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Axis of Evil

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Flashback: At What Cost the Israel Lobby?

Jeff Gates
Criminal State
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:41 EDT

More than 46 years ago, President John F. Kennedy sought to preclude a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. In June 1963, he wrote the last in a series of insistent letters to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Those letters sought what Israel now demands of Iran: international inspections of its nuclear facilities. The key difference: Kennedy knew for certain that Israel, while portraying itself a friend and ally, repeatedly lied to Kennedy about its nuclear weapons development at the Dimona reactor in the Negev Desert.

Best estimates point to sometime between 1962 and 1964 when Israel produced its first weapon in what is now a vast nuclear arsenal estimated at 200-400 warheads. Kennedy's letter to Ben-Gurion was anything but friendly. The words he chose were drawn not from diplomacy but from the instructions that a judge gives a jury on criminal culpability. In that brusque letter, the U.S. commander-in-chief insisted that this purported ally prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the Zionist enclave was not developing nuclear weapons.

Jeff Gates
Criminal State
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:23 EDT

The Nobel Committee again piqued the interest of those who marvel at the impact of an annual ritual of global branding that in 1973 labeled Henry Kissinger a peace laureate! As with many aspects of unconventional warfare, what emerges in the foreground often obscures behavior that remains concealed in the background.

Anyone paying attention knows that pro-Israelis manipulated the intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq. That same source is now hoping to expand this war to Iran - without being detected. In an irony of epic proportions, this award may enable that deceit.

Pundits charge that Barack Obama was given the 2009 peace prize for Not Being Bush. The Nobel Committee cited Obama's multilateralism in contrast to Bush's unilateralism. Yet the same pro-Israeli networks that deployed phony intelligence to manipulate decision-making in the Bush presidency remain active inside the Obama presidency. At least Bush had the mass murder of 9-11 to rationalize his choices.

The manipulation of consensus beliefs discredited the U.S. when it went to war on fixed intelligence. A similar mental manipulation generated consensus support for trade and financial policies that systematically devastated the U.S. economy. The challenge for Tel Aviv is how best to continue its agenda for Greater Israel now that the manipulation of public opinion has grown more transparent - and when entire communities, reeling from the impact of massive financial frauds, are aware that something fundamental is amiss.

Khalid Amayreh
The Peoples Voice
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:17 EST

Ashkenazi

There seems to be a perfect conformity between Gabi Ashkenazi and his last name. The Israeli chief of staff is considered one of the main Israeli war criminals responsible for the virtual genocide against the Gaza Strip during the past winter. On his murderous hands, he carries tons of innocent blood, including that of more than 340 children, killed in Israel's pornographic bombing of civilian neighborhood.

Last week, Ashkenazi was quoted as saying that Israel was likely to wage another quasi holocaust on Gaza, adding that the Israeli occupation army would enter the innermost corners and streets of the coastal territory.

As a nefarious mass murderer, Ashkenazi, like the rest of Israeli war criminals, ought to be in the Hague preparing his defense against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. After all the crimes he perpetrated put him on equal footing with Nazi war criminals who had stood trial for their own crimes against humanity during the Second World War.

Israel Lobby Routs Obama As Dollar Dies

Paul Craig Roberts
The Peoples Voice
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:00 EST

It did not take the Israel Lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration's "no new settlements" position. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel's latest victory over the US government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

In May President Obama read the Israelis the riot act, telling the Israeli government that he was serious about ending the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians and that a lasting peace agreement required the Israeli government to abandon all construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Best of the Web: Beliefs: The Power Behind Unending Warfare

Jeff Gates
Veterans Today
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:43 EST

In unconventional warfare, manipulated beliefs are used to displace inconvenient facts. When waging war by way of deception, false beliefs are an oft-deployed weapon. Recall Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories?

Iraqi meetings in Prague with Al Qaeda? Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium from Niger? All these claims were reported as true. All were later proven false or, worse, fabricated. Yet all were widely believed. Only the yellowcake uranium was conceded as bogus before the invasion of Iraq. As the U.S. crafted its response to the provocation of a mass murder on U.S. soil, those widely shared beliefs shaped a consensus to wage war on a nation that had no hand in it.

A similar deception - traceable to the same source - is now working to expand this war to Iran. Based on fast-emerging events, the next conflict could include Pakistan.

The modern battlefield has shifted. Ground warfare is now secondary. Likewise air strikes, combat troops, naval support and even covert operations. Those physical operations are all downstream of information operations. Manipulated beliefs come first. Psyops precede bombs and bullets. Hardware ranks a distant third.

First and foremost are the consensus shapers and thought manipulators who target perceptions and opinions until a critical mass of agreement is reached. Then comes war. Those skilled at such duplicity induced coalition troops to war in Iraq. Knowledge was their target. Manipulate thought and all else was downstream.

Mark Glenn
The Ugly Truth
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:34 EST

What? What?? Whaaaaat?!?!?!

No, this can't be. According to an article appearing in one of Israel's biggest mainstream news outlets - Haaretz - Israeli Military Intelligence is AT THIS VERY MOMENT trying to "figure out" what went wrong in 1954 with something known as the "Lavon Affair", described by the news outlet as a "sabotage operation" by Israel in "bombing theaters, post offices and U.S. and British institutions, and making it seem as though Egypt was behind the bombings".

Ohhhh, this simply can't be, or as the character Vizzini infamously said over and over again in that adorable movie the Princess Bride - "INCONCEIVABLE". Israel - the apple of God's eye - deliberately bomb American buildings with the intention of blaming it on her Arab enemies in order to achieve a desired political outcome? Deliberately put innocent civilian life in jeopardy with an overt act of state terrorism?

She would NEVER do something like this, and especially not to her bestest buddy in da whole-wide woyld, America. After all, the Jews are God's chosen people, and something like this would be a sin and they - the Jewish people - don't sin.

In a word - INCONCEIVABLE.

Emily Badger
Alternet
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:20 EST

President Obama has had a hard time dislodging misperceptions about his health care proposal - those stubborn beliefs that there are death panels and free care for illegal aliens that don't actually exist in the legislation. Recent research about the way people defend their faith in false information, though, suggests calling out the inaccuracies may not be all that effective in converting the suspicious.

Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence - even when it came from President Bush himself.

Of 49 people included in the study who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn't true.

Telegraph.co.uk
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:31 EST

Former top executives at Blackwater have said the security firm sent $1 million to its Iraq office with the intention of paying off officials in the country who were angry about the fatal shootings of 17 civilians by Blackwater employees, The New York Times reported.

Four former executives described the plan under the condition of anonymity, the newspaper said.

Iraqis had long complained about ground operations by the North Carolina-based company, now known as Xe Corp even before the shooting by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007 left 17 civilians dead, further strained relations between Baghdad and Washington and led US prosecutors to bring charges against the Blackwater guards involved.

Ma'an News Agency
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:07 EST

Richard Golstone, the celebrated war crimes prosecutor who lead UN inquiries on Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Gaza, is obsessed with Israel and cares little for justice, according to Israeli President Shimon Peres.

"Goldstone is a small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence," Peres was quoted as telling Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Wednesday.

The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported on Thursday that Peres termed Goldstone's UN-backed fact-finding inquiry on alleged war crimes committed in Gaza was "a one-sided mission to hurt Israel... If anyone should be investigated, it should be him."

Aram Roston
The Nation
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:28 EST

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime's ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat's right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Comment: The US doesn't know how to fix it because the US isn't concerned with trying to "fix" it: this a CIA-led paramilitary "war" in which the "enemy" is actively recruited, trained and funded by US forces, invariably under cover of "counter-insurgency operations." The 'Taliban' are after all Our Terrorists.

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"The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty" Adlai E. Stevenson

"There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle." Bill Moyers

"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823

"A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press, must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know.": Murray I. Gurfein

One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free. N.A. Scott