senator, Hillary Clinton, who has backed Iraqi invasion and now supporting Bush policy of confrontation with Iran, recently, said that Bush treated the Senate like a plantation. The strange thing is that the failure in Iraq is now apparent to a large majority of American people, yet the Con-gress is acquiescing to Bush's call for a needless and dangerous confrontation with Iran.

Ahmadinejad was struggling to have his cabinet ministers approved by the parliament. For example, his nominees for the ministry of oil were rejected twice by the parliament, and the process has al-ready begun to impeach his transportation minister over the crash of airplane. On the contrary, Bush has the absolute power to appoint anyone for any posts or offices he wants. He openly, by-passes the congress and the court. For example, John Bolton was appointed by Bush as the US Am-bassador to the UN without even the Congress approval. Simply he exercised his executive power.

John Bolton the one who once said that the UN did not exist without the US. Another way of describ-ing Bolton's comment is that the UN is nothing but the US rubber stamp. In fact, the UN and its subsidiaries like IAEA is a tool used by the US to advance its policy. He is now sitting in the UN and coercing the Security Council to issue a strongly worded "presidential statement against Iran provid-ing the US with a pretext for intervention if Iran continues to enrich uranium.

During the initial confirmation debate of John Bolton in the Senate in 2004, senior Sen. Joseph Bi-den said that sending Bolton to the UN was like sending a bull to the china market.

Bush's Patriot Act, which is now almost the law of the land is in fact, reversed the concept of pre-sumption of innocence into presumption of guilt in the US making Bush an absolute king empower-ing his modern inquisitors to invade the citizens' privacy arresting them even without search war-rants. The reason for this gross erosion of civil liberties is the security of state, which is a term that has been used by all dictators including Hitler. US needs an enemy, if does not exist, the ruling party can create even an imaginary one. During the Cold War, bogyman was the Soviet Union then Sad-dam, now Iran has become Bush's new bogyman.

Exercising his executive power, Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without warrants, ignoring the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Consequently, Civil rights leaders are now monitored. Antiwar groups are under surveil-lance. Domestic phones are tapped. Mails are opened and emails are monitored. The FBI is conduct-ing warrantless "black bag" break-ins of private residences and offices, while US government agen-cies have been barred from using persistent cookies since 2000 because of privacy concerns. Police are to be given sweeping powers to arrest people for every offence, including the minor traffic infrac-tions and misdemeanors.

In the first round of Iranian presidential elections in which 62 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballots for seven candidates with diverse political inclinations. The electoral process in Iran was much more democratic than that of the U.S. two-party system of presidential election of 2004 in which each candidate from either party won about 25% of the popular votes (the turn out was about 50% and that in the US, there is no run-off election). This means that about 75% of population did not vote for Bush's reelection. Yet, Bush and his neocons cabal call it democracy.

Therefore, Bush is in no position at this point in time, to question even the outcome of elections in banana republic however, on the eve of the election in Iran, he hypocritically said that the electoral process in Iran ignores the basic requirements of democracy.

Some pundits believe that the intellectually challenged president was cherry- picked and indoctri-nated into the doctrine of Hegelian Dialectic by the illuminati to establish the world new order. They led him to believe that Bush has a heavenly mandate to meddle in the business of every sovereign nation. And therefore, should any of the sovereign states dare not to acquiesces supinely to the US unilateralist and imperial global hegemony, Bush has the divine rights to invade and occupy them by force under the pretext of what he calls WMD, Human Rights abuse, and supporting terrorism.

Despite the fact that there is no a real and visible enemy armed with conventional or non-conventional weapons who wants to attack US and that according to their own investigations, no single state or country directly or indirectly involved in the 9/11 tragedy except, a dozen or few more stateless terrorists, who used the civilian aircrafts as the weapons. However, paranoid war president and the commander-in- chief, George. W. Bush, gripped with hysteria, like Don Quixote de la Man-cha, the hero character of Cervantes, imagines himself as a gallant warrior who is at war with ghosts and giants. Yet, the GOP calls him wartime president.

Bush and his war party keep comparing their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the World War II, in which Stalin defeated the army of the Third Reich. On the contrary, neither, Iraq nor Afghanistan had the real combat armies. The Iranians had almost destroyed the Iraqi army during the eight- years war, and the remnants of its military forces were decimated during the first Persian Gulf War. As for Afghanistan, its army was made of almost militia type forces with antiquated weapons lacking air force and mechanized ground forces. Yet, the occupation forces are bogged-down in both coun-tries. However, it is noteworthy that without Iran, the US could never have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. They know that launching war of aggression against Iran would mean they would be driven out of those two countries."

Unlike the parliamentary democracy, the US president is not directly elected by the popular votes, rather based on the America's 18th century constitution; the powerful Electoral College elects the president. This flawed method of voting system opens the entire election process to all sorts of ir-regularities. When voters cast their ballots, they are actually electing the 538 members of the Elec-toral College, the ones who will really cast votes for the president.

States get one electoral vote for each of 100 senators and one electoral vote per US representative, which are 435, plus three electoral votes for the District of Columbia. It is noteworthy that the larg-est state like California with the population of about 36 million has two senators (the same number of senators for the smaller states), i.e., the state of Wyoming with a population of about half a million has two senators also.

Holy Warriors in the US & Secular Europe
In his first term, during an interview, Bush said that Iran had a history of brutality. Since he doesn't know the history and according to Michael Moore, he does not read the newspapers, or the books rather than the religious ones and so much so, he does not know even the difference between the myth and the recorded history, it follows that Bush's statement must come from the Book of Daniel. 9: 6, which says that Darius, the King of Persia arrested Daniel the Prophet and threw him into the pit of lions. Lumping Iran into the "axis of evil", he has also repeatedly marked Iran as a real threat to the Middle East. It seems that these statements emanating from the Book of Ezekiel 38:5-6, prophesizing that Iran and Armenia from far off lands in the north, are going to gather their forces to attack Israel.

According to the Guardian, a former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath recalled that Bush confessed, God, apparently addressing the president each time as "George", had told him, "Go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. Go and end the tyranny in Iraq.

There is no shortage of modern Nostradamus, prophecy gurus, and end time specialists in and around the White House. Among the most flamboyant Armageddon experts and wizards are Hal Lindsey and Pat Robertson. The former claims that he has been in communication with God since he was a child. The latter declared that during the election times God spoke to him pledging that George W. Bush would win the election. Both neocons, are extremely far right fanatics and very in-fluential figures, who are umbilically connected to the White House, and usually, what they preach reflecting the Bush's administration viewpoints.

Pat Robertson, who lives like a king, has invested millions of dollars in stock markets; and according to the ABC News, some believe that he is running a questionable charity organization called Opera-tion Blessing. A super rich Social Darwinist who believes that under-privileged Americans have the liberty to live under the bridge. He also accepts as true that all Muslims are Arabs, including the Iranians. Advocating hatred against the other faiths and philosophies, Robertson, on his private TV show, issued a fatwa (religious edict) ordering CIA to assassinate the Venezuelan democratically elected and popular socialist President, Hugo Chavez who is a critic of Bush's foreign policy.

Recently, he also suggested that Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine punishment for pulling Israel out of Gaza. God considers this land to be his," Robertson said on his TV program The 700 Club. "You read the Bible and he says 'This is my land,' and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, 'No, this is mine.'" He also said, however, that in the Bible, the prophet Joel "makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who 'divide my land.'"

Bush's former grand inquisitor, John Ashcroft once claimed, "In America, there was no king but Je-sus"? And that the Pentagon's new special ops units' commanding officer, Lt. Gen. William Boykin claimed that "the US Army was the house of God and Muslims the agent of Satan".

According to the Independent, Tony Blair proclaimed that God would judge whether he was right to send British troops to Iraq, echoing statements from his ally, George W. Bush. Contradicting warn-ings from advisers not to mix politics and religion, the Prime Minister said that his interest in poli-tics sprang from his Christianity and its "values and philosophy" had guided him in public life.

The irony here is that Bush and his like-minded advisers and groupthink, which are entirely fanatic extremists, have launched the medieval times style crusade against the other religions' extremists.

It is not coincidence that the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is one of the Bush few exponents in Europe and his troops have already joined the Iraqi crusade, defended the far right- neo-conservative Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, who originally published 12 satirical and racist cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The cultural editor of the Danish newspaper is Flemming Rose who has a close ties with far right neocons circle in US, including Daniel Pipes, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. The same paper that is now defending the freedom of press, refused to publish satirical cartoon of Christ in 2003.

The EU countries keep claiming that they are secular; however, their claim has proved to be other-wise as their national flags echoing the religious symbolism. Furthermore, the foundation of the EU is based on the Christian values. On November 1, 1993, which falls on All Saints Day, at Maastricht, the Netherlands, the 12 members of the formerly named EEC officially ratified and changed it to EC, and subsequently transformed into EU. The festival of All Saints, also sometimes known as "All Hallows," or "Hallowmas," is a feast celebrated in their honour. All Saints is also a Christian formula invoking all the faithful saints and martyrs, known or unknown. The Roman Catholic holiday (Festum omnium sanctorum) falls on November 1.

Crusaders in Iraq
As the Venezuelan writer, Fernando Baez eloquently articulates, what is happening in Iraq today is the largest cultural catastrophe since the Mongols forced entry into Baghdad in 13 century.

According to wikipedia.org, in 1258, the Mongols laid siege to the city and constructed a palisade and a ditch. Siege equipment was erected as well. The bombardment began on January, 1258 and by February 4, a breach was made. By february 5, the Mongols controlled a stretch of the wall. Al-Musta'sim tried to negotiate, but was refused.

On February 10, Baghdad surrendered, after the Caliph Al-Musta'sim came out of the city and gave himself up, at which point he was executed, by wrapping him in a rug and having him either "beaten to a pulp" or trampled by horses. The Mongols swept into the city on February 19, 1258, which began a week of massacre, looting, and fire.

Paradoxically, the brutal assault against the cradle of civilization this time around, planned and executed - not by the Mongols rather by the forces of American modern King George II who shame-lessly portrays himself as the great leader of the civilized world. The brutal invasion of Iraq took place on March 19, 2003, with indiscriminate carpet bombings. The occupation forces used bunker busters and "MOAB" bombs, which apparently, stands for "The Mother of All Bombs, aka the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb."

However, the real hidden meaning of the "MOAB" goes far deeper than what the US military appar-ently illustrates it as "the mother of all bombs". MOAB is a symbolism and a biblical name repre-senting the Crusade. According to Genesis: 30-38, Moab was the son of Abraham's nephew Lot and the name of a place named after him (the land of "MOAB") in Jerusalem. When the Crudaders occupied the area, the castle they built to defend the eastern part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was called Krak des Moabites. The name also signifying the covenant, and appears in the Scriptures many times (Genesis: 30-38; Deuteronomy 29:1; Ruth1:1, 22; 2 Kings 1:1; 2 Chronicles 20:22; Daniel 11:41).

The salvo of shock and awe inflicting bombs that went down in Baghdad resulted in mass destruc-tion and devastation of cultural and religious artifacts, which belong to the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon where according to recorded history, is the birthplace of civilization.

According to Baez over one million books, 10 million documents, and 14,000 archaeological artifacts have been lost in the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Among the world precious books that were burnt in the Baghdad National Library included the early editions of Arabian Nights, the treatises of the two Iran's great mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyam and philosopher, scientist, and medical writer, Avicena, aka Abu Ali Sina, and the dissertation of distin-guished Arab- Spanish philosopher, Averroes, aka Ibn Rushdi.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Rice said that before mushroom of cloud appeared on Washington DC, the US had to stop Iraq. At the same time, on the other side of Atlantic, notorious Tony "B.Liar" of England claimed that Saddam had capacity to nuke London within 48 hours.

England has the history of brutal colonial tactics of the "divide and rule", and its prime minister, Tony Blair who pursuing the same old dirty trick, claimed that if the occupation forces leave Iraq, there would be civil war, which is nothing but a shell game because the root cause of violence and insurgency in Iraq is the foreign occupation. It is noteworthy that in the 1920s when the British had installed her puppet king and prime minister like Faisal and Noori Said in Iraq whose regime would not last a day without the imperial forces bayonets, then British prime minister at the House of Commons was saying the same things as Blair does today.

American style liberty & freedom of press
Bush also considers himself as the flag bearer of democracy on the face of the planet who supports and disseminates freedom, and liberty. Therefore, any independent nation who disagrees with the Bush's foreign policy is subject to liberation and regime change. Just the way US liberated Guan-tanamo from Cuba and turned it into the concentration camps, which Amnesty International calls it Gulag of modern time. Just the way US liberated Iraqi oil pipelines. Just the way, the Bush – Che-ney's administration liberated the undemocratic Abu-Ghraib Prison from Saddam Hussein, the dic-tator, and turned it into a democratic torturing chamber, where, the insurgents are systematically tortured and abused democratically by the US occupation forces.

Like the Stalin's purges, the Republican presidents in the past, used the doctrine of McCarthyism to remove their critics or opposition groups from the offices, restricting the freedom of speech and erod-ing the civil liberties. During the WW II, American citizens of German and Japanese origins were rounded up and lucked up in the camps until the end of the war.

Despite its glamorous PR campaign and empty slogans designed targeting the international audi-ences, not only the US has never been interested in democracy, but also, it has used all its political and military might to bring down the democratic states and backing the brutal tyrants especially, in the Middle East and Latin America.

According to Robert Fisk, who is a distinguished journalist and an author, during the US invasion both in Iraq and Afghanistan, journalists were the prime targets, including the Western and Arab journalists i.e., Aljazeera offices were bombed twice in Baghdad. British newspaper The Daily Mirror reported that Bush told UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at a White House summit on 16 April 2004 that he wanted to bomb Aljazeera's headquarters in Qatar.

In response to the bribery scandal of Iraqis media by the US to write the favourable stories about the war in Iraq, War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who speaks and acts like Joseph Goebbels, recently admitted that they were doing just the PR campaigns and claiming that they had every right to do so. Rumsfeld has also admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact.

According to Doug Thomson, the Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue, Pentagon orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the
United States on holiday leave with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public. The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed "Operation Home front", ordered military person-nel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq.

During the election campaign in Lebanon, Bush proudly said, "Freedom is on the march in the Mid-dle East." On the contrary, some voters in northern Lebanon were reportedly bribed to cast their bal-lots for the U.S.-backed anti-Syrian faction.

Foreign nationals are being kidnapped and flown from country to country by the CIA planes under the false suspicion of so-called renditions. Recently, the head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe reported that there was evidence pointing to the existence of a system of "outsourcing" of torture by the United States, and that European governments were aware of it.

History of the US policy of regime change & snubbing international law
In 1953, the U.S.'s CIA staged the military coup and toppled Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mossadegh's government and restored pro-American system of absolute monarchy.

In 1954, CIA ousted Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. In 1961, the US-backed invasion of Bay of Pigs of Cuba but failed. The same year, CIA assassinated Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and eliminated Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, their former ally in the Dominican Republic, and subsequently, the CIA ousted Juan Bosch, the democratically elected leader of the Dominican Repub-lic. In 1963, CIA eliminated general Abdul Karim Qassim, president of Iraq, and toppled Jose Maria Velasco of Ibarra of Ecuador, and U.S. backed coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1964, the CIA backed the overthrow of João Goulart in Brazil, and covertly supported the election of Eduardo Frei Montalva of Chile. In 1965, the US staged a bloody military coup toppling the democratically elected President, Sukarno in Indonesia, installing a brutal dictator, Suharto who killed over a million people in Indonesia during his reign of terror. Subsequently, the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia supplied their newly installed military tyrant with a list of 5,000 suspected communists given to them by the CIA to be executed. In addition, the CIA supported a military coup that brought Joseph Mobutu to power in the Congo in 1965. In 1967, the CIA supported Regime of the Colonels in Greece through a military coup. In the 1967, U.S. supported Israel Six-Day War, and CIA launched the military "Operation Condor" assassinating Che Guevara, the legendary hero and the icon of the socialist revolution in Bolivia.

On September 11,1973, which was the first 9/11, the US staged a bloody coup d'état in Chile in which Salvador Allende, who had come to power in 1970 by the democratic election campaign process was killed instantly. Subsequently, the notorious General Pinochet, who had the full US backing, seized the power and became an absolute military dictator. Consequently, thousands of Chileans were slaughtered, tortured, or sent to the detention centers, many more disappeared, and some of them are still missing.

Not to mention Granada, Panama, former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, in 1992, U.S.- and French staged a military coup against the most honest and democratic election campaign process in the his-tory of entire Arab world ever and annulled the election. The Arab's only democratic election was held in Algeria in 1992 in which the Islamic parties won the landslide victory. Now, the US and Is-rael are reportedly planning to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called. The goal is to starve the Palestinian Authority of cash and international connections forcing its President to call a new election, bringing back the corrupt Fatah groups in power again ignoring the fact that Hamas won the landslide victory in the democ-ratic election campaign. If the outcome of elections suits the US corporate interest, Bush calls it free and fair, if not, declares it bunk.

While 25% of the world pollution comes from US, Bush-Cheney administration yet, does not recog-nize the Kyoto protocols. US not only refuse to join the International Court of Criminal (ICC), but also have attempted to undermine it. The Hague Invasion Act, which was introduced and passed in August 2002 by the Congress, allows the US government to save US citizens from extradition to the ICC, and also authorizes any necessary action, including the miltary invasion to free U.S. soldiers and officials handed over to that Court. The stated purpose of the Act was to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party.

Although the United States is a signatory to the 1983 Convention that prohibits the use of White Phosphorus "against military targets within concentrations of civilians," it has not ratified Protocol III, which involves restrictions against the incendiary weapons.

The cultural devastation committed by the US and the coalition of idiots is the gross violation of the Hague Convention of 1954, which states that in times of war, cultural heritage must be protected by the occupation forces. As a pattern of behavior, this convention like many other internationally es-tablished protocols, are not yet recognized by Washington.

Iran's nuclear program
Initiated and backed by the US, the idea of Iran's nuclear program goes back to four decades. It kicked off in the 1960s, under auspices of the U.S. within the framework of bilateral agreements be-tween the two countries. In 1967, the Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) was built and run by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). The TNRC was equipped with a US supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor. Iran signed and ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968.

Westinghouse Corporation lobbied very hard to convince both Iran and the US governments to con-struct at least 23 nuclear reactors in Iran. In 1975 the U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had signed National Security Decision Memorandum 292, titled "U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation," for the sale of nuclear reactors to Iran projected to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue. That time the population of Iran was about 30 millions, however, was pumping as much as 6 million barrels of oil a day, with a domestic oil consummation of about ½ millions barrels a day. Today, Iran with a population of about 70 millions, consumes about two millions barrels a day domestically, whereas produces about 4 million barrels a day. Not to mention currently, Iran's refinery capacities are far shorter than those of the growing demands for domestic refined products i.e., gasoline, which are imported from abroad.

President Gerald R. Ford even signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and op-erate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete "nuclear fuel cycle. The notion behind Ford strategy was introduction of nuclear power would both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.

In 1975, Kraftwerk-Union A.G. of Germany, a joint venture of Siemens AG and A.E.G Telefunken, signed a contract worth $4-$6 billions to build the nuclear power plant. Construction of the two nu-clear generating units was subcontracted to Thyssen Krupp AG, and was to have been completed in 1981. However, during the imposed war on Iran, the reactors were then damaged by Iraqi air strikes.
In 1995, Iran signed a contract with Russia to resume work on the half complete Bushehr plant. The construction is being done by the state-controlled company Atomstroyexport (Russian for Atomic Construction Export), which an arm of Russia's atomic energy ministry, Minatom.

As an industrializing nation, Iran's civilian nuclear power plant is crucial for rising demand for power supply and its growing population. In fact, Iran's population has more than doubled in 20 years, the country regularly imports gasoline and electricity, and that burning fossil fuel in large amounts harms Iran's environment drastically. Additionally, Iran questions why it should not be allowed to diversify its sources of energy, especially when there are fears of its oil fields eventually being depleted. Therefore, it is not sustainable for Iran to use its valuable non-renewable resources simply for electricity. Moreover, developing the excess capacity in oil industry would cost Iran about $40 billion, whereas, nuclear power costs a fraction of this, in view of the fact that Iran has abundant supplies of accessible uranium ore.

Furthermore, the nuclear situation in Iran is about more than the production of nuclear fuel. It is a national issue - it is about a country's independence, sovereignty, and national identity- it is about a country that have emerged from about two centuries of Western bullying and regime change (1953) - it is about a country that wants to master its own destiny. It is about a country that wants to be treated equally and with respect on the world stage. In a nutshell, it is about national pride.

When the sovereignty and independence of Iran is at stake, the nation has the final say. On Febru-ary 11, 2006, millions of Iranians poured into the streets and expressed their support for Iran's peaceful nuclear programs achieved by its indigenous young scientists. Their message was loud and clear. All speaking in one voice, they demanded that they would never forsake their inalienable legal right to the nuclear technology. People from all walks of life, including the religious, secular, poor, rich, reformist, conservative, young, old male, female, and intellectual were aligned behind their president honoring their scientific achievements and securing the nation's independence. Conse-quently, it is not for Bush, Blair, or Jacques Chirac to decide whether Iran needs the civilian nuclear plants or what type of reactors it should have. i.e. light water or heavy water.

While President Jacques Chirac trying to portray himself as a civilized and liberal democrat, on the other hand, talking like war lord and openly threatening to use its nuclear weapons against Iran, and subsequently, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy bluntly accuses Iran of secretly making nuclear weapons without showing a shred of evidence. Why EU in general, France, and Eng-land in particular pursuing Bush's policy towards Iran?

The answer is, they all have one thing in common that is the economic interest that glues them to-gether. As the exclusive fuel, suppliers France and England are profiting millions of dollars annually from recycling the fuels for the other countries nuclear reactors, especially the German and Japanese plants. For both countries, recycling nuclear fuel is an uncontested business bonanza and economic windfall. To them, allowing Iran, which is an emerging and potential low-cost supplier of nuclear fuels to share their profits, is unacceptable. Therefore, they view Iran as a threat to their lucrative businesses. They cannot say this openly, but deceitfully and unfairly launched a smear campaign and making it look like Iran is building nuclear bombs.

While on the one hand, Western powers formally declare that Iran has the rights to nuclear energy, building image that they are logical and rational in order to fool the world. On the other hand, trying to force Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment program used for nuclear energy, however if, Iran outsources its nuclear fuels to Russia or Western suppliers, that will be okay with them. What kind of logic is that? That is nothing but the logic of neocolonialism.

The fact is, Western powers in general and US in particular view nuclear technology as their intel-lectual property. Legally speaking, they cannot patent the nuclear technology as their intellectual property simply because if they do, then the matter must be resolved by the World Trade Organiza-tion (WTO) meaning that the UN nuclear watchdog, IAEA will be irrelevant. However, they use eve-rything in their power, including the backroom dealings, or bribing and intimidating others to mo-nopolize it. Profiteering is the capitalists Achilles heel. They do everything they can at any cost in order to make the money. No matter how civilized or liberal democrat they are, money always comes first.

As for Bush administration, Iran's threat is not for its nuclear program, but their perceived threat is coming from Iran's mercantile exchange market, which is called oil bourse. Iran is planning to open its own oil bourse, a mercantile exchange, and potentially a futures market, where traders can buy and sell oil and gas in Euros, not dollars. If everything goes as planned it is scheduled to kick off in March 19 otherwise will take place sometimes later this year. However, even before the realization of the idea, Iran is being accused of making nuclear bombs and is being threatened with illegal sanc-tions or war of aggression.

In 2001, Venezuela wanted to switch to the Euro for all its oil sales. The following year, there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with assistance from the CIA. However, the military coup failed and Chavez who was democratically elected president escaped the assassination plot against his life unharmed. In November 2002, Saddam Hussein demanded Euros for his oil, in 2003; Iraq was invaded and occupied by the US.

Shifting from dollars to Euros is not good news for America's system of dollar hegemony, which its nominal value is backed by the world daily sales of oil . Some countries are already replacing their dollar reserves with Euro in silence. If the oil bourse does not trigger a blow to the US already trou-bled economy straight away, but it will take out the steam in the long- run. The economy that its to-tal federal debts is $8.2 trillion (60% owned by foreigners, i.e., EU, China, Japan, and S. Korea), with a current account deficit of $700 billion, and $500 billion of budget deficit, with zero savings and re-cord business and personal debts, cannot sustain further setback in the long haul.

The US Senate just approved to raise the government debt limit to nearly $9 trillion, with the new ceiling expected next year, the debt will represent $30 thousand for every US citizen. Bush's gov-ernment has already spent $350 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far, and asking for another $120 billion for the current year. US allocated $450 billion for its military budget, which is almost half of the entire world military spending, and trying to resolve its economic issues by the military forces.

The US's GDP which was always ranked first in the world, slid into second in 2004 after the EU. During the same period, its total exports ranked third after the EU and Germany respectively. EU's GDP was $12,865 trillion compared to US GDP of $11,734 trillion, Germany's total exports was $950 billion compared to the US total exports of $750 billion, and Germany's net exports exceeded $200 billion (source: IMF, Germany's Bundesbank, US Census Bureau). Thanks to Bush-Cheney inept and ham-fisted leadership.

Bush orchestrated media campaign against Iran, deliberately distorting Ahmadinejad's speeches, and fictitiously considering him a threat, whereas the truth of the matter is that he was quoting di-rectly from the founder of Iran's Islamic Revolution, which is a slogan that has been there since 1979, and surprisingly, never captured the US media attention up until now.

However, Ahmadinejad has also, said, "A nation which has culture, logic and civilization does not need nuclear weapons. The countries, which seek nuclear weapons, are those, which want to solve all problems by the use of force. Our nation does not need such weapons," which surprisingly, Bush & Co. media never reflected that.

Nevertheless, during the 26 years life of the revolution, Iran has never made any effort to wipe any country off the map. It is noteworthy that the Iranians indeed, are the liberators of Israelites. That was Cyrus the Great, the King of Persia, who liberated Israelites from slavery in Babylon 25 centu-ries ago. Additionally, the great king provided them with a free of charge means of transportation all the way to Jerusalem. Furthermore, the Iranians are not Arabs and consequently, there is no strate-gic ground for any animosity between Iran and Israel.

Bush illegal covert operations in Iran under the pretext of democracy
While US and England have destroyed and torn apart Iraq with their illegal occupation, on the other hand, ludicrously, accusing Iran of interfering in Iraq, and blaming it for their failure. In fact, the US media frenzy against Iran for what they claim, as "threat" is a smokescreen used to distract the world attention from Bush's miserable failure in Iraq.

According to the Financial Times, the US military has been studying ethnic and religious tensions in Iran as part of its preparations for war. The military wants to determine attitudes towards the cen-tral government and examine if Iran is prone to the same tensions that are tearing Iraq apart. As with the planning for the war in Iraq, the Pentagon has recruited exiles to help with its survey. A similar group of Iraqi exiles told the Bush administration that US soldiers would be welcome when they invaded, and fed them false information about weapons of mass destruction. Among the exile groups that surveyed by the military are the Kurdish Democratic Party, who support the occupation in Iraq; the followers of the deposed Iranian royal family, who hope a US invasion will restore the monarchy; and the former pro-Saddam militant opposition group.

Now the White House has asked the US Congress to make available $75 million to fund a round-the-clock radio and television from UAE broadcasting false news and propaganda campaign into Iran aimed at brainwashing for regime change.

There are also reports that the US has already funded and mobilized a number of the Iranian Chal-abies residing Beverly Hills, London, and Paris in order to cook the intelligence and fix the case against Iran to justify Bush's preemptive war. Among the groups are: the monarchists mainly oper-ating from the US; the leftist elements of exile groups, including the remnants and new militants of the old pro-Moscow Communist Party of Iran, aka the Tudeh Party, along with the other communist factions operating from England; and the militant opposition group operating from Iraq. Some of the exile groups who are on the payrolls of the CIA and the British MI6 and acting like the Trojan Horses, are now operating in the Persian Gulf states and carrying out the acts of sabotage and ter-rorism in order to destabilize Iran.

Iranian's security forces have already arrested the terrorists who planted bombs in the City of Ahvaz killing a number of innocent people. According to the Iranian officials, they have the concrete evi-dence that the Bush and Tony Blair's administrations had equipped and dispatched these terrorists from their launching pad in Basra.

Iran has become the new focal point of distorted and Goebbels style Western media's propaganda, despite the fact that it is evident that Iraq has become a mission impossible rather than the "mission accomplished" for Bush-Cheney, their controlled media deliberately ignoring the reality on the ground and dire situation in Iraq. The timing of this kind of cries of outrages that are coming from the Western media against Iran raises more questions than answers as it coincides with the Bush-Blair preparations for possible sanctions at the Security Council, and like Iraq's prewar WMD sce-nario, they are fixing the case against Iran.

Bush media also keep claiming that Iran has broken the seals, and trying to trick the world into be-lieve that Iran is violating the NPT, and therefore, is in non-compliance in order to justify the American corporate war against Iran who is in fact, neither a threat nor a strategic adversary to the US. The US corporate media knowingly ignoring the fact that Iran's Parliament had passed a law last year that required – in the event the IAEA Board reported Iran to the Security Council – the cessation of all voluntary cooperation with the IAEA above and beyond that required by Iran's Safe-guards Agreement. That includes the resumption of all Iranian Safeguarded nuclear programs that had been voluntarily suspended.

Since US will never be satisfied with partial submission and she wants the total capitulation. There-fore, There is security risk involved, if Iran agrees with the non binding terms in the presidential statement (UN Security Council), which contains a demand that Iran accept an additional protocol that gives IAEA inspectors exceptional access to plants and research laboratories as this was the case in Iraq before the war. For instance, Germany who apparently was against the Iraqi invasion, now reportedly confirmed that its foreign intelligence agency (BND) who worked in Iraq before the war, supplied U.S. occupation forces with Saddam defense information and helping them select bombing targets at the start of the Iraq war.

The US, England, and Israel who possess sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy the world, are the very countries that deceitfully cooked the case against Iraq, are now trying to do the same to Iran by demonizing it simply for having a civilian nuclear plants used for generating the electricity.

The US is the only country on the face of the planet that has used nuclear bombs against innocent civilians in Japan in 1945, and mustard and Agent Orange gases in Vietnam (WMD) after the WWII.
On the 60th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Na-gasaki, new questions are being asked about whether it was really necessary to use the atomic weapons?

About 80,000 people were killed in a split second in Hiroshima. Five months later, more than 70,000 others died from radiation and injuries. Three days after Hiroshima's attack, the U.S. dropped an-other nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, killing more than 70,000 people before the year-end. Since 1945, tens of thousands more citizens of both cities continue to suffer and die from radiation-induced can-cers, birth defects and stillbirths.

Couple of weeks ago, Tony Blair said that Britain needed to improve its nuclear capabilities, and ac-cording to the special report by The Guardian on Argentina dated Nov. 22,2005, Margaret Thatcher forced François Mitt errand to give her the codes to disable Argentina's deadly French-made missiles during the Falklands war by threatening to launch a nuclear warhead against Buenos Aires. Eng-land who is a world away from the Islas Malvinas (Falklands Islands) threatening to use its nuclear warheads killing millions of innocent people just to keep its colony there.

Recently, the Archbishop of York, Dr Sentamu, a former High Court judge who fled Uganda for Brit-ain after it became clear that standing up to the dictator had placed his own life in jeopardy, is now, accusing Tony Blair of helping the US to run Idi Amin-style tactics in the war on terrorism.

Israel, who possesses illegally about 200-300 nuclear bombs in its arsenal, with technical assistance of US and England, openly disregards the international law and IAEA rules. It has constantly ig-nored almost all the UN resolutions, with the American veto in the Security Council and whose hu-man rights records is clearly questionable and has attacked all its neighbours plus Iraq's nuclear plant, and has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran with American bunker buster bombs and the German Dolphin type submarines, which acquired them almost free of charge.

Nuclear negotiations of the EU-3 with Iran
EU-3, including England, France, and Germany, who entered into the negotiations with Iran, played good cops to Bush's bad cop during the talks with Iran over the nuclear issues. However, in order for confidence building, Iran in good faith agreed to suspend its nuclear activities voluntarily allowing the IAEA to seal off its equipment until the negotiations end. Now that the negotiations ended with no results, and consequently, Iran is not deemed in non-compliance and has not violated its agree-ment with the EU-3 because the terms of the accord were based on non-binding and temporary con-ditions not permanent.

Iran, as a signatory to the NPT, plus the additional protocols has the legal right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, Israel, India, Pakistan, and N. Korea who developed nuclear weapons refused even to ratify the NPT. Despite the fact that there is no law or treaty banning peaceful nuclear research; to do uranium enrichment is legal and it simply violates the good will of Germany, France, and Britain, with which Iran negotiated a volun-tary deal about three years ago to abandon its uranium enrichment program.

Negotiations collapsed because no matter what concessions Iran made to the EU, at the end of the day, Iran would have nothing to gain. Iran has credible argument for refusing to rely on foreign countries for its energy because, in fact, Russia is not a reliable partner. Russia's game of natural gas roulette with Ukraine and Georgia is a perfect example. Moreover, the repeated delays by Russia to launch the Bushehr nuclear power plant shows that Moscow cannot be trusted as honest and de-pendable business partner.

Furthermore, Russia has the history of betrayals of its friends and allies. In 1915, during the Arme-nians and Turks conflict, Russia simply walked away. In 1938, Stalin pandered to Hitler in return for DM 200 millions of Germany's loan and let Poland to be divided between Germany and Russia. During the 1962 Cuban crisis, Nikita Khrushchev backed off. In the first Persian Gulf War, Gor-bachof approved the US orchestrated UN Security Council sanctions against Iraq. During the bom-bardments of the former Yugoslavia, the Russians did nothing and let their Slav brothers down. So much so, they simply let their former partner, Iraq to be occupied. Therefore, double-crossing Iran by Russia, which is Russia's one of a few partners and close friends left in the world, should not come as a surprise.

Contracting out Iran's nuclear fuel to Russia is bad for Iran and serendipity for Russia because the Russians want to build at least 20 nuclear plants for Iran in the near future each requiring enriched uranium fuel that will cost Iran about $40-50 millions for startup. Subsequently every two or three years, the nuclear plans need recycling again that will cost almost the same amount for each.

Iran cannot count on Russia's undertaking because after 12 years, they have not even been able to finish the Bushehr plant, which was half complete by the time they undertook in 1995 to complete it by 2001 or so. How they will be able to deliver the fuels to Iran on time for the future plants. While the Iranians are quite capable of recycling their own nuclear fuels domestically, then why should Iran outsource them to unreliable and unpredictable foreign suppliers in the first place?

The Bush administration initially did not want Mohamed ElBaradei to be the director of the Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for another term, and when faced strong opposition from the other member states then rewarded him with the Noble Peace prize in order to get him on board. As for Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN, the US did other way around. First, they rewarded him with Noble Peace Prize when he declared that occupation of Iraq was illegal, right after that Bush and Blair produced evidence that allegedly Kofi Annan and his son had been involved in brib-ery scandal in the Food for Oil program in Iraq during Saddam regime. By contrast, both Blair and Bush administrations were to blame because they new exactly what was going on in the program from the very beginning.

It seems that the US's stick and carrot tactics is working for the UN and the IAEA as ElBaradei has now agreed to send Iran's dossier to the UN Security Council and its report sent to the 35 member states, ElBaradei said Iran has failed to answer crucial questions about its nuclear program after three years of an agency investigation.

Quite the opposite, Iran has not violated the NPT, does not have a nuclear weapons program, and poses no threat to its neighbors or the United States. ElBaradei hypocritically praised the US recent nuclear deal with pariah state like India, who ignores the IAEA's rules, on the contrary, denounced Iran, who plays by the rule, meaning they are pandering to the lawbreakers, and chastising those who obey the law. This conspicuous double standard makes a mockery of the IAEA and US long-standing advocacy of the NPT. Why should Iran be treated differently from Israel, India, and Paki-stan, all of which have their own nuclear fuel recycling production?

Despite the US and EU's propaganda machine that accusing Iran of enriching uranium to make nu-clear bombs, Iran is now operating only a 10-15-centrifuge cascade putting uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas into centrifuges, which distill out enriched uranium at its pilot enrichment plant in Natanz. Iran had not yet even fired up the whole 164-centrifuge cascade at the plant. The US and the IAEA recognize that it is nowhere near getting a bomb with 164- centrifuge cascades, as it re-quires industrial-scale enrichment facilities with thousands of centrifuges, which could produce enough highly enriched uranium for atomic bombs.

Bush administration has abandoned Non-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by helping India to boost its nuclear weapons. Unlike nuclear- armed India, Pakistan, and Israel, who did not sign up the NPT, Iran is the signatory to the NPT, plus the Additional Protocols. Mockingly, the IAEA, EU, and US while are penalizing Iran for playing by the rules, on the other hand, rewarding the coun-tries that illegally possess nuclear weapons and refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty.

It seems like some countries have sovereignty while others are subject to the US political whim. Unlike the US who has broken the international laws and protocols, Iran is not guilty of abdicating or reneging on its obligations as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). Under the terms of that treaty, Iran has an inalienable right to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination. Nuclear technology is neither a patent nor the patented property nor the intellectual property of the US or EU or anybody else to monopo-lize it, and whether they like it or not, they have to live with nuclear-powered Iran.


Asghar Bishbareh can be reached at: abish61@hotmail.com



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Chavez Again Talks of a U.S. Invasion

By IAN JAMES
Associated Press
21 Mar 06

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned that if U.S. troops were to invade any Latin American country, "revolutionaries" from across the region would join forces to battle the Americans.

Chavez's remark in a speech Monday night confirmed what many in Venezuela have long presumed: that his government would go to the aid of a close ally like Cuba in the hypothetical scenario of the U.S. sending troops.
Although U.S. officials often dismiss his claims as outlandish, Chavez insists his country must be on guard to face any potential U.S. military attack. Washington also has said repeatedly it has no plans to attack Cuba.

The Venezuelan leader said the U.S. "should know that if it wants or someday decides ... to invade any of our countries - be it Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, today, tomorrow or the next day - we would be there gathering together the revolutionaries to do battle with weapons in hand against U.S. imperialism."

The U.S. has accused Chavez of trying to export his socialist "revolution" to neighboring countries, saying he is a destabilizing force in the region.

Chavez has responded furiously that he poses no threat, saying the U.S. is the one with a history of invading countries from Iraq to Panama.

He also lashed out Monday against Washington's efforts to promote free trade deals with Latin American countries. "They're making deals with the devil," he said.

Chavez argues the U.S.-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas would help transnational companies grow wealthier at the expense of Latin America's poor. He has joined Cuban President Fidel Castro in proposing a "Bolivarian Alternative" trade pact based on socialist principles rather than free-market competition.

"I am convinced that in this century we will bury U.S. imperialism, sooner rather than later," Chavez said.

Chavez addressed an audience at the presidential palace after officials signed a deal for Venezuela to sell fuel under preferential terms to El Salvador cities governed by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front - a political party that in the 1980s was a rebel group fighting U.S.-backed troops.

Despite political tensions between Chavez's government and Washington, Venezuela still sells the largest share of its oil to the United States.

© 2006 The Associated Press.



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N. Korea Suggests It Can Strike U.S. First

Associated Press
21 Mar 06

North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre- emptive attack on the United States, according to the North's official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.
"As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."

Last week, the communist country warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike, saying it would strengthen its war footing before joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises scheduled for this weekend.

The spokesman also said it would be a "wise" step for the United States to cooperate on nuclear issues with North Korea in the same way it does with India.

Earlier this month, President Bush signed an accord in India that would open some of its atomic reactors to international inspections in exchange for U.S. nuclear know-how and atomic fuel.

The accord was reached even though New Delhi has not signed the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North Korea has withdrawn from the treaty.



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Pocket Protector Parade

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Rewriting The Science - there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear

60 Minutes
CBS
19 Mar 06

As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway.

Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.

But he didn't hold back speaking to Pelley, telling 60 Minutes what he knows.
Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says: "Or they're censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I'm allowed to say it."

What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea.

Is it fair to say at this point that humans control the climate? Is that possible?

"There's no doubt about that, says Hansen. "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."

Those human changes, he says, are driven by burning fossil fuels that pump out greenhouse gases like CO2, carbon dioxide. Hansen says his research shows that man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable. He says the White House is blocking that message.

"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.

Restrictions like this e-mail Hansen's institute received from NASA in 2004. "… there is a new review process … ," the e-mail read. "The White House (is) now reviewing all climate related press releases," it continued.

Why the scrutiny of Hansen's work? Well, his Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the source of respected but sobering research on warming. It recently announced 2005 was the warmest year on record. Hansen started at NASA more than 30 years ago, spending nearly all that time studying the earth. How important is his work? 60 Minutes asked someone at the top, Ralph Cicerone, president of the nation's leading institute of science, the National Academy of Sciences.

"I can't think of anybody who I would say is better than Hansen. You might argue that there's two or three others as good, but nobody better," says Cicerone.

And Cicerone, who's an atmospheric chemist, said the same thing every leading scientist told 60 Minutes.

"Climate change is really happening," says Cicerone.

Asked what is causing the changes, Cicernone says it's greenhouse gases: "Carbon dioxide and methane, and chlorofluorocarbons and a couple of others, which are all - the increases in their concentrations in the air are due to human activities. It's that simple."

But if it is that simple, why do some climate science reports look like they have been heavily edited at the White House? With science labeled "not sufficiently reliable." It's a tone of scientific uncertainty the president set in his first months in office after he pulled out of a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future," President Bush said in 2001, speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House. "We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it."

Annoyed by the ambiguity, Hansen went public a year and a half ago, saying this about the Bush administration in a talk at the University of Iowa: "I find a willingness to listen only to those portions of scientific results that fit predetermined inflexible positions. This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster."

Since then, NASA has been keeping an eye on Hansen. NASA let Pelley sit down with him but only with a NASA representative taping the interview. Other interviews have been denied.

"I object to the fact that I'm not able to freely communicate via the media," says Hansen. "National Public Radio wanted to interview me and they were told they would need to interview someone at NASA headquarters and the comment was made that they didn't want Jim Hansen going on the most liberal media in America. So I don't think that kind of decision should be made on that kind of basis. I think we should be able to communicate the science."

Politically, Hansen calls himself an independent and he's had trouble with both parties. He says, from time to time, the Clinton administration wanted to hear warming was worse that it was. But Hansen refused to spin the science that way.

"Should we be simply doing our science and reporting it rigorously, or to what degree the administration in power has the right to assume that you should be a spokesman for the administration?" asks Hansen. "I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can."

Dozens of federal agencies report science but much of it is edited at the White House before it is sent to Congress and the public. It appears climate science is edited with a heavy hand. Drafts of climate reports were co-written by Rick Piltz for the federal Climate Change Science Program. But Piltz says his work was edited by the White House to make global warming seem less threatening.

"The strategy of people with a political agenda to avoid this issue is to say there is so much to study way upstream here that we can't even being to discuss impacts and response strategies," says Piltz. "There's too much uncertainty. It's not the climate scientists that are saying that, its lawyers and politicians."

Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet."

Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.

Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality."

Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney."

Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.

Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes "may be undergoing change." "Uncertainty" becomes "significant remaining uncertainty." One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.

"He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout."

In a report, Piltz says Cooney added this line "… the uncertainties remain so great as to preclude meaningfully informed decision making. …" References to human health are marked out. 60 Minutes obtained the drafts from the Government Accountability Project. This edit made it into the final report: the phrase "earth may be" undergoing change made it into the report to Congress. Piltz says there wasn't room at the White House for those who disagreed, so he resigned.

"Even to raise issues internally is immediately career limiting," says Piltz. "That's why you will find not too many people in the federal agencies who will speak freely about all the things they know, unless they're retired or unless they're ready to resign."

Jim Hansen isn't retiring or resigning because he believes earth is nearing a point of no return. He urged 60 Minutes to look north to the arctic, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world. When 60 Minutes visited Greenland this past August, we saw for ourselves the accelerating melt of the largest ice sheet in the north.

"Here in Greenland about 15 years ago the ice sheet extended to right about where I'm standing now, but today, its back there, between those two hills in the shaded area. Glaciologists call this a melt stream but, these days, its a more like a melt river," Pelley said, standing at the edge of Greenland's ice sheet.

The Bush administration doesn't deny global warming or that man plays a role. The administration is spending billions of dollars on climate research. Hansen gives the White House credit for research but says what's urgent now is action.

"We have to, in the next 10 years, get off this exponential curve and begin to decrease the rate of growth of CO2 emissions," Hansen explains. "And then flatten it out. And before we get to the middle of the century, we've got to be on a declining curve.

"If that doesn't happen in 10 years, then I don't think we can keep global warming under one degree Celsius and that means we're going to, that there's a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets. It will be a situation that is out of our control."

But that's not a situation you'll find in one federal report submitted for review. Government scientists wanted to tell you about the ice sheets, but before a draft of the report left the White House, the paragraph on glacial melt and flooding was crossed out and this was added: "straying from research strategy into speculative findings and musings here."

Hansen says his words were edited once during a presentation when a top official scolded him for using the word danger.

"I think we know a lot more about the tipping points," says Hansen. "I think we know about the dangers of even a moderate degree of additional global warming about the potential effects in the arctic about the potential effects on the ice sheets."

"You just used that word again that you're not supposed to use - danger," Pelley remarks.

"Yeah. It's a danger," Hansen says.

For months, 60 Minutes had been trying to talk with the president's science advisor. 60 Minutes was finally told he would never be available. Phil Cooney, the editor at the Council on Environmental Quality didn't return 60 Minutes' calls. In June, he left the White House and went to work for Exxon Mobil.




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Ancient Sarcophagus Unearthed in Cyprus

By GEORGE PSYLLIDES
Associated Press
21 Mar 06

NICOSIA, Cyprus A 2,500-year-old sarcophagus with vivid color illustrations from Homer's epics has been discovered in western Cyprus, archaeologists said Monday.

Construction workers found the limestone sarcophagus last week in a tomb near the village of Kouklia, in the coastal Paphos area. The tomb, which probably belonged to an ancient warrior, had been looted during antiquity.
"The style of the decoration is unique, not so much from an artistic point of view, but for the subject and the colors used," said Pavlos Flourentzos, director of the island's antiquities department.

Only two similar sarcophagi have ever been discovered in Cyprus before. One is housed in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other in the British Museum in London, but their colors are more faded, Flourentzos said.

Flourentzos said the coffin _ painted in red, black and blue on a white background _ dated to 500 B.C., when Greek cultural influence was gaining a firm hold on the eastern Mediterranean island. Pottery discovered in the tomb is expected to provide a precise date.

Experts believe the ornate decoration features the hero Ulysses in scenes from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey _ both hugely popular throughout the Greek world.

In one large painting, Ulysses and his comrades escape from the blind Cyclops Polyphemos' cave, hidden under a flock of sheep. Another depicts a battle between Greeks and Trojans from the Iliad.

Archeologists think the scenes hint at the status of the coffin's occupant.

"Why else take these two pieces from Homer and why deal with Ulysses? Maybe this represents the dead person's character _ who possibly was a warrior," Flourentzos said.

Other drawings depict a figure carrying a seriously injured or dead man and a lion fighting a wild boar under a tree. These are not believed to be linked with Homer's poems.

Reflecting a long oral tradition loosely based on historic events, Homer's epics were probably composed around 800 B.C. and written down in the 6th century B.C.

The tomb was found in an area containing several ancient cemeteries which belonged to the nearby town of Palaepaphos, 11 miles inland from modern Paphos.

First settled around 2800 B.C., Palaepaphos was the site of a temple of Aphrodite _ the ancient goddess of beauty who, according to mythology, was born in the sea off Paphos.



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Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

Lee Dye
March 20, 2006

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.
McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

"This is real," he says.

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren't a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started.

"We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh.

His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong - or at least incomplete.

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

"Here's a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all," McGaugh says.

That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.

But she did.

"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.

"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she "just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang."

She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.

"I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn't even remember what year I had gone to Germany," he says.

That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.

AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place.

"So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it."

Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

She is also quite different from savants who have surfaced from time to time with extraordinary abilities in music, art or memory.

"Some of them can remember every single detail about the particular hobby that they have, such as baseball or calendars or art, but they are very narrow," he says. McGaugh described one person who could memorize a piece of music instantly, and not forget it, but who "couldn't make change or couldn't take a bus because he didn't know where he was."

By contrast, AJ is a " fully functioning person," McGaugh says.

The researchers are preparing to take their work in a new direction in hopes of understanding what is going on here. It's possible AJ's brain is wired differently, and that may show up through magnetic resonance imaging. Testing is expected to begin within six months.

"We will be looking at her brain, using brain scanning techniques, to see if there's anything that is dramatically different that we can point to," McGaugh says.

Those of us with normal, very fallible memories function somewhat like a computer in that different areas of our brains are interconnected and thus better-suited for general memories. We know where we live and how to get to work, but we may not know what the weather was like on this date four years ago.

It's possible that AJ's brain has some "disconnections" that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.

So unique, in fact, that the Irvine team has given her condition a new name. They call it hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis for "remembering" and hyper, meaning "more than normal."

Some day, the researchers say, they hope to know what's different about AJ's brain, but they are still a ways off.

"In order to explain a phenomenon you have to first understand the phenomenon," McGaugh says. "We're at the beginning."



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Mayan underworld proves researchers' dream

Mar 20, 2006 — By Tim Gaynor

TULUM, Mexico (Reuters) - The ancient Maya once believed that Mexico's jungle sinkholes containing crystalline waters were the gateway to the underworld and the lair of a surly rain god who had to be appeased with human sacrifices.

Now, the "cenotes," deep sinkholes in limestone that have pools at the bottom, are yielding scientific discoveries including possible life-saving cancer treatments.
Now, the "cenotes," deep sinkholes in limestone that have pools at the bottom, are yielding scientific discoveries including possible life-saving cancer treatments.

Divers are dipping into the cenotes, which stud the Yucatan peninsula, to explore a vast underground river system.

Hefting air tanks, guidelines and waterproof lamps, they have so far mapped 405 miles of channels that form part of a huge subterranean river delta flowing into the Caribbean sea, and they are only just starting.

Scientists investigating the network of caverns and galleries, formed by rainwater passing through porous limestone, have found a wealth of early archeological relics and prehistoric animal bones.

They also have identified dozens of new aquatic species specially adapted to extreme environmental conditions which could have medical applications.

In the Riviera Maya, a strip of Caribbean tourist resorts including the world-famous archeological site of Tulum, there are more than 500 cenotes. Some are open to the jungle, while others have tiny eye-like holes letting in sunlight and jungle roots.

Their waters have filtered through sponge-like limestone which leaves them so transparent that divers say they feel like they are floating in space. The pools range in depth from a few feet (a meter) to an abyss where explorers have still not touched bottom at over 500 feet.

"It is proving to be a totally unique environment," said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University. "We are finding things down there including forms of life that no one had ever guessed existed, and there is a lot more work to be done."

BLIND FISH AND MAMMOTHS

The Yucatan sits on a limestone plateau where rainwater percolates down to nonporous rock below ground. Over millions of years, underground river systems have formed that flow out to the sea through caves.

The region's 7,000 to 8,000 cenotes were formed when caves collapsed in on themselves. The resulting sinkholes became a vital water source and a focus for Mayan sacrifices to honor Chac, the volatile, crocodile-like rain deity.

In recent years, biologists delving into the underlying river systems, which unlike the sinkholes are jet-black because of the lack of sunlight, have identified 40 entirely new species, mostly blind shrimps and fish which have adapted to life in the system's harsh conditions, where dissolved oxygen and food are scarce.

Among the startling discoveries are microorganisms that live in the transitional zone where the fresh water rivers flow out into the Caribbean, and salt-water sponges which may contain anti-tumor compounds.

"Research is at an early stage, but it is quite possible that the bacteria and sponges may have potential biomedical applications including cures for cancer," Iliffe told Reuters in a telephone interview. "There is a great deal of scientific excitement about it."

Other finds made by divers roaming the deep, dark corridors include the bones of giant jungle sloths, rabbits and even mammoths dating back beyond the last Ice Age.

"When you come up and tell people there are elephants down there they really think you've gone crazy," said Sam Meacham, an underwater explorer and conservationist.

THREATENED BY DEVELOPMENT

In the past three decades the population of the Riviera Maya has soared 10-fold to close to 1 million people, as tourists from the United States, Europe and Mexico flock to the palm-fringed strip to soak up the sun.

Environmentalists say that the explosive development has been only patchily regulated and warn that waste produced by resort hotels and service towns in the area is already polluting the complex underground oasis.

"It's totally the Wild West, when what is needed is carefully planned, sustainable development," said Meacham, who runs the Quintana Roo Water Systems Research Center, a local non-profit group that raises consciousness about water issues in schools.

Water conservation will be a key issue when ministers, hydrologists and environmentalists from around the world meet at the World Water Forum in Mexico City from March 16-22.

Meacham says human sewage is pumped deep underground, and that at least one water system in the Yucatan has been polluted with fecal matter. The impact of 250 tonnes of trash dumped in landfills each day has yet to be evaluated.

The hundreds of tourists who dive and snorkel each day in any of a dozen cenotes and caves open to the public are also unwittingly destroying the ecosystems before they can be properly understood, Iliffe says.

"Fish are following the divers into the caves and they gobble up all the life, and they (the caves) are left biologically sterile," he said.

"When you consider that they could possibly lead to a cure for cancer, it is essential to conserve them."



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NASA Halts Kennedy Space Center Operations After Accidents

Matthew Borghese
All Headline News
March 20, 2006

Cape Canaveral, Florida (AHN) - NASA is halting shuttle launch preparation at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) after a series of recent accidents.

KSC Director Jim Kennedy stopped work on NASA's three-orbiter shuttle fleet and International Space Station (ISS) components after a small fire at the Vehicle Assembly Building, among other problems.

Kennedy says, "We must stop, in their tracks, the chain of events that led me to call for this safety stand-down."

Kennedy says that the small fire "could have been catastrophic," where two fully fueled shuttle solid rocket boosters were stacked.

Kennedy calls the accidents "a threat to successfully accomplishing our mission - the launching of astronauts and payloads into space."

"We understand that incidents may occur, but a major mishap could result in losing the confidence of the American people."

According to Kennedy, the accidents "could derail NASA's plans to complete the International Space Station and begin exploration of the moon, Mars and beyond."




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Around the World

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Blair wants battle of ideas with terrorists

Reuters
21 Mar 06

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday will call for a global, interventionist approach to confront terrorism head on and win a battle over values and ideas.

"This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization," Blair will say in a speech this afternoon, according to extracts released by his official spokesman.
"'We' is not the West. 'We' are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. 'We' are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts," he will say.

The speech, due to be given at a Reuters Newsmaker event, is the first of three that Blair plans to deliver on terrorism and the significance of Iraq and Afghanistan. The second will be given in Australia and the third in the United States.

"The only way to win is to recognize this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas in which it operates as linked and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists," the speech will say.

Blair will say a belief in an "activist approach" to foreign policy, based on values and interests, is the theme underlying the government's approach to issues from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, to climate change and poverty in Africa.

Blair's spokesman played down fears the speech might ring alarm bells in Iran, which is locked in a battle of wills with the United States and Europe over its nuclear program.

"On Iran, we are engaged in an activist, interventionist approach. It isn't just sitting back waiting for Iran, it is trying to enforce through diplomacy," the spokesman said.

Blair will contrast his approach with one he calls the "doctrine of benign activity," a doctrine he says sees setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan as a reason why Saddam Hussein and the Taliban should have been left in place.

"The terrorists know that if they are to succeed either in Iraq or Afghanistan or indeed Lebanon or anywhere else wanting to go the democratic route, then the choice of a modern future for the Arab or Muslim world is dealt a potentially mortal blow," Blair will say.

"Likewise if they fail and those countries become democracies and make progress, then not merely is that a blow against their whole value system but it is the most effective message against their wretched propaganda about America, the West and the rest of the world."

Blair said nations must recognize extremism is deep rooted -- with 40 to 50 countries subject to regular terrorist attacks loosely linked to its ideology -- and that an interventionist stance was the precondition for future prosperity and stability.

© Copyright Reuters Ltd.



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Protesters defy Belarus authorities for third day of rallies against election

06:36:55 EST Mar 21, 2006
YURAS KARMANAU


MINSK, Belarus (AP) - Temperatures plunged. Then it began snowing. But when dawn broke Tuesday in Belarus, they were still there - a few hundred determined demonstrators huddled around a dozen small tents on Minsk's central square.

The protesters are trying to mimic techniques that worked in neighbouring Ukraine, where crowds of 100,000 or more jammed the centre of the capital for weeks in December 2004, forcing a rerun of a flawed presidential election.
But their diminishing numbers suggested the opposition was losing momentum in its drive to overturn President Alexander Lukashenko's overwhelming victory on Sunday, despite support from the United States and the European Union.

International observers said the vote fell short of democratic standards, and Europe's main human rights organization denounced it as a farce. Washington called for a new election.

On Sunday night an estimated 10,000 people had poured into Oktyabrskaya Square to register their outrage - a demonstration extraordinary for its size and for the restraint shown by police. The former Soviet republic is a tightly controlled country where police have cracked down swiftly on unsanctioned opposition gatherings.

Leaders called on them to return to the square Monday evening, but only about 5,000 heeded the call. By midnight their numbers had fallen to a few hundred.

"What happened last night will be in history books," the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, told the shivering protesters early Tuesday.

"We are here, and we have begun the true struggle for freedom, truth and justice," he said, urging supporters to stick it out.

During the night the protesters formed a human chain around a dozen small tents they set up in the square, locking arms to protect the tiny encampment. Others tried to bring in blankets, food and hot beverages to help them endure their vigil in freezing temperatures but were often detained by police.

"I believe that the repression will not stop us," said Olena Savina, 21, a journalism student who said police detained her for about an hour and took away the bread, sausages and sleeping mats she was bringing to the square. "I believe that there will be more and more of us."

Milinkevich has called Lukashenko an "illegal, illegitimate president," describing his official vote tally as "monstrously inflated." Backing his appeal for a new vote, the United States hinted it might impose travel restrictions on Belarusian leaders.

"The United States will continue to stand with the people of Belarus," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, congratulated Lukashenko and said the results would help strengthen the alliance of the two ex-Soviet countries.

Milinkevich said two top opposition figures, United Civil Party leader Anatoly Lebedko and his deputy, Alexander Dobrovolsky, were detained early Tuesday.

Andrei Denko, head of a leading opposition newspaper called Nasha Niva, was detained by police after he got off a bus by the square Tuesday morning.

Three Georgian citizens, including a diplomat, were detained late Monday in Belarus and were likely to be deported, Georgian legislator Givi Targamadze said in Tbilisi.

Belarusian authorities claimed before the vote that Georgians including Targamadze were involved in an alleged election-day terror plot aimed at overthrowing the government - accusations widely dismissed as scare tactics.

The Belarusian Interior Ministry said it could not immediately confirm the detentions.



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Demonstrator still in coma, police deny responsibility

PARIS, March 21, 2006 (AFP)

A demonstrator who was hospitalised after Saturday's disturbances in Paris over the French government's youth jobs plan remained in a coma on Tuesday, as a row broke out over how he received his injuries.

Cyril Ferez, a 39 year-old member of the SUD PTT union, was trampled underfoot in a charge by police against rioters in the Place de la Nation, according to the union.
"The attitude of the police was particularly scandalous. Having resorted to significant violence during the demonstration, the forces of law and order refused to call for first aid as Cyril was lying on the ground in an obviously serious state," SUD PTT said.

But a paramedic from the CRS riot police said that Ferez had told him his injuries were inflicted by other demonstrators.

In a deposition to an official investigation into the incident, the paramedic said Ferez was "in a semi-conscious state with multiple facial bruising" and that he appeared to have consumed alcohol.

In the ambulance which took them to hospital Ferez "realised we were keen to get to the exact truth and he admitted he had had an argument with other demonstrators who had attacked him", the unnamed paramedic said.

But SUD PTT said "once again the General Services Inspectorate (investigating authority) and the government are trying to cover up a police blunder".

Tens of thousands of people attended Saturday's protest march, which was peaceful until the end, when groups of masked men began throwing projectiles at police and setting fire to vehicles. Police responded with tear gas and baton charges.



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Kadhafi says Saddam still legitimate Iraqi leader, government illegal

Agence France Presse
20 Mar 06

ROME - Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi said Saddam Hussein should still be considered Iraq's legal president and the current government illegitimate as it was elected under an occupation regime.

In an interview with the Italian Sky TG24 television channel, he slammed the practice of sending in troops to get rid of heads of state, saying that by that theory he could be next.

Kadhafi said that "Saddam Hussein cannot be tried because he is a prisoner of war and under the Geneva Convention should be released at the end of hostilities.
"Saddam is still to be considered the legal president of Iraq because he was not overthrown by the people but by the occupation forces."

"It is dangerous to send troops to eliminate heads of state who are not appreciated, because tomorrow it could be the turn of Castro, Kadhafi or Mugabe, or even China and North Korea," he said, referring to Cuban President Fidel Castro and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

"The invasion of Iraq was not justified because Saddam had already abandoned weapons of mass destruction," Kadhafi added, referring to the main US pretext for invading Iraq three years ago.

He said that the United States should get out of Iraq in its own interest "because the Iraqis are no longer afraid of the Americans so that the murder of US soldiers has become routine."

Libya and the United States resumed direct diplomatic relations in June 2004 -- after a gap of 24 years which saw US planes bomb Tripoli in 1986 -- following Kadhafi's announcement of a programme to destroy his weapons of mass destruction.

© Copyright Agence France-Presse.



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Back in the USA

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Baker's Latest Assignment; tell Bush we lost

By Mike Whitney
Information Clearing House
20 Mar 06

The cracks and fissures are finally beginning to appear in Fortress Bush. The AP is reporting that Congress quietly appointed an "Iraq Study Group" headed by James A. Baker to "assess the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and political and economic developments in the troubled country". In other words, Baker has been picked to tell Bush that the war is over; we lost.

The group was voted into being with little fanfare to spare the White House any unnecessary embarrassment, but the message is clear; the adults are finally stepping in. The war has been so appallingly mismanaged that jittery American elites are forcing themselves back into the policy-making apparatus.
The group is led by Bush-family friend and consigliore, James Baker who helped the president squeak-by in election 2000 by convincing the Supreme Court that his client (George Bush) would suffer "irreparable harm" if the legally cast Florida ballots were counted. Now, Baker has returned, leading a team of disgruntled government big-wigs and policy-wonks to see if they can extricate the recalcitrant executive from his Babylon folly. The move illustrates the widening chasm between American elites and the White House over the bungled handling of the war. In the last two weeks, die-hard conservatives William Buckley and Francis Fukuyama "bailed out" decrying the present policy as a failure and urging the administration to change course.

Just days ago, Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy giant and master of American-style Realpolitik, added his voice to the growing chorus of nay-sayers; opining that it was time for the withdrawal of American troops. It is unlikely that Buckley, Fukuyama, or Brzezinski would concede defeat if it was just a matter of wiping out another 100,000 Iraqis or so. Their judgment is predicated on the simple fact that the U.S. will not win.

The newly-formed Baker group consists of political insiders and powerbrokers who typically work behind the scenes to guide the ship of state in a corporate-friendly direction. Members include former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, head of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Lee Hamilton, former CIA Director Robert Gates, former Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan, former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Senator of Virginia Chuck Robb, and Former Senator of Wyoming Alan Simpson.

Traditionally, the real power in Washington derives from a core of elites who hale from the various think-tanks and semi-secret organizations (particularly the 4,200 member Council on Foreign Relations CFR) that provide the financial support for congressional campaigns and political maneuvering. This new commission represents a departure from their normal modus operandi of working behind the scenes. That implies that the situation is graver than we think. Baker would never humiliate the president unless the plutocrats were running scared, but Bush has given them little choice. The deteriorating situation in Iraq and the thickheaded disregard for differing opinions has raised the level of angst among Baker's friends and precipitated a major crisis.

The group is put together to look like a "fact-finding" mission, but it's not hard to figure out what's going on. All of the members are well-connected with contacts on ground in Iraq as well as in the military. They know what is going on in Iraq; it's a mess, that's why they have decided to break with precedent and jump in headfirst.

The group will probably produce a document that will tell the nation that the 'war has been lost' and we should prepare to leave immediately. There's no telling what the media's response will be. Some will see it as a conspiracy by panicky Americans Mandarins who want to wrest power from the small cadres of fanatics and neocons that surround the president. In fact, that is exactly the case.

In just six years Bush has enraged enemies, alienated allies, increased terrorism, eviscerated America's moral authority, and savaged the military. In fact, military equipment is deteriorating at five times the normal rate and many soldiers are now headed for their forth tour in Iraq. Baker knows that this situation is not sustainable.

He'll try to pile up enough facts to make his case before the American people hoping administration die-hards will see the light. It won't be easy.

It's likely that the group will make concrete suggestions concerning a timetable for complete withdrawal, a plan to remove troops from all Sunni cities, negotiations with high-ranking members of the Iraqi resistance, appeals for international assistance, and stealth-agreements for future oil concessions.

There are many glaring ironies about Baker's involvement in the present coup. Baker not only led the charge in the 2000 election; he also headed the Independent Task Force on Strategic Energy Policy Challenge for the 21st Century for the Council on Foreign Relations. As Lawrence Shoup reports in "The CFR Debates Torture" ( Z Magazine March 2006) "Fifty one task force members, many of them connected to the oil industry, signed the report which reached a consensus on a number of questions. The first general conclusion was that 'a new era of energy scarcity' was upon the world…presenting fundamental obstacles to continued economic growth and prosperity. …"

The report advised the forming of an "interagency process to articulate and promote energy security policy" …noting that the Bush administration has moved has moved rapidly in this direction through the creation of the White House Energy Policy Development Group headed by Vice President Dick Cheney".( Lawrence Shoup; "The CFR Debates Torture")

This was the beginning of the dividing up of Iraq according to future contracts with the oil giants. (all behind closed doors) This suggests that it was James A. Baker who provided the report to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that persuaded them that 'something had to be done about Iraq'.

Now he's back telling them its time to quit.

Baker's new assignment is to loosen the madman's grip on the nations' steering wheel and glide the people's-wagon back to safety. Expect to see Baker looking a lot like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill.

After years of struggle, Baker and company have finally created the one-party system of their dreams with a government that is unaccountable to the people, the law, or its political base. Unfortunately, he's about to learn what others have known for some time; the nation is in the vice-like grip of homicidal maniacs who have no intention of relinquishing power or admitting defeat.



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Media Avoids Covering Vote on Permanent Bases

By David Swanson
afterdowningstreet.org

Something is happening in Iraq that most Americans have never heard about, but many Americans think the war is being fought for: the United States is building what look like permanent military bases.

Something happened in Congress last Thursday that most Americans have not heard about. A number of Congress Members, led by Barbara Lee and Tom Allen, proposed an amendment to the latest giant spending bill for the war, an amendment forbidding the United States to establish permanent bases in Iraq.
Both Lee and Allen spoke on the floor in support of the amendment, as did Jan Schakowsky, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Sheila Jackson Lee, David Price, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey, Maurice Hinchey, and the militantly pro-war Jane Harman. That's a lot of speeches. Did you read about any of them anywhere? See them on TV? How about on the radio?

The amendment passed!

Did you read or hear that anywhere? You almost certainly did not, unless you search out information on the internet or subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Lexis-Nexis database contains most major newspapers and transcripts of many talk shows. I did a search Sunday afternoon for "Barbara Lee." I found four relevant articles. One was from the San Francisco Chronicle. One was Lee's own press release. And two were Allen's press release. I also searched for "permanent bases." Again I found Lee's press release. I also found a story from Agence France Press and two from the BBC quoting the U.S. ambassador to Iraq promising that the United States would not build permanent bases. Neither the BBC nor AFP had anything about the amendment passed by Congress.

If you search for "Iraq" in Lexis Nexis it comes back with too many articles to display. Media decision makers are, to put it mildly, aware of Iraq as an issue in the news. In fact, dozens of articles covered the vote to spend another $72 billion on the war. But they did not mention the amendment.

The relevant reporters had all been sent press releases from two Congress Members and various NGOs, such as the Council for a Livable World, which sent out this one: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/8979

The blogosphere was blasting the news all over Thursday evening. And on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle had the story, in print and online. The article began:

"Washington -- The House passed a $92 billion emergency spending package Thursday to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Hurricane Katrina relief operations. The House, in approving the spending bill 348-71, also gave anti-war Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland a rare victory by accepting her proposal to bar permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq."

After a few other paragraphs, it continued:

"Lee's amendment, which would bar the use of any funds in the new spending bill to establish permanent bases, passed on a voice vote, with no one speaking in opposition. President Bush and some top administration officials have said the U.S. military has no interest in permanent bases, the prospect of which is among the causes of anti-American unrest in Iraq. Leaders of the Republican majority also may have chosen to avoid a debate and recorded vote on Lee's proposal because they didn't want to go on record endorsing a permanent military presence in Iraq when polls show Americans oppose the war. Opponents also may try to strike the amendment when leaders of the House and Senate reconcile their bill for final passage. 'In adopting this amendment, we can take the target off our troops' backs by sending a strong and immediate signal to the Iraqi people, the insurgents and the international community that the United States has no designs on Iraq,' Lee said on the House floor."

That's quite a story: an issue so touchy that the majority party goes against its own wishes in order to avoid going on record, and a reporter, with his editor's approval, anticipates that they will likely reverse that position behind closed doors. Won't that be an even bigger story!

Well, no. Not if no one has heard about this one. And not if no one has even heard that bases are being built or that Iraqis are killing Americans because of it.

Maybe the wisest course is to cut out the middleman. Go straight to Barbara Lee's press release for your news on this issue:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/8975



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How to spot a baby conservative - Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...

KURT KLEINER
Toronto STAR
19 Mar 06

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look.
In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings - the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a political bias.

Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost's study, was less impressed.

"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

The results do raise some obvious questions. Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes filled with little proto-conservative whiners?

Or does an insecure little boy raised in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism?

Or do the whiny kids grow up conservative along with the majority of their more confident peers, while only the kids with poor impulse control turn liberal?

Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.

For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.

Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.

The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.

Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?

It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.

Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based freelance science writer.



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Cold Warrior in a Strange Land A Tomdispatch Interview with Chalmers Johnson (Part 1)

Tomdispatch

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, "Look at that structure!" I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. "It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan," he says, "the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city."


Soon, we're heading toward their home just up the coast in one of those fabled highway traffic jams that every description of Southern California must include. "We feel we're far enough north," he adds in the kind of amused tone that makes his company both alarming and thoroughly entertaining, "so we could see the glow, get the cat, pack up, and head for Quartzsite, Arizona."

Chalmers Johnson, who served in the U.S. Navy and now is a historian of American militarism, lives cheek by jowl with his former service. San Diego is the headquarters of the 11th Naval District. "It's wall to wall military bases right up the coast," he comments. "By the way, this summer the Pentagon's planning the largest naval concentration in the Pacific in the post-World War II period! Four aircraft-carrier task forces -- two from the Atlantic and that's almost unprecedented -- doing military exercises off the coast of China."

That afternoon, we seat ourselves at his dining room table. He's seventy-four years old, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and bad knees. He walks with a cane, but his is one of the spriest minds in town. Out the window I can see a plethora of strange, oversized succulents. ("That's an Agave attenuata," he says. "If you want one, feel free. We have them everywhere. When the blue-gray Tequila plant blooms, its flower climbs 75 feet straight up! Then you get every hummingbird in Southern California.") In the distance, the Pacific Ocean gleams.

Johnson is wearing a black t-shirt that, he tells me, a former military officer and friend brought back from Russia. ("He was amused to see hippies selling these in the Moscow airport.") The shirt sports an illustration of an AK-47 on its front with the inscription, "Mikhail Kalashnikov" in Cyrillic script, and underneath, "The freedom fighter's friend, a product of the Soviet Union." On the back in English, it says, "World Massacre Tour" with the following list: "The Gulf War, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Angola, Laos, Nicaragua, Salvador, Lebanon, Gaza Strip, Karabakh, Chechnya… To be continued."

Johnson, who served as a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy in the early 1950s and from 1967-1973 was a consultant for the CIA, ran the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years. He defended the Vietnam War ("In that I was distinctly a man of my times…"), but is probably the only person of his generation to have written, in the years since, anything like this passage from the introduction to his book Blowback: "The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense… In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naiveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."

Retired, after a long, provocative career as a Japan specialist, he is the author of the prophetic Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published in 2000 to little attention. After 9/11, it became a bestseller, putting the word "blowback," a CIA term for retaliation for U.S. covert actions, into common usage. He has since written The Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. ("As an academic subject, the American Empire is largely taboo," he tells me. "I'm now comfortably retired, but I had a successful academic career. I realize that young academics today will take up the subject and start doing research on aspects of our empire only if they've got some cover. They need somebody to go first. I've had some of my former graduate students say, 'Look, you're invulnerable. If you won't take the lead, why do you expect us to go do a research project on the impact of American military whorehouses on Turkey. I mean, let's face it, it's a good subject!")

He is just now completing the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy. It will be entitled Nemesis.

Sharp as a tack, energetic and high-spirited, by turns genuinely alarmed and thoroughly sardonic, he's a talker by nature. Our encounter is an interview in name only. No one has ever needed an interviewer less. I do begin with a question that had been on my mind, but it's hardly necessary.

Tomdispatch: Let's start with a telltale moment in your life, the moment when the Cold War ended. What did it mean to you?

Chalmers Johnson: I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so.

There's no doubt that, in some ways, the Soviet Union inspired a degree of idealism. There are grown men I admire who can't but stand up if they hear the Internationale being played, even though they split with the Communists ages ago because of the NKVD and the gulag. I thought we needed to protect ourselves from the Soviets.

As I saw it, the only justification for our monster military apparatus, its size, the amounts spent on it, the growth of the Military-Industrial Complex that [President Dwight] Eisenhower identified for us, was the existence of the Soviet Union and its determination to match us. The fact that the Soviet Union was global, that it was extremely powerful, mattered, but none of us fully anticipated its weaknesses. I had been there in 1978 at the height of [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev's power. You certainly had a sense then that no consumer economy was present. My colleagues at the Institute for the USA and Canada were full of: Oh my god, I found a bottle of good Georgian white wine, or the Cubans have something good in, let's go over to their bar; but if you went down to the store, all you could buy was vodka.

It was a fairly rough kind of world, but some things they did very, very well. We talk about missile defense for this country. To this day, there's only one nation with a weapon that could penetrate any missile defense we put up -- and that's Russia. And we still can't possibly match the one they have, the Topol-M, also known as the SS-27. When [President Ronald] Reagan said he was going to build a Star Wars, these very smart Soviet weapon-makers said: We're going to stop it. And they did.

As [Senator] Daniel Moynihan said: Who needs a CIA that couldn't tell the Soviet Union was falling apart in the 1980s, a $32 billion intelligence agency that could not figure out their economy was in such awful shape they were going to come apart as a result of their war in Afghanistan and a few other things.

In 1989, [Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev makes a decision. They could have stopped the Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, but for the future of Russia he decided he'd rather have friendly relations with Germany and France than with those miserable satellites Stalin had created in East Europe. So he just watches them tear it down and, at once, the whole Soviet empire starts to unravel. It's the same sort of thing that might happen to us if we ever stood by and watched the Okinawans kick us out of Okinawa. I think our empire might unravel in a way you could never stop once it started.

The Soviet Union imploded. I thought: What an incredible vindication for the United States. Now it's over, and the time has come for a real victory dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the U.S. behave as it had in the past when big wars came to an end? We disarmed so rapidly after World War II. Granted, in 1947 we started to rearm very rapidly, but by then our military was farcical. In 1989, what startled me almost more than the Wall coming down was this: As the entire justification for the Military-Industrial Complex, for the Pentagon apparatus, for the fleets around the world, for all our bases came to an end, the United States instantly -- pure knee-jerk reaction -- began to seek an alternative enemy. Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War.

That was, I thought, shocking. I was no less shocked that the American public seemed indifferent. And what things they did do were disastrous. George Bush, the father, was President. He instantaneously declared that he was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It's over. What a huge cost we've paid for that, for creating the largest clandestine operation we ever had and then just walking away, so that any Afghan we recruited in the 1980s in the fight against the Soviet Union instantaneously came to see us as the enemy -- and started paying us back. The biggest blowback of the lot was, of course, 9/11, but there were plenty of them before then.

I was flabbergasted and felt the need to understand what had happened. The chief question that came to mind almost at once, as soon as it was clear that our part of the Cold War was going to be perpetuated -- the same structure, the same military Keynesianism, an economy based largely on the building of weapons -- was: Did this suggest that the Cold War was, in fact, a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British Empire?.

Now that led me to say: Yes, the Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be. You can make something of a claim for that in Western Europe at certain points in the 1950s, but once you bring it into the global context, once you include China and our two East Asian wars, Korea and Vietnam, the whole thing breaks down badly and this caused me to realize that I had some rethinking to do. The wise-ass sophomore has said to me -- this has happened a number of times -- "Aren't you being inconsistent?" I usually answer with the famous remark of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who, when once accused of being inconsistent, said to his questioner, "Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?"

A personal experience five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union also set me rethinking international relations in a more basic way. I was invited to Okinawa by its governor in the wake of a very serious incident. On September 4, 1995, two Marines and a sailor raped a 12-year old girl. It produced the biggest outpouring of anti-Americanism in our key ally, Japan, since the Security Treaty was signed [in 1960].

I had never been to Okinawa before, even though I had spent most of my life studying Japan. I was flabbergasted by the 32 American military bases I found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and the enormous pressures it put on the population there. My first reaction as a good Cold Warrior was: Okinawa must be exceptional. It's off the beaten track. The American press doesn't cover it. It's a military colony. Our military has been there since the battle of Okinawa in 1945. It had all the smell of the Raj about it. But I assumed that this was just an unfortunate, if revealing, pimple on the side of our huge apparatus. As I began to study it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not exceptional. It was the norm. It was what you find in all of the American military enclaves around the world.

TD: The way we garrison the planet has been essential to your rethinking of the American position in the world. Your chapters on Pentagon basing policy were the heart of your last book, The Sorrows of Empire. Didn't you find it strange that, whether reviewers liked the book or not, none of them seemed to deal with your take on our actual bases? What do you make of that?

Johnson: I don't know why that is. I don't know why Americans take for granted, for instance, that huge American military reservations in the United States are natural ways to organize things. There's nothing slightly natural about them. They're artificial and expensive. One of the most interesting ceremonies of recent times is the brouhaha over announced base closings. After all, it's perfectly logical for the Department of Defense to shut down redundant facilities, but you wouldn't think so from all the fuss.

I'm always amazed by the way we kid ourselves about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex in our society. We use euphemisms like supply-side economics or the Laffer Curve. We never say: We're artificially making work. If the WPA [Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression] was often called a dig-holes-and-fill-em-up-again project, now we're making things that blow up and we sell them to people. Our weapons aren't particularly good, not compared to those of the great weapons makers around the world. It's just that we can make a lot of them very rapidly.

TD: As a professional editor, I would say that when we look at the world, we have a remarkable ability to edit it.

Johnson: Absolutely. We edit parts of it out. I mean, people in San Diego don't seem the least bit surprised that between here and Los Angeles is a huge military reservation called Camp Pendleton, the headquarters of the First Marine Division. I was there myself back in the Korean War days. I unfortunately crossed the captain of the LST-883 that I was serving on. We had orders to send an officer to Camp Pendleton and he said, "I know who I'm going to send." It was me. (He laughs) And I'll never forget it. The world of Marine drill sergeants is another universe.

In many ways, as an enthusiast for the natural environment, I am delighted to have Pendleton there. It's a cordon sanitaire. I spent a little time with its commandant maybe a decade ago. We got to talking about protecting birds and he said, "I'm under orders to protect these birds. One of my troops drives across a bird's nest in his tank and I'll court martial him. Now, if that goddamn bird flies over to San Clemente, he takes his chances." Even then I thought: That's one of the few things going for you guys, because nothing else that goes on here particularly contributes to our country. Today, of course, with the military eager to suspend compliance with environmental regulations, even that small benefit is gone.

TD: So, returning to our starting point, you saw an empire and…

Johnson: …it had to be conceptualized. Empires are defined so often as holders of colonies, but analytically, by empire we simply mean the projection of hegemony outward, over other people, using them to serve our interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected.

So what kind of empire is ours? The unit is not the colony, it's the military base. This is not quite as unusual as defenders of the concept of empire often assume. That is to say, we can easily calculate the main military bases of the Roman Empire in the Middle East, and it turns out to be about the same number it takes to garrison the region today. You need about 38 major bases. You can plot them out in Roman times and you can plot them out today.

An empire of bases -- that's the concept that best explains the logic of the 700 or more military bases around the world acknowledged by the Department of Defense. Now, we're just kidding ourselves that this is to provide security for Americans. In most cases, it's true that we first occupied these bases with some strategic purpose in mind in one of our wars. Then the war ends and we never give them up. We discovered that it's part of the game; it's the perk for the people who fought the war. The Marines to this day believe they deserve to be in Okinawa because of the losses they had in the bloodiest and last big battle of World War II.

I was astonished, however, at how quickly the concept of empire -- though not necessarily an empire of bases -- became acceptable to the neoconservatives and others in the era of the younger Bush. After all, to use the term proudly, as many of them did, meant flying directly in the face of the origins of the United States. We used to pride ourselves on being as anti-imperialist as anybody could be, attacking a king who ruled in such a tyrannical manner. That lasted only, I suppose, until the Spanish-American War. We'd already become an empire well before that, of course.

TD: Haven't we now become kind of a one-legged empire in the sense that, as you've written, just about everything has become military?

Johnson: That's what's truly ominous about the American empire. In most empires, the military is there, but militarism is so central to ours -- militarism not meaning national defense or even the projection of force for political purposes, but as a way of life, as a way of getting rich or getting comfortable. I guarantee you that the first Marine Division lives better in Okinawa than in Oceanside, California, by considerable orders of magnitude. After the Wall came down, the Soviet troops didn't leave East Germany for five years. They didn't want to go home. They were living so much better in Germany than they knew they would be back in poor Russia.

Most empires try to disguise that military aspect of things. Our problem is: For some reason, we love our military. We regard it as a microcosm of our society and as an institution that works. There's nothing more hypocritical, or constantly invoked by our politicians, than "support our boys." After all, those boys and girls aren't necessarily the most admirable human beings that ever came along, certainly not once they get into another society where they are told they are, by definition, doing good. Then the racism that's such a part of our society emerges very rapidly -- once they get into societies where they don't understand what's going on, where they shout at some poor Iraqi in English.

TD: I assume you'd agree that our imperial budget is the defense budget. Do you want to make some sense of it for us?

Johnson: Part of empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the way we've become dependent on it. Empires in the past -- the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Japanese Empire -- helped to enrich British citizens, Roman citizens, Japanese citizens. In our society, we don't want to admit how deeply the making and selling of weaponry has become our way of life; that we really have no more than four major weapons manufacturers -- Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics -- but these companies distribute their huge contracts to as many states, as many congressional districts, as possible.

The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.

Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent budget. It becomes less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.

This is not, of course, free enterprise. Four huge manufacturers with only one major customer. This is state socialism and it's keeping the economy running not in the way it's taught in any economics course in any American university. It's closer to what John Maynard Keynes advocated for getting out of the Great Depression -- counter-cyclical governmental expenditures to keep people employed.

The country suffers from a collective anxiety neurosis every time we talk about closing bases and it has nothing to do with politics. New England goes just as mad over shutting shut down the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as people here in San Diego would if you suggested shutting the Marine Corps Air Station. It's always seen as our base. How dare you take away our base! Our congressmen must get it back!

This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism and our military empire. We can't get off it any more. It's not that we're hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we let it go and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.

And the precedents for this should really terrify us. The greatest single previous example of military Keynesianism -- that is, of taking an economy distraught over recession or depression, over people being very close to the edge and turning it around -- is Germany. Remember, for the five years after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he was admired as one of the geniuses of modern times. And people were put back to work. This was done entirely through military Keynesianism, an alliance between the Nazi Party and German manufacturers.

Many at the time claimed it was an answer to the problems of real Keynesianism, of using artificial government demand to reopen factories, which was seen as strengthening the trade unions, the working class. Capitalists were afraid of government policies that tended to strengthen the working class. They might prove to be revolutionary. They had been often enough in that century. In this country, we were still shell-shocked over Bolshevism; to a certain extent, we still are.

What we've done with our economy is very similar to what Adolf Hitler did with his. We turn out airplanes and other weapons systems in huge numbers. This leads us right back to 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We couldn't let the Cold War come to an end. We realized it very quickly. In fact, there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise. And that's how -- my god – in 1966, only a couple of decades after we started down this path, we ended up with some 32,000 nuclear warheads. That was the year of the peak stockpile, which made no sense at all. We still have 9,960 at the present moment.

Now, the 2007 Pentagon budget doesn't make sense either. It's $439.3 billion…

TD: … not including war…

Johnson: Not including war! These people have talked us into building a fantastic military apparatus, and then, there was that famous crack [Clinton Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright made to General Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Well, if you want to use it today, they charge you another $120 billion dollars! (He laughs.)

But even the official budget makes no sense. It's filled with weapons like Lockheed Martin's F-22 -- the biggest single contract ever written. It's a stealth airplane and it's absolutely useless. They want to build another Virginia class nuclear submarine. These are just toys for the admirals.

TD: When we were younger, there were always lots of articles about Pentagon boondoggles, the million-dollar military monkey wrench and the like. No one bothers to write articles like that any more, do they?

Johnson: That's because they've completely given up on decent, normal accounting at the Pentagon. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, and a colleague at Harvard have put together a real Pentagon budget which, for the wars we're fighting right now, comes out to about $2 trillion. What they've added in are things like interest on the national debt that was used to buy arms in the past. Turns out to be quite a few billion dollars. Above all, they try to get a halfway honest figure for veterans' benefits. For this year, it's officially $68 billion, which is almost surely way too low given, if nothing more, the huge number of veterans who applied for and received benefits after our first Gulf War.

We hear on the nightly news about the medical miracle that people can be in an explosion in which, essentially, three 155 millimeter shells go off underneath a Humvee, and they survive through heroic emergency efforts. Barely. Like Bob Woodruff, the anchor person from ABC News. The guy who saved his life said, I thought he was dead when I picked him up. But many of these military casualties will be wards of the state forever. Do we intend to disavow them? It leads you back to the famous antiwar cracks of the 1930s, when Congressmen used to say: There's nothing we wouldn't do for our troops -- and that's what we do, nothing.

We almost surely will have to repudiate some of the promises we've made. For instance, Tricare is the government's medical care for veterans, their families. It's a mere $39 billion for 2007. But those numbers are going to go off the chart. And we can't afford it.

Even that pompous ideologue Donald Rumsfeld seems to have thrown in the towel on the latest budget. Not a thing is cut. Every weapon got through. He stands for "force transformation" and we already have enough nuclear equipment for any imaginable situation, so why on Earth spend anything more? And yet the Department of Energy is spending $18.5 billion on nuclear weapons in fiscal year 2006, according to former Senior Defense Department Budget Analyst Winslow Wheeler, who is today a researcher with the Center for Defense Information.

TD: Not included in the Pentagon budget.

Johnson: Of course not. This is the Department of Energy's budget.

TD: In other words, there's a whole hidden budget…

Johnson: Oh, it's huge! Three-quarters of a trillion dollars is the number I use for the whole shebang: $440 billion for the authorized budget; at least $120 billion for the supplementary war-fighting budget, calculated by Tina Jones, the comptroller of the Department of Defense, at $6.8 billion per month. Then you add in all the other things out there, above all veterans' care, care of the badly wounded who, not so long ago, would have added up to something more like Vietnam-era casualty figures. In Vietnam, they were dead bodies; these are still living people. They're so embarrassing to the administration that they're flown back at night, offloaded without any citizens seeing what's going on. It's amazing to me that [Congressman] John Murtha, as big a friend as the defense industry ever had -- you could count on him to buy any crazy missile-defense gimmick, anything in outer space -- seems to have slightly woken up only because he spent some time as an old Marine veteran going to the hospitals.

Another person who may be getting this message across to the public is Gary Trudeau in some of his Doonesbury cartoons. Tom, I know your mother was a cartoonist and we both treasure Walt Kelly, who drew the Pogo strip. How applicable is Pogo's most famous line today: "We have met the enemy and he is us."



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The Letter of the Law - The White House says spying on terror suspects without court approval is ok. What about physical searches?

By Chitra Ragavan
US News & World Report
27 March 2006 Issue

In the dark days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a small group of lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department began meeting to debate a number of novel legal strategies to help prevent another attack. Soon after, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to begin conducting electronic eavesdropping on terrorism suspects in the United States, including American citizens, without court approval.
Meeting in the FBI's state-of-the-art command center in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the lawyers talked with senior FBI officials about using the same legal authority to conduct physical searches of homes and businesses of terrorism suspects - also without court approval, one current and one former government official tell US News. "There was a fair amount of discussion at Justice on the warrantless physical search issue," says a former senior FBI official. "Discussions about - if [the searches] happened - where would the information go, and would it taint cases."

FBI Director Robert Mueller was alarmed by the proposal, the two officials said, and pushed back hard against it. "Mueller was personally very concerned," one official says, "not only because of the blowback issue but also because of the legal and constitutional questions raised by warrantless physical searches." FBI spokesman John Miller said none of the FBI's senior staff are aware of any such discussions and added that the bureau has not conducted "physical searches of any location without consent or a judicial order."

In December, the New York Times disclosed the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance program, resulting in an angry reaction from President Bush. It has not previously been disclosed, however, that administration lawyers had cited the same legal authority to justify warrantless physical searches. But in a little-noticed white paper submitted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress on January 19 justifying the legality of the NSA eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers made a tacit case that President Bush also has the inherent authority to order such physical searches. In order to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, the 42-page white paper says, "a consistent understanding has developed that the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches and surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence purposes." The memo cites congressional testimony of Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, in 1994 stating that the Justice Department "believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

"Black-bag jobs." Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the white paper cited the Gorelick testimony simply to bolster its legal defense of the NSA's electronic surveillance program. Roehrkasse points out that Justice Department lawyers have told Congress that the NSA program "described by the president does not involve physical searches." But John Martin, a former Justice Department attorney who prosecuted the two most important cases involving warrantless searches and surveillance, says the department is sending an unambiguous message to Congress. "They couldn't make it clearer," says Martin, "that they are also making the case for inherent presidential power to conduct warrantless physical searches."

It could not be learned whether the Bush administration has cited the legal authority to carry out such searches. A former marine, Mueller has waged a quiet, behind-the-scenes battle since 9/11 to protect his special agents from legal jeopardy as a result of aggressive new investigative tactics backed by the White House and the Justice Department, government officials say. During Senate testimony about the NSA surveillance program, however, Gonzales was at pains to avoid answering questions about any warrantless physical surveillance activity that may have been authorized by the Justice Department. On February 6, Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Gonzales whether the NSA spying program includes authority to tap E-mail or postal mail without warrants. "Can you do black-bag jobs?" Leahy asked. Gonzales replied that he was trying to outline for the committee "what the president has authorized, and that is all that he has authorized" - electronic surveillance. Three weeks later, Gonzales amended his answer to Leahy's question, stating that he was addressing only the legal underpinnings for the NSA surveillance program but adding: "I did not and could not address operational aspects of the program, or any other classified intelligence activities." In the past, when Congress has taken up explosive issues that affect the bureau, Mueller has made it a point, officials have said, to leave Washington - and sometimes the country - so as not to get pulled into the political crossfire. When Gonzales testified February 6, Mueller was on his way to Morocco.

Government officials told the magazine that Mueller and then Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who also questioned the NSA spying program, both believed that while it was a close call legally, the president did have authority to conduct electronic surveillance of terrorism suspects in the United States without court approval; both men, however, raised grave concerns about the possible use of any information obtained from any warrantless surveillance in a court of law.

At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches. On Sept. 23, 2005 - nearly three months before the Times broke the NSA story - Thomas Nelson wrote to US Attorney Karin Immergut in Oregon that in the previous nine months, "I and others have seen strong indications that my office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches." In an interview, Nelson said he believes that the searches resulted from the fact that FBI agents accidentally gave his client classified documents and were trying to retrieve them. Nelson's client is Soliman al-Buthe, codirector of a now defunct charity named al-Haramain, who was indicted in 2004 for illegally taking charitable donations out of the country. The feds also froze the charity's assets, alleging ties to Osama bin Laden. The documents that were given to him, Nelson says, may prove that al-Buthe was the target of the NSA surveillance program.

The searches, if they occurred, were anything but deft. Late at night on two occasions, Nelson's colleague Jonathan Norling noticed a heavyset, middle-aged, non-Hispanic white man claiming to be a member of an otherwise all-Hispanic cleaning crew, wearing an apron and a badge and toting a vacuum. But, says Norling, "it was clear the vacuum was not moving." Three months later, the same man, waving a brillo pad, spent some time trying to open Nelson's locked office door, Norling says. Nelson's wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.

In October, Immergut wrote to Nelson reassuring him that the FBI would not target terrorism suspects' lawyers without warrants and, even then, only "under the most exceptional circumstances," because the government takes attorney-client relationships "extremely seriously." Nelson nevertheless filed requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, with the NSA. The agency's director of policy, Louis Giles, wrote back, saying, "The fact of the existence or nonexistence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter."

"Maximum speed." For the FBI, the very mention of the term "black-bag jobs" prompts a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. In 1975 and 1976, an investigative committee led by then Sen. Frank Church documented how the FBI engaged in broad surveillance of private citizens and members of antiwar and civil rights groups, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. The committee's hearings and the executive-branch abuses that were documented in the Watergate investigation led to numerous reforms, including passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. The law created a special secret court tasked with approving electronic wiretaps in espionage and other national security investigations. After the Aldrich Ames spy case, Congress amended FISA to include approval of physical searches. After 9/11, the law was further amended to allow investigators to place wiretaps or conduct physical searches without notifying the court for 72 hours and to obtain "roving" wiretaps to allow investigators to tap multiple cellphones.

In justifying the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, Gonzales has argued that the review process required for a FISA warrant is too cumbersome for a program that is of "a military nature" and that requires "maximum speed and agility to achieve early warning."

White House lawyers, in particular, Vice President Cheney's counsel David Addington (who is now Cheney's chief of staff), pressed Mueller to use information from the NSA program in court cases, without disclosing the origin of the information, and told Mueller to be prepared to drop prosecutions if judges demanded to know the sourcing, according to several government officials. Mueller, backed by Comey, resisted the administration's efforts. "The White House was putting pressure on Mueller to broadly make cases with the intelligence," says one official. "But he did not want to use it as a basis for any affidavit in any court." Comey declined numerous requests for comment. Sources say Mueller and his general counsel, Valerie Caproni, continue to remain troubled by the domestic spying program. Martin, who has handled more intelligence-oriented criminal cases than anyone else at the Justice Department, puts the issue in stark terms: "The failure to allow it [information obtained from warrantless surveillance] to be used in court is a concession that it is an illegal surveillance."

Mueller has been criticized by some agents for being too close to the White House. His predecessor, Louis Freeh, made his break publicly from President Clinton, even returning his White House security access badge. Until recently, Mueller reported to the White House daily to brief Bush and Cheney. But Mueller has not shied away from making tough decisions. He refused to allow FBI agents to participate in CIA and Defense Department interviews of high-value prisoners because of the administration's use of aggressive interrogation techniques. In Iraq and at the Pentagon-run camp for terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, it has been FBI agents who have called attention to what they viewed as abuse of detainees.

It is unclear how much resistance from the FBI the White House and the Justice Department will be willing to brook. What is clear, however, is the extraordinary extent to which officials in both places inject themselves in the bureau's operations. In late 2004, President Bush asked then FBI Deputy Director Bruce Gebhardt, filling in for Mueller during the daily White House briefings, minute details about a suspected terrorism threat in Kansas. "Don't worry, Mr. President," responded Gebhardt, straight-faced. "We have Kansas surrounded."



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Bombs and Butchers - "Where Do We Get Such Men?"

Werther
CounterPunch
18/19 Mar 06

The question posed in our title rings historical and true, and nine out of ten readers might surmise it refers to the Marines at Khe Sanh, or perhaps the boys of Pointe du Hoc, or possibly the lost battalion almost 90 summers ago in the fields of France.

But it is artifice, a quote from a movie based on James Michener's novel, The Bridges of Toko-ri. It rings true because we think it ought to be true: because it tidies up the sordid and disjointed reality of violence in the name of a cause.

This process is behind the confidence trick of how the state mystifies and glorifies its underhanded acts. In war, we are supposed to think of Audie Murphy, or Alvin York, or Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as typical exemplars. We should indeed think of such men, and honor their deeds. But due diligence requires we think of other men, whose acts in the name of the state, the state that acts in your name, were more important--meaning more consequential for our history.
Men like John Buchanan Floyd, Secretary of War in 1860, whose arguably treasonable acts armed an insurrection against the Constitution he had sworn to protect. Or Woodrow Wilson, possessed of messianic ego and pathological dishonesty, who fed American youth into the furnace of a senseless war even as he rammed through a supine Congress a law making criticism of himself punishable for up to ten years. Or Donald Rumsfeld, a disastrously incompetent successor to John Floyd Buchanan's portfolio: a man who arrogantly and inflexibly defends the quagmire in Iraq because it got rid of the supposed Devil Incarnate Saddam Hussein, even as he feigns amnesia regarding his 1980s diplomatic mission to assure Saddam of U.S. support.

Where, indeed, do we get such men? Why do they always seem to choke the upper levels of government like kudzu on a Georgia hillside? What is the structural morphology of human society that ordains such creatures shall insert themselves into the body politic and determine its fate?

The latest example of such men--that is, men whose relation to their country is that of a tapeworm to the large intestine--comes to us courtesy of a conference on the Vietnam War held by the John F. Kennedy Library on 11 March 2006.

Among the array of self-justifying participants, the choicest quote was offered by former Chief of Staff to President Nixon and later Secretary of State Alexander Haig. He said that military leaders in Iraq are repeating a mistake made in Vietnam by not applying the full force of the military to win the war.

"Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don't do it," he said. "We're in the midst of another struggle where it appears to me we haven't learned very much."

Haig, whose swansong in public office was a borderline hysterical (and unconstitutional) statement that he was "in charge" after the attempted assassination of President Reagan, made a sententious declaration at the Kennedy Library that sounded reasonable--until one subjects it to a moment's analysis. Notice that once the decision for war is made according to the Haig formula, every asset of the nation should be brought to bear. But who makes the decision for war? Is it a wise one? Is it even an honest one? A skeptic would suggest that the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a fraud, as was the declaration that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

With his silence, Haig implies that Americans are supposed to give a pass to "leaders" who lie the country into war, so long as those leaders direct it like berserkers. Is it the duty of Americans only to make every sacrifice necessary (and with a GDP of over $13 trillion, there are a lot of assets to be sacrificed; unfortunately they involve our children's standard of living), and never to question the rationale and the principle behind the war?

Haig does not expatiate on that question. Neither does he expound on precisely what it means to apply every asset. Would that mean fire-bombing? Nuclear weapons? Poison gas? These have been military means from time to time. Apparently the 57,000 U.S. military and up to two million Vietnamese deaths were not, in Haig's mind, a sign of serious warmaking.

Really? The United States dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia than in all the theaters of war in World War II. The basso profundo roar of a B-52 arc light mission shook the earth as it rent eardrums and pulped the internal organs of those military or civilians unfortunate enough to be in the immediate vicinity. Quang Tri Province may have been the most blasted and bombed real estate in the history of war.

Millions of acres of coastal mangrove forest (protecting the shore from typhoons and anchoring the way of life of the local peasantry) were wiped out. The Agent Orange defoliation campaign was a lasting success, as the Vietnamese population's scientifically interesting genetic mutations can attest even unto the present day. [2]

For an impressionistic portrait of a mere sideshow of the Vietnam War, we quote at length Simon Jenkins in the Times of London [3]:

"The bombing of Laos ranks among the most obscene acts of war. It was wanton destruction, power without restraint divorced from the purpose of battle, which is to take and hold territory. . . . Like medieval armies salting fields and poisoning wells, modern air forces leave behind them weapons which they know will sprout death for decades to come.

"By the time Nixon and Kissinger sent the Air Force's 'strategic' B52s to the Plain of Jars in 1970--against the pleading of local commanders--the Vietnam War was lost. But punitive bombing exacted a terrible revenge on Laos, as on Cambodia to the south. Laos suffered a monsoon of destruction, with a peak of 500 sorties a day. The B52s used napalm, defoliants and weapons which, on any definition, were 'chemical.' They bombed the plain's neolithic jars, like bombing Stonehenge. At night they hosed anything that moved with cannon."

What was the physical effect of the bombing?

"The beautiful plain, in reality a long valley flanked by high karst mountains, is still a morass of craters, each containing unknown horrors. Its settlements were more blasted than the Somme, more flattened than Dresden. The 500-year-old provincial capital of Xiang Khouang saw its temples reduced to dustclouds by B52s, described afterwards as 'looking like Hiroshima.' Nobody knows how many people died. The only memorial I saw was to the 320 villagers of Tham Piu, forced from their homes into a cave, where a direct hit from a T28 rocket incinerated them."

And more than three decades on, the dying persists:

"Still the war continues, killing and maiming hundreds. Every other day, someone treads on a bomb, plays with it or hits it with a hoe or a fishing line. Instantly the years roll back and blood and guts are everywhere. There are far too many bombs ever to be cleared."

This is the war Al Haig thinks the government, which succored his bank account, fought with one arm tied behind its back. This is the war our resident wise man says the government conducted with a blameworthy excess of moral scruple.

Where indeed, in which circle of hell, do we get such men?

Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst



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Polls show public want Australian troops out of Iraq

Gillian Bradford
The World Today
20 Mar 06

ELEANOR HALL: A new opinion poll out today suggests that almost two thirds of people in this country want Australian troops to leave Iraq within the next couple months.

The research, by public affairs firm Hawker Britton, was conducted at the same time that Defence Minister Brendan Nelson was announcing that Australian soldiers would remain with the US-led Coalition well into next year.

And today the Federal Labor Party has said that Australia's "open commitment" is unwise and that the troops should be brought home.

Labor's Defence Spokesman Robert McClelland has been speaking to reporter Gillian Bradford about the survey.
ROBERT MCCLELLAND: It shows that the Australian people are very concerned that we're going to be sucked along into a civil war situation in Iraq, and certainly that could happen if we don't precisely define what our mission is and what the benchmarks for achieving that mission are. So far the Government's failed to do that.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: The Prime Minister has of course maintained that Australians shouldn't cut and run. Isn't he right to say that we've got to stay there as long as the Iraqis need us?

ROBERT MCCLELLAND: Well, again, that open-ended, and we say open chequebook commitment is unconditional, and for instance there's been no conditions attached regarding the appropriate conduct of the Iraqi regime itself.

Certainly one ministry appears to be tolerating, if not sponsoring, its own sectarian violence and payback, and that is something which can only aggravate the civil disquiet and the potential for, indeed, civil war.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: So are you saying Australia's government needs to place a lot more pressure on the Iraqi Government to get its own house in order?

ROBERT MCCLELLAND: Very much so. I mean, this open-ended and open chequebook commitment is directly contrary to that objective.

I mean, we are entitled to know as Australians, and certainly they must be told, look, this is what we're intending to do, we're intending to train x-thousand number of members of the security force, supervise or protect the Japanese in respect of this particular scope of works.

But after that point in time, the time has come for you to have your own house in order, to put aside this sectarian rivalry, appropriate compromise where necessary to form a viable government and take responsibility for your own security.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: What difference do you think it would make to the security situation in Iraq if Australia did pack up and leave?

ROBERT MCCLELLAND: In one sense we've completed our objective, one would think, in terms of training, I think it's about two battalions of members of their security forces and, from my understanding, assisted the Japanese in terms of protecting them while they complete their existing scope of works.

I mean, April or May, one would think after the current rotation would be an appropriate time to leave.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: So what do you say is a better use of Australian troops?

ROBERT MCCLELLAND: Well, we've clearly got, and Condoleezza Rice confirmed last week on our own doorstep, our own backyard is a particularly dangerous place in terms of international terrorism.

And the irony of it is, that is where we can be most effective in the international fight against terrorism, because that's where we've got our geographic, our historic and diplomatic ties more closely than any other nation in the world, and where we can be most effective in assisting the United States in terms of our Australian-United States alliance, and the international community, to combat international terrorism.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: But where specifically are you saying those troops could go? It's not as though we can just drop them into Indonesia uninvited.

ROBERT MCCLELLAND: Well it's, it's both a question of troops, but it's also a question of resources. For instance, we've spent $1.2 billion on the war in Iraq to date, and that's more than we spend each year on the entire Australian Federal Police budget.

There's obviously a lot that can be done in South East Asia to assist them with policing activities, with intelligence activities, but indeed I think it's being explored and should be explored, actually supporting the Philippines Government in terms of the area in southern Philippines where terrorism is rife.

Certainly, several years ago, the United States assisted that government with several thousand troops, and these are things where Australia obviously could be exploring.

ELEANOR HALL: Labor's Defence Spokesman Robert McClelland, speaking to Gillian Bradford.



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Let Us Prey

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Pentagon hired contractor to advise on collecting information on churches, mosques, other U.S. sites - Plans for Fake Terrorist Attacks?

By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
20 Mar 06

WASHINGTON - A Pentagon intelligence agency that kept files on American anti-war activists hired one of the contractors who bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.

MZM Inc., headed by Mitchell Wade, also received three contracts totaling more than $250,000 to provide unspecified "intelligence services" to the White House, according to documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about what those intelligence services entailed.
MZM's Pentagon and White House deals were part of tens of millions of dollars in federal government business that Wade's company attracted beginning in 2002.

MZM and Wade, who pleaded guilty last month to bribing Cunningham and unnamed Defense Department officials to steer work to his firm, are the focus of ongoing probes by Pentagon and Department of Justice investigators.

In February 2003, MZM won a two-month contract worth $503,144.70 to provide technical support to the Pentagon's Joint Counter-Intelligence Field Activity, or CIFA. The top-secret agency was created five months earlier primarily to protect U.S. defense personnel and facilities from foreign terrorists.

The job involved advising CIFA on selecting software and technology designed to ferret out commercial and government data that could be used in what's called a Geospatial Information System. A GIS system inserts information about geographic locations, such as buildings, into digital maps produced from satellite photographs.

According to a "statement of work," the data that CIFA was interested in obtaining included "maps, street addresses, lines of communication, critical infrastructure elements, demographic and other pertinent sources that would support geocoding and multi-level analysis."

Geocoding involves assigning latitudes and longitudes to locations, such as street addresses, so they can be displayed as points on maps. Such tools increasingly are being used by U.S. corporations and law enforcement agencies.

MZM was to "assist the government in identifying and procuring data" on maps, as well as "airports, ports, dams, churches/mosques/synagogues, schools (and) power plants," said the statement of work.

"In many cases, the government already owns such data, and for reasons of economy, government-owned data is preferred," said the statement. It isn't clear why U.S. intelligence agencies couldn't do the work themselves.

Navy Cmdr. Gregory Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman, said MZM began working on the project in October 2002, when the agency was created.

Its job was to help the agency integrate technology into its "information architecture to help CIFA use available (satellite) imagery, which is produced legally by other commercial and government agencies," Hicks said.

"GIS software ... is designed to allow integration of geographic and imagery data with threat information to provide complex analytic products," he said. "Not knowing the location of key infrastructure and points of interest, such as bridges, chemical plants, schools, parks, and even religious facilities, as they relate to threat information, could significantly affect the accuracy of such analysis and plans and lead to disastrous results."

He was unable to discuss further details of CIFA's dealings with MZM, citing the ongoing investigations into Wade's dealings with the Pentagon.

CIFA recently has come under fire following disclosures that it maintained information on individuals and groups involved in peaceful anti-war protests at defense facilities and recruiting offices.

The information was stored in a database that was supposed to be reserved for reports related to potential foreign terrorist activity.

In a March 8 letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a senior Pentagon official said that a review of the Cornerstone database had identified 186 "protest-related reports" containing the names of 43 people that were mistakenly retained in the database.

"These reports have since been removed from the Cornerstone database and refresher training on intelligence oversight and database management is being given to all CI (counter-intelligence) and intelligence personnel," said the letter from Robert W. Rogalski, an acting deputy undersecretary of defense.

The disclosure that CIFA was storing information on anti-war activities added to concerns that the Bush administration may have used its war on terrorism to give government agencies expanded power to monitor Americans' finances, associations, travel and other activities.

The administration's domestic eavesdropping program and FBI monitoring of environmental, animal rights and anti-war groups have also fueled such fears. The administration contends that its programs are legal and insists that they're designed to ensure civil liberties while protecting national security.

A Washington Post story last year contained a brief reference to the White House contracts in a report on the company's dealings with the Pentagon.

Wade, who faces up to 20 years in prison, was one of four men charged in the Cunningham case. Cunningham, who resigned from Congress in November after serving for 15 years, was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison earlier this month.

Copyright Knight Ridder Newspapers

Comment: And what do they want this "intell" for? Why do they want "latitudes and longitudes?" Why, for targeted bombing, of course! After all, if you are going to fake terrorist attacks, might as well make them count for your side while you are at it!

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Religious fanaticism out of control

By Dave Zweifel
The Capital Times
20 Mar 06

In case you're still not sure just how destructive the Bush administration has become to this country, you need to read Michael Specter's piece in the March 13 issue of the New Yorker magazine.

It's enough to give you the willies.

Specter documents how the Bush people have stacked the Food and Drug Administration with fanatics who regularly trump science to advance their own religious beliefs. It reads like a modern-day Galileo being persecuted by the Catholic Church because he maintained Earth was round.
Although Specter cites several examples of religious beliefs thwarting scientific advances by key appointees to the FDA and other divisions of the Department of Health and Human Services (Tommy Thompson's old department), one of the most egregious has been to block a vaccine designed to thwart cervical cancer.

Two of the country's bigger pharmaceutical companies Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have developed and proven the safety of a vaccine that prevents a common sexually transmitted disease called human papillomavirus (HPV). Strains of HPV are known to cause cervical cancer in early adulthood. The vaccine needs to be administered to girls before they become sexually active, which is an average age of 17.

And therein lies the rub for the religious base of the Republican Party that George Bush and company have installed in crucial posts in the health department. That base and George W. Bush himself steadfastly adheres to the proposition that kids need to practice abstinence. In their eyes, anything from promoting the use of condoms to giving young girls vaccinations against sexually transmitted diseases only encourages promiscuity among young people.

These people refuse to believe results of the numerous scientific studies that have shown the availability of condoms, for instance, has absolutely no impact on the rate of teen sex, or that young people who pledge to abstain actually engage in sex as often as those who don't take a pledge.

Their religion maintains that premarital sex is a sin, period, which is fine except that Bush has created a situation where those overzealous religious beliefs instead of scientific fact determine national policy.

"Since George W. Bush became president, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on abstinence programs, and it has cut almost that much in aid to groups that support abortion and the use of condoms as a primary method of birth control," Specter pointed out.

But, who would believe they would actually block approval of a vaccine that can prevent cancer?

The role that religion is playing in important health decisions has caused several career FDA doctors and staff to quit their jobs in disgust.

It isn't just an insane war. It's the anti-environment policies, the unjust tax policies, the ceaseless trashing of civil liberties and the subjugation of solid medical science for religious zealotry that is tearing down an America that was based on fairness and truth.

Can we really survive nearly three more years of this destruction?

Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times. E-mail: dzweifel@madison.com.



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Good Christian hate

Monday, March 20, 2006
David Neiwert
Orcinus

Did you know that the theory of evolution was cooked up -- probably by Jews -- as part of a New World conspiracy to enslave mankind? No?
Well, the people agitating for teaching "creation science" in the schools at Dover, Pa., will tell you that if you talk to them long enough.

Not that it came out publicly this week, when Michael Marcavage's Repent America outfit -- whose work in Dover I recently discussed -- sponsored an appearance at Dover Area High School by none other than "Doctor Dino" himself, Kent Hovind. They're much too clever for that -- instead, they keep the banter to a steady stream of trite rhetorical bombs:

Much of creationist speaker Kent Hovind's seminar felt more like a clean stand-up comic show than a religious lecture. Hovind, a creation science evangelist, used terms including "American Communist Lawyers' Union" when referring to the ACLU. He called the Big Bang Theory a "cosmic burp," and said "Charlie Darwin's" lies should be removed from textbooks.

He joked about his former experience as a science teacher for 15 years and said students taught him that "There's not much intelligent life on this planet."

He went on to call evolution the "dumbest and the most dangerous religion in the history of the earth."

You see, Hovind and his ilk save the "serious stuff" for later.

As earlier coverage of the Hovind seminars noted, Hovind is actually a right-wing extremist with a penchant for promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And of course, Marcavage denied the charges, in imitable fashion:

Michael Marcavage, whose Philadelphia-based organization Repent America is sponsoring Hovind's visit, said the accusations of anti-Semitism and extremism are unfair.

"He believes that people are from one race, the human race," Marcavage said.

He said some Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union, are targeting Christians because of their faith.

"Those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh are under the spirit of anti-christ," Marcavage added, a reference to 1 John 4:2-3.

Yes, you see: Jews can't help being under the spirit of the anti-Christ. Well, they could if they converted. But otherwise, it's just in their nature. And defending themselves against anti-Semitic smears is of course how they "target Christians."

Actually, Marcavage and Hovind are birds of a feather: far-right extremists trying to pose as nominally normal, mainstream folks. The Southern Poverty Law Center report on Hovind's "Dinosaur Adventure Land" -- a creationist theme park for kiddies -- makes clear that this isn't just generic fundamentalism:

Opened in 2001, Dinosaur Adventure Land sprung from Hovind's Creation Science Evangelism ministry, which began to evolve in the late '80s. CSE sells videos and audiotapes of Hovind's lectures and his debates with evolutionary scientists, along with books on "Evolution and the New World Order." (At least one of them, Fourth Reich of the Rich, alleges a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.)

Hovind also points his followers to Citizens Rule Book, popular among antigovernment "Patriots"; Media Bypass, an antigovernment magazine with strong anti-Semitic leanings; and titles by America's leading authority on tax-dodging, Irwin Schiff, who was indicted on criminal tax evasion charges in March ... Two years ago, Hovind's "fine Christian friend," Joseph Sweet of the Joy Foundation, ran into similar trouble, sued by the feds for allegedly teaching folks how to evade income taxes.

An earlier SPLC report detailed just what comprises Hovind's theological approach:

Do you think the theory of evolution is a Satanic plot to bring about the New World Order? Are you worried that Darwin's idea produced "Communism, Socialism, Naziism, abortion, liberalism and the New Age Movement?" Then Dr. Kent Hovind is for you.

Hovind, who runs the Creation Science Evangelism ministry from Pensacola, Fla., says the whole Bible is literally true and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. While that may seem par for the creationist course, Hovind also sells anti-Semitic books like Fourth Reich of the Rich and has recommended The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book blaming the world's problems on a Jewish conspiracy.

Environmentalism and income taxes, Hovind says, are designed to destroy the United States and "bring it under Communism." "Democracy," he says, "is evil and contrary to God's law."

So the response he received in Dover, at least according to the local news report, was problematic:

On Friday, he found a receptive audience in Dover.

According to several in the crowd of more than 600, Hovind's charisma and humor got his message across: "The universe was created by God."

"Everybody's fighting over it," Frysinger, a 13-year-old who attends Dover's intermediate school, said of evolution versus creation.

"Actually, what he's saying is true," his brother, Chris Frysinger, 15, said of Hovind's lecture. "He knows what he's talking about. You can hear it in his voice."

Myriah Hartzell, 11, recently stopped attending a Christian school and enrolled in Dover Area School District's North Salem Elementary School because she wanted to be in a larger school that has a football team. She came to Hovind's seminar with her parents and younger brother and said she brought a book along expecting to be bored by the lecture. But she said Hovind was very funny and held her attention.

Most of those who attended, of course, were probably predisposed to listen to Hovind's message favorably -- even if they didn't previously share his views on the New World Order. And thus the far right continues to exert its gravitational pull on mainstream America.



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Weird and Wacky

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Anger at Bin Laden niece's reality TV show

Oliver Burkeman in New York
Tuesday March 21, 2006
The Guardian

The news that Osama bin Laden's niece is to star in a US reality TV show has provoked fury from families of some of those killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The as yet unnamed series, being offered at auction to US television networks, will follow the California-born Wafah Dufour as she follows her "dream to make it in the music business", according to Regan Media, which is producing it.

Ms Dufour, a 27-year-old graduate of Columbia University law school, was born Wafah bin Ladin, the daughter of Carmen bin Ladin, former wife of the al-Qaida leader's half-brother Yeslam. "I understand that when people hear my last name, they have preconceived notions," Ms Dufour said in a statement. "But I was born in America and I love my country."

Article continues
She has never met her uncle, she said, but Regan Media made no effort to deny that she owes her fame to the connection. "Her history and her quest for stardom will make a compelling television series: she is a musician, a young woman, and, most important, a human being," said the company's founder, Judith Regan."She is a young woman who falls in love, has her heart broken, worries about her looks, doesn't always listen to her mother, and hasn't spoken to her father in years."

A spokeswoman for the September 11th Families Association called the show "an absolute disgrace ... we urge every TV network and channel planning to run this series to think again. The very idea that the family of a man with so much blood on his hands should profit from some sort of instant celebrity is an outrage."

In fact, the series will not be Ms Dufour's first brush with celebrity. Last year, she posed for a photoshoot reclining in a bubble bath, wearing only a necklace.



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Aliens gave me psychic powers

By Claire McNeilly
21 March 2006

Patrick King attracted newspaper headlines when he recently predicted a huge bank robbery but he been predicting the future and telling clients secrets from their past for more than 40 years. Claire McNeilly casts her fate to the winds and meets the man who claims he was abducted by aliens at the age of five
IF you have any skeletons hidden in your closet or some dark secret to protect, you might want to stay away from Co Down clairvoyant Patrick King. But if you'd like to know whether your partner is having an affair or if you can really trust a friend, then maybe it might be worth a visit to his home in Holywood ...

After all, the clinical psychologist-turned-fortune teller has been reading his clients' minds, as well as predicting their futures, for over 40 years.

Even an ex-girlfriend of Michael Stone, the notorious Milltown Cemetery murderer, once popped in - Paddy, knew, he says, "because I smelt a terrorist off her".

Then there are those who may be searching for information about a lost loved one and, of course, a few who are looking for love ...

"People of all ages come to see me, from 15 to my oldest client, who's 97," the 58-year-old Manchester University psychology graduate reveals. "And I have a lot of regulars. Everyone wants to know something different. A few come purely to ask if they will be happy, but most of them have secrets."

Indeed, once Paddy, who has one daughter, Debbie (33), consults the tarot cards, his crystal ball, or reads your palm, he claims it can be quite a revelation.

And sometimes, apparently, it only takes one look - when his fourth wife-to-be Esther (52) walked in, for instance, he says: "I told her I was going to be her husband."

Over the years, he claims to have seen some unbelievable things.

"One girl who came for a reading had killed a three-year-old child, and a man had murdered his family and escaped justice.

"These type of people want to know if I know what they've done and if they'll ever be found out."

Of course, among the questions every sceptic asks are: how can one believe him? And how can he possibly know what he claims is true?

"People test me all the time," he protests. "Once a woman swallowed her wedding ring when she tried to hide it! But if you're going to come and try to bluff me, what's the point?"

Where, then, do these so-called revelatory powers come from?

"I don't think clairvoyance is a gift," he replies, "it's something I work on and practise every day. My mum read tea leaves and, as a child, she taught me the basics; it's been a learning curve since then and I've learned from my mistakes."

One such 'mistake', if you could call it that, was his inability to foresee a disaster for a relative who was raped in east Belfast by four men some years ago.

"I didn't know it was going to happen," he admits, "even though I had just left my psychology job to concentrate on fortune telling full time."

At £25 per half hour session, his counsel isn't cheap, but there are some who clearly think it's worth it.

"There are 26 millionaires who come to see me - they usually want to know if the Inland Revenue is going to catch up with them," he says.

"Then there are murderers who want to know if their victim's body will be found.

"Other people have been stealing from their employers ... and I've also done readings for policemen, as well as members of the IRA and UDA."

If - as he claims - his access to sensitive paramilitary information at one point led Special Branch to bug his office, he must be shouldering the weight of withholding the truth?

"Who am I to judge?" he counters. "I don't pass on information, although in the past I have helped the police with murder investigations."

His isn't, obviously, a job for the faint-hearted either.

"You have to be careful what you tell people. I get threats all the time. For example, if I've told a woman her husband is having an affair and she confronts him ..." he trails off.

"I also remember a man coming in with his wife and her sister. I did the women's readings first and when it came to his turn I told him they were both pregnant - by him."

Apart from treading the murky waters of human nature, there is frequently an upside to his profession.

"Sometimes you're helping folk without them realising," he explains. "During one reading I told a woman to insure her husband, because she would have nothing left when he died.

"She replied that he was fighting fit, but did it anyway. A few days later, he had a heart attack and passed away."

Reports in different publications in the past have suggested that there could be some truth in Patrick's predictions.

"A few weeks before a triple killing in Portavogie, a woman visited me. I saw the tragedy written in her cards and I told her," he explains.

Despite that, Elizabeth Downes died, along with her 17-year-old daughter, Joanne, on May 3, 1992. They were both shot dead at the family home by her husband, Stuart, who then turned the gun on himself.

So what's the point of seeing the future, if you can't change what's in store? Especially if you diagnose yourself with throat cancer - as he did recently ("I'm hoping to receive a date for an operation fairly soon").

Is turning to the occult simply a question of faith - or loneliness?

"I don't believe in God. I believe in what I can see and hear; some of which has been terrible," he says.

"Religion has been geared to keep the masses in check; if people didn't believe in Jesus Christ, mayhem would ensue."

He adds: "I'm not close to my family (he has four brothers and five sisters) and I don't have any friends either. Who would want to be friends with someone who can read their mind?"

Patrick started down his chosen path after a supernatural childhood experience.

"One night, when I was about five, I was taken away by a UFO," he says.

"I shared a room with my brother and mummy put us to bed around 8pm. The next thing I knew it was morning ... but I remembered being in a very bright room with several people. They were between 4ft 5ins and 5ft tall, with big faces and big eyes. All I can say is, I came back a clairvoyant."

Before I leave, Paddy is keen to give me an insight into what my destiny holds.

He asks me to pick nine tarot cards, which he reads, along with my palm.

As a qualified psychologist, Patrick can no doubt pick up more than most from appearance and body language - but I still found the experience disconcerting.

What he told me about the future is, well, possible, that I'll meet a gorgeous man (indeed, a pleasant change) and move to England (God help us all).

But the revelations about a past relationship were rather shocking - if what he says is true.

After I leave I'm in limbo for a while.

Still, without wishing to cast aspersions on Paddy's powers, or disparage those who consult him, I can't help remembering an Albanian proverb: there are no scarecrows in the desert.



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Ark's Quantum Quirks

Ark
Signs of the Times
March 21, 2006






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