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Editorial: Do America and Israel Want ME Engulfed by Civil War?
Jonathan Cook
12/19/06
Why would the US want and intend civil war raging across the Middle East, apparently threatening strategic interests like oil supplies and the security of a key regional ally, Israel?
The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration's favoured model across the region.
Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly planning on behalf of the US. The reverberations would likely consume the region.
Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the West's failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East. Were we more engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more aggressive in opposing Syrian manipulations in Lebanon, or more hands-on in Iraq, the sectarian fighting could be prevented. The implication being, of course, that, without the West's benevolent guidance, Arab societies are incapable of dragging themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.
But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have been engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash of political ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about whether to submit to, or resist, American and Israeli interference. Where the factions derive their funding and legitimacy from -- increasingly a choice between the US or Iran -- seems to determine where they stand in this confrontation.
Palestine is in ferment because ordinary Palestinians are torn between their democratic wish to see Israeli occupation resisted -- in free elections they showed they believed Hamas the party best placed to realise that goal -- and the basic need to put food on the table for their families. The combined Israeli and international economic siege of the Hamas government, and the Palestinian population, has made a bitter internal struggle for control of resources inevitable.
Lebanon is falling apart because the Lebanese are divided: some believe that the country's future lies with attracting Western capital and welcoming Washington's embrace, while others regard America's interest as cover for Israel realising its long-standing design to turn Lebanon into a vassal state, with or without a military occupation. Which side the Lebanese choose in the current stand-off reflects their judgment of how plausible are claims of Western and Israeli benevolence.
And the slaughter in Iraq is not simply the result of lawlessness -- as is commonly portrayed -- but also about rival groups, the nebulous "insurgents", employing various brutal and conflicting strategies: trying to oust the Anglo-American occupiers and punish local Iraqis suspected of collaborating with them; extracting benefits from the puppet Iraqi regime; and jockeying for positions of influence before the inevitable grand American exit.
All of these outcomes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq could have been foreseen -- and almost certainly were. More than that, it looks increasingly like the growing tensions and carnage were planned. Rather than an absence of Western intervention being the problem, the violence and fragmentation of these societies seems to be precisely the goal of the intervention.
Evidence has emerged in Britain that suggests such was the case in Iraq. Testimony given by a senior British official to the 2004 Butler inquiry investigating intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was belatedly published last week, after attempts by the Foreign Office to hush it up.
Carne Ross, a diplomat who helped to negotiate several UN security council resolutions on Iraq, told the inquiry that British and US officials knew very well that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that bringing him down would lead to chaos.
"I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said, adding: "At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."
The obvious question, then, is why would the US want and intend civil war raging across the Middle East, apparently threatening strategic interests like oil supplies and the security of a key regional ally, Israel?
Until the presidency of Bush Jnr, the American doctrine in the Middle East had been to install or support strongmen, containing them or replacing them when they fell out of favour. So why the dramatic and, at least ostensibly, incomprehensible shift in policy?
Why allow Yasser Arafat's isolation and humiliation in the occupied territories, followed by Mahmoud Abbas's, when both could have easily been cultivated as strongmen had they been given the tools they were implicitly promised by the Oslo process: a state, the pomp of office and the coercive means to impose their will on rival groups like Hamas? With almost nothing to show for years of concessions to Israel, both looked to the Palestinian public more like lapdogs rather than rottweilers.
Why make a sudden and unnecessary fuss about Syria's interference in Lebanon, an interference that the West originally encouraged as a way to keep the lid on sectarian violence? Why oust Damascus from the scene and then promote a "Cedar Revolution" that pandered to the interests of only one section of Lebanese society and continued to ignore the concerns of the largest and most dissatisfied community, the Shia? What possible outcome could there be but simmering resentment and the threat of violence?
And why invade Iraq on the hollow pretext of locating WMDs and then dislodge its dictator, Saddam Hussein, who for decades had been armed and supported by the US and had very effectively, if ruthlessly, held Iraq together? Again from Carne's testimony, it is clear that no one in the intelligence community believed Saddam really posed a threat to the West. Even if he needed "containing" or possibly replacing, as Bush's predecessors appeared to believe, why did the president decide simply to overthrow him, leaving a power void at Iraq's heart?
The answer appears to be related to the rise of the neocons, who finally grasped power with the election of President Bush. Israel's most popular news website, Ynet, recently observed of the neocons: "Many are Jews who share a love for Israel."
The neocons' vision of American global supremacy is intimately tied to, and dependent on, Israel's regional supremacy. It is not so much that the neocons choose to promote Israel's interests above those of America as that they see the two nations' interests as inseparable and identical.
Although usually identified with the Israeli right, the neocons' political alliance with the Likud mainly reflects their support for adopting belligerent means to achieve their policy goals rather than the goals themselves.
The consistent aim of Israeli policy over decades, from the left and right, has been to acquire more territory at the expense of its neighbours and entrench its regional supremacy through "divide and rule", particularly of its weakest neighbours such as the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It has always abominated Arab nationalism, especially of the Baathist variety in Iraq and Syria, because it appeared immune to Israeli intrigues.
For many years Israel favoured the same traditional colonial approach the West used in the Middle East, where Britain, France and later the US supported autocratic leaders, usually from minority populations, to rule over the majority in the new states they had created, whether Christians in Lebanon, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, or Hashemites in Jordan. The majority was thereby weakened, and the minority forced to become dependent on colonial favours to maintain its privileged position.
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, for example, was similarly designed to anoint a Christian strongman and US stooge, Bashir Gemayel, as a compliant president who would agree to an anti-Syrian alliance with Israel.
But decades of controlling and oppressing Palestinian society allowed Israel to develop a different approach to divide and rule: what might be termed organised chaos, or the "discord" model, one that came to dominate first its thinking and later that of the neocons.
During its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel preferred discord to a strongman, aware that a pre-requisite of the latter would be the creation of a Palestinian state and its furnishing with a well-armed security force. Neither option was ever seriously contemplated.
Only briefly under international pressure was Israel forced to relent and partially adopt the strongman model by allowing the return of Yasser Arafat from exile. But Israel's reticence in giving Arafat the means to assert his rule and suppress his rivals, such as Hamas, led inevitably to conflict between the Palestinian president and Israel that ended in the second intifada and the readoption of the discord model.
This latter approach exploits the fault lines in Palestinian society to exacerbate tensions and violence. Initially Israel achieved this by promoting rivalry between regional and clan leaders who were forced to compete for Israel's patronage. Later Israel encouraged the emergence of Islamic extremism, especially in the form of Hamas, as a counterweight to the growing popularity of the secular nationalism of Arafat's Fatah party.
Israel's discord model is now reaching its apotheosis: low-level and permanent civil war between the old guard of Fatah and the upstarts of Hamas. This kind of Palestinian in-fighting usefully depletes the society's energies and its ability to organise against the real enemy: Israel and its enduring occupation.
The neocons, it appears, have been impressed with this model and wanted to export it to other Middle Eastern states. Under Bush they sold it to the White House as the solution to the problems of Iraq and Lebanon, and ultimately of Iran and Syria too.
The provoking of civil war certainly seemed to be the goal of Israel's assault on Lebanon over the summer. The attack failed, as even Israelis admit, because Lebanese society rallied behind Hizbullah's impressive show of resistance rather than, as was hoped, turning on the Shia militia.
Last week the Israeli website Ynet interviewed Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli citizen and co-founder of MEMRI, a service translating Arab leaders' speeches that is widely suspected of having ties with Israel's security services. She is also the wife of David Wurmser, a senior neocon adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Meyrav Wurmser revealed that the American Administration had publicly dragged its feet during Israel's assault on Lebanon because it was waiting for Israel to expand its attack to Syria.
"The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians ... The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space ... They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran's] strategic and important ally [Syria] should be hit."
Wurmser continued: "It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and [changed] the strategic map in the Middle East."
Neocons talk a great deal about changing maps in the Middle East. Like Israel's dismemberment of the occupied territories into ever-smaller ghettos, Iraq is being severed into feuding mini-states. Civil war, it is hoped, will redirect Iraqis' energies away from resistance to the US occupation and into more negative outcomes.
Similar fates appear to be awaiting Iran and Syria, at least if the neocons, despite their waning influence, manage to realise their vision in Bush's last two years.
The reason is that a chaotic and feuding Middle East, although it would be a disaster in the view of most informed observers, appears to be greatly desired by Israel and its neocon allies. They believe that the whole Middle East can be run successfully the way Israel has run its Palestinian populations inside the occupied territories, where religious and secular divisions have been accentuated, and inside Israel itself, where for many decades Arab citizens were "de-Palestinianised" and turned into identity-starved and quiescent Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouin.
That conclusion may look foolhardy, but then again so does the White House's view that it is engaged in a "clash of civilisations" which it can win with a "war on terror".
All states are capable of acting in an irrational or self-destructive manner, but Israel and its supporters may be more vulnerable to this failing than most. That is because Israelis' perception of their region and their future has been grossly distorted by the official state ideology, Zionism, with its belief in Israel's inalienable right to preserve itself as an ethnic state; its confused messianic assumptions, strange for a secular ideology, about Jews returning to a land promised by God; and its contempt for, and refusal to understand, everything Arab or Muslim.
If we expect rational behaviour from Israel or its neocon allies, more fool us.
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Editorial: Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History
by Stephen Lendman
20 December 2006
Well almost, as explained below. Hugo Chavez Frias' reelection on December 3 stands out when compared to the greatest landslide presidential victories in US history. Except for the close race in 1812 and the electoral deadlock in 1800 decided by the House of Representatives choosing Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr, the very earliest elections here weren't hardly partisan contests at all as the Democrat-Republican party of Jefferson and Madison was dominant and had everything its own way. It was like that through the election of 1820 when James Monroe ran virtually unopposed winning over 80% of the vote. A consistent pattern of real competitive elections only began with the one held in 1824, and from that time to the present Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide victory beat them all.
The nation's first president, George Washington, had no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all the votes. His "elections" were more like coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as an elected leader and not as a monarch which Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the nation's first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay preferred and one aligned with the British monarchy. They also were nationalists believing in a militarily strong central government with little regard for the rights of the separate states.
Most of them were dubious democrats as well who believed for the nation to be stable it should be run by elitists (the way it is today) separate from what Adams arrogantly called "the rabble." And John Jay was very explicit about how he felt saying "The people who own the country ought to run it." Today they do. Adams showed his disdain for ordinary people (and his opposition) when as president he signed into law the Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from dangerous aliens (today's "terrorists") and that criminalized any criticism of his administration (the kind George Bush calls traitorous).
Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free expression. It helped him and his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800 that led to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful opposition and their demise as a political party after the war of 1812. It meant that from 1800 - 1820, after Washington's two unopposed elections, presidential contests were lopsided affairs (except for the two mentioned above), the "loyal opposition" was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans weren't challenged until the party split into factions and ran against each other in 1824. Then Democrat party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It's only from that period forward that any real comparison can be made between Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide on December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And doing it shows one thing. In all US landslide electoral victories from then till now, Chavez outdid them all, but you won't ever hear that reported by the dominant corporate-controlled media.
Earlier, there might not have been a basis for comparison had Washington chosen to be president for life as the Federalists preferred. If he'd done it, he could have stayed on by acclamation and those holding office after him might have done the same. Wisely, however, he decided eights years was enough and stepped down at the end of his second term in office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until Franklin Roosevelt went against tradition running and winning the presidency four times.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1951 settled the issue providing that: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
The US Constitution specifies that the president and vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the states. Article Two, Section One says: "Each state shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The electors then meet in their respective states after the popular vote to choose a president and vice-president.
That's how it's been done since George Washington was first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his vice-president. The method of choosing state electors changed later on, but the US system choosing presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral College (a term unmentioned in the Constitution) of all the state electors has remained to this day, to the distress of many who justifiably believe it's long past time this antiquated and undemocratic system be abolished even though it's unimaginable a state's electors would vote against the majority popular vote in their states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it was also unimaginable that five members of the US Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a presidential election to choose the candidate they preferred even though he was the loser - but they did, and the rest is history.
Hugo Chavez Frias' Electoral Victory Majority Greater Than For Any US President - Since 1820
Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the right to vote for the first time ever.
As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.
Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate. In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier, it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years to get.
Back at the republic's birth, only adult white male property-owners could vote. It took until 1810 to eliminate the last religious prerequisite to voting and until 1850 before property ownership and tax requirements were dropped allowing all adult white males the franchise. It wasn't until 1913 and the passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters could elect senators who up to then were elected by state legislatures. Native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived and took it from them, couldn't vote until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted all Native peoples the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections. It didn't matter that this was their country, and it's they who should have had to right to decide what rights the white settler population had instead of the reverse.
In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory poll taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections ended poll tax requirements in all elections for the four remaining southern states still using them including George Bush's home state of Texas. In 1971, the 26th amendment set the minimum voting age at 18, and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein ruled residency requirements for voting in state and local elections were unconstitutional and suggested 30 days was a fair period.
This history shows how unfair laws were and still are in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral process.
That freedom has been severely compromised today in the US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections Since Contests Began After 1820
Six US presidential elections stand out especially for the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.
1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas day, 1921.
Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson who took the country to the war he promised to keep us out of. The economy was also in recession, the country and Congress were mainly isolationist, and the main order of business was business and the need to get on with it and make it healthy again. It turned out to be the start of the "roaring twenties" that like the 1990s "roared" mainly for the privileged. It also was a time of scandal and corruption best remembered by the Teapot Dome affair of 1922 that involved Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall's leasing oil reserve rights on public land in Wyoming and California without competitive bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts today to favored corporations) and getting large illegal gifts from the companies in return that resulted in the crime committed.
Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the White House before everything came to a head with Fall eventually found guilty, fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison making him the first ever presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for offenses while in office.
2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number one is after the FDR years.
3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management, something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting them including their union-busting practices.
4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl" campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s, Republicans had a hard enough time competing with Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being the exception because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular Korean war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it worse by being a conservative before his time and a hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its early stages but would be an act of lunacy any time.
5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone electroshock therapy for depression.
It proved a decisive factor in McGovern's defeat, but oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough at that time to sweep to a landslide win only to come a cropper in the Watergate scandal that began almost innocently in June, 1972, months before the election, but spiralled out of control in its aftermath along with growing anger about the war. It drove Richard Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974 and gave the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald Ford. It made him the nation's only unelected president up to the time five Supreme Court justices gave the office to George Bush violating the law of the land they showed contempt for.
6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense of the middle class.
In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W. Bush.
One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing to genuflect to the country's power establishment.
While Time was honoring the free use of the internet, its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now know it.
Time also failed to report they held an online poll for "Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here - in the online space the magazine rates so highly:
Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had an unprecedented decline.
It shows in how wide the income disparity is between those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total, including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.
This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's, engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels of income they now receive.
Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26 million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.
It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market" capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left far behind.
It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free market" capitalism.
Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.
A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez
Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years, to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's wealth for themselves and their US allies.
Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.
In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the legislature. They in the National Assembly have the authority to make appointments to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential social services and the right to participate in how the country is run. The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden ones in the US.
While the ruling authority in Washington systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control, and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories put under worker control.
In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5% of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.
These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the 21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen" the Bolivarian spirit.
Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a "unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.
Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt sure to come at some point.
He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and Globovision.
The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the next level.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Zionist Killing Machine
Rival Palestinian forces withdraw from Gaza streets
Reuters
20/12/2006
Hamas policemen and rival forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas withdrew from Gaza's streets on Wednesday as a fresh ceasefire aimed at halting a slide to civil war appeared to hold.
Two fighters from Abbas's Fatah movement died from wounds sustained in a clash late on Tuesday that coincided with the announcement of the Egyptian-mediated truce, relatives said.
That raised to 10 the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since Abbas called on Saturday for early elections to try to break a political deadlock with the Hamas government and get crippling Western sanctions lifted.
Palestinian sources said they expected Abbas would hold a long-awaited meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the coming days. Olmert's spokeswoman had no comment.
While such a meeting would be seen as a possible spur to reviving peace talks between Israel and the moderate Abbas, Olmert has said the Palestinians could expect little until a soldier held captive in Gaza since June was freed.
Israel refuses to deal with the Hamas Islamist movement, which formally seeks the Jewish state's destruction.
A senior aide to Abbas said the president planned to issue a decree next week to lay the legal foundations for the fresh parliamentary and presidential elections, which Hamas has described as a "coup" and unconstitutional.
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Two Killed After Cease Fire Announced on Wednesday
IMEMC & Agencies
20 December 2006
Two Palestinian residents were killed early on Wednesday and at least six others wounded in renewed gun battles between militants in Gaza.
Local medical sources reported that two unidentified people were killed and seven others wounded in armed clashed in the Alsabra neighborhood of Gaza City, just a few hours after all parties, under Egyptian mediation, agreed late Tuesday night to halt all forms of tension in Gaza and to immediately back dialogue to resolve their differences.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, agreed yesterday evening to work on reaching a national unity government through open talks, after both Fatah and Hamas failed to conclude such a government over the previous 9 months.
Recent clashes in Gaza came after Palestinian President Abbas called for early presidential and legislative elections, while the Hamas-led government refused. The Palestinian PM announced official refusal of that call in a televised speech yesterday.
Comment: Gun battles between militants? Really? How can this be when the leaders of both factions have declared a ceasefire and instructed their members to withdraw from the streets? What is not being reported is that there are more than two factions at work in the occupied Palestinian territories, there is a third: Israel.
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Palestinian Ministry of health denounces shooting at their ambulance
Maannews
20/12/2006
The Palestinian ministry of health on Monday condemned the shooting by unknown gunmen at one of their ambulances at the At-Tuffah neighbourhood in Gaza City. In their statement, the ministry of health said that the staff of the ambulance were in jeopardy.
Comment: "Unknown gunmen"? Hmmm... it seems that these "unknown gunmen" are determined to keep the tension high between Hamas and Fatah. So tell us, who benefits?
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Israeli High Court Backs Military On Its Policy of 'Targeted Killings'
Washington Post
December 15, 2006
JERUSALEM - Israel's high court upheld Thursday the military's right to assassinate members of groups the state defines as terrorist organizations, but cautioned that such operations should always be weighed first against the potential harm to civilian bystanders and the human rights of the target.
The unanimous decision departs little from guidelines the military says it already follows in carrying out "targeted killings," the terminology used by the government and by the court in its ruling. But it does say commanders should allow an independent investigation to follow each assassination and recommends that the military compensate "innocent civilians" harmed in the operation.
Under current practice, Israel's military works with Shin Bet, the domestic security service, to compile lists of Palestinians who are influential or active figures in armed groups. Using eavesdropping equipment, aerial surveillance and informants, air force pilots or drone operators receive detailed information about a target's movements, most commonly in the Gaza Strip, where the army no longer operates regularly on the ground.
Military officers say the decision to strike is made -- sometimes in a matter of minutes -- by balancing the threat posed by the target against the potential for injuring bystanders. Many of the strikes have killed civilians in addition to targeted individuals.
Israeli military officials said they would review the court's findings in coming days. But one senior officer who specializes in matters of international law said the ruling, although vague in places, appeared to be a "validation" of existing policies regarding assassinations, and he expected few new restrictions to be implemented.
The decision states that military commanders must have "strong and convincing" information before ordering an assassination, and should not do so "if a less harmful means can be employed," namely, arrest. The ruling also says that "every effort must be made to minimize harm to innocent civilians."
"The need to balance casts a heavy load on those whose job it is to provide security," the three-judge panel wrote. "Not every efficient means is also legal. The ends do not justify the means."
The ruling has been awaited outside Israel for what it might add to the debate underway in many countries, including the United States, over how to ensure basic human rights in what the Bush administration calls the "war on terrorism." Following Israel's lead, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies have also used drones to carry out assassinations, including a November 2002 strike on a car in Yemen that killed six suspected members of al-Qaeda.
The decision, one of the last to be issued by retiring Chief Justice Aharon Barak, represented a disappointing defeat for Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations that have called the tactic, pioneered during the most recent Palestinian uprising, a war crime.
Hawkish lawmakers and officials from Israel's security establishment expressed pleasant surprise at the ruling, given that Barak, an activist judge throughout his decades-long career, has often come down against the military in cases where human rights and security measures appear to conflict. The court said the state "must balance security needs and human rights."
The ruling stemmed from a petition filed by two human rights organizations -- one Israeli, one Palestinian -- challenging the state's right to assassinate members of Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other armed groups fighting the Jewish state. In its decision, the court said the "starting point of the legal analysis is that between Israel and the terrorist organizations active in the Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip" -- referring to the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war -- "there exists a continuous situation of armed conflict."
The ruling states that international law applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying "it is not an internal state conflict that is subject to the rules of law enforcement."
The practice of targeted assassination began officially in November 2000, when an Israeli helicopter fired missiles at a car carrying Hussein Abayat, a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, near the city of Bethlehem. The strike killed Abayat and two bystanders.
Israeli security officials have argued that targeted killings are among their most effective tools against the armed groups, which have carried out scores of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, fight from civilian areas and employ other guerrilla tactics that pose challenges to Israel's conventional army.
But many of the assassinations have been conducted by Israeli attack helicopters, drones or fighter aircraft, and civilian casualties are common.. B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, reports that in operations over the past six years Israeli security forces have assassinated 210 intended targets but also killed 129 bystanders.
"Anyone who thinks that in this kind of warfare things cannot go wrong and mistakes cannot happen does not know in what world he is living," Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel's National Security Council, told Israel's Army Radio. "Compare the terrorist attacks that were taking place only four years ago with those taking place today. In the last analysis, we are now living in an incomparably better situation now than what we lived in then. How do you think that came about? It is partly due to targeted killings."
Barak, who once ruled that Israeli officials could not use torture during interrogations even to stop imminent suicide bombings, rejected in Thursday's decision the concept of "unlawful combatants" employed by the Bush administration to justify detaining suspects without charges.
Instead, the court decided that "members of the terrorist organizations are not combatants," but civilians who relinquish certain legal protections when they participate directly in "hostilities" intended to "harm the army or civilians."
By way of offering guidelines to military commanders responsible for ordering assassinations, the decision says that "shooting at a terrorist sniper shooting at soldiers or civilians from his porch is permitted, even if an innocent passerby is harmed. Such harm conforms to the principle of proportionality.
"However, that is not the case if the building is bombed from the air and scores of its residents and passersby are harmed," it continues. "Between these two extremes are the hard cases. Thus a meticulous examination of every case is required."
In reviewing specific cases, the ruling said, "the Court will ask itself if a reasonable military commander could have made the decision which was made." Human rights lawyers criticized that advice, along with several other aspects of the decision, as overly vague.
"Here the court has done something that will create a cloud of illegality over many missions, because the officer will not know what is allowed and what is prohibited," said Michael Sfard, the attorney for the petitioners in the case. "When you go to court, at least you expect to get a clear ruling."
Sfard also represents petitioners in the case of Salah Shehada, a Hamas military commander killed in July 2002 when an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on his house in Gaza, killing him and 14 others, including nine children. Sfard said he will seek a new hearing "on the basis of this ruling, which obliges the court to order a criminal investigation."
Comment: Other than the face that it uses paramoralistic reasoning and logic to condone premeditated murder of civilians by the Israeli military, the most interesting thing about this debate by Zionists on "targetted killings" is that it takes Israel's righteousness and the "terroristic" nature of Palestinians as fact, when in reality, Israel is the aggressor and the one that is acting outside of all known laws. As for the Israeli general's claims that life in Israel is now more safe because of targeted murder; the reality of the situation is that Israel was behind 99% of attacks, "suicide" or otherwise, inside Israel in the last 6 years, with the reduction in such attacks in recent months being a function of the decision by Israeli internal intelligence agencies to cease such fake "suicide" bombings in order to "prove" that their policy of murdering innocent Palestinians is worth it. You get the "logic", psychopathic as it is.
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Israeli troops murder 14-year-old Palestinian girl, 2 others, in West Bank
12/20/2006
UPI
TEL AVIV, Israel -- Israeli troops Tuesday killed three Palestinians, including a 14-year-old girl, as rival Fatah and Hamas fight in the Palestinian territories.
The girl, identified as Daha Abdul Kader, and a 12-year-old friend who was seriously injured, were shot while approaching Israel's security barrier near Tul Karem in the West Bank.
The Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper said the soldiers saw suspicious people approach and opened fire.
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Israeli Army Abducts Eight Palestinian Men During Morning Invasion in the West Bank
IMEMC & Agencies
20 December 2006
The Israeli Army invaded several cities in the West Bank and abducted eight Palestinian men on Wednesday at dawn.
Israeli troops invaded several parts of the southern West Bank city of Hebron and abducted two Palestinians. Mazin Ighnimat, 28, was taken away by the Israeli soldiers when they raided the village of Surif, west of Hebron after searching a number of houses there. Meanwhile, another Israeli force stormed the villages of Yatta and Al-Thahriya, south of Hebron city, searched homes and farms, and took Osama Al-Amour, 24, from Yatta to an unknown destination.
Elsewhere, in the northern West Bank city of Ramallah, the Israeli army surrounded the home of Ahmad Al-Atownah, 33, deputy assistant in the local government ministry of Ramallah. Soldiers stormed Atownah's home and forced his family into one room of the house while searching the remainder of the home, then left taking Al-Atownah with them to an unknown detention camp, the family reported.
In Nablus city, also in the north of the West Bank, Israeli Army Forces invaded the city and the nearby Askar refugee camp, searched several homes, and took Wajdi Al-Affouri, 25, Mohammed Al-Mansi, 23, and Zekki Al-Tashtoush, 19, to unknown destinations, eyewitnesses reported.
Moreover, Israeli troops attacked and searched residents homes in the northern part of Tulkarem city and the village of Ateel also north of Tulkarem and abducted Tariq Zahran, 21, and Misad Abu Musah after searching both of their homes, local sources reported.
Israeli Army spokesperson stated that the army invaded several parts of the West Bank looking to abduct individuals the army states are wanted men.
Comment: Hmmm...we wonder what the real cause of problems in the Middle East is....any ideas?
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Israeli Army Assassinates Two More Palestinians in the West Bank
IMEMC & Agencies
20 December 2006
Local Palestinian sources reported that an Israeli army convoy invaded the village of Siliet Al Harthia, surrounded a house in the center of the village and clashed with the besieged resistance fighters located inside the home killing two of them.
The Israeli Army stormed the village of Siliet Al Harthia near the northern West Bank city of Jenin and killed two Palestinians on Wednesday morning.
Medical sources identified the two Palestinians killed as Hussam Al Aifie and Salah Fawastah, both were said to be fighters for Al-Quds Brigades which is the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad movement. During the gun fight, an additional two activists were also injured and then abducted by the invading Israeli troops.
This is the third assassination attack Israeli forces have conducted in the Northern West Bank areas in less than 24 hours. On Tuesday morning, Israeli undercover agents killed one Palestinian resistance fighter in Nablus city and another undercover force killed another resistance fighter in Tulkarem city on Tuesday afternoon.
The Israeli Army has apparently resumed the policy of extra-judicial killings aimed at Palestinian leadership and resistance fighters. This came shortly after several Israeli human rights organizations raised the case against the army's use of these types of assassination policies. That argument was rejected by the highest Israeli Supreme Court which opens the door for the army to conduct such assaults in Palestinian territories based on the decisions taken by Israeli Army Officers. This is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention governing human rights, which guarantees the rights of any person suspected of a crime to have a fair, just and legal trial.
Comment: Palestinian territory has been expropriated by Israel and it regularly murders Palestinian civilians, in response to this, Palestinians arm themselves and fight back, yet Israel does not permit such defense of life and livelihood, and anyone involved is a "terrorist" subject to summary execution. Fair, isn't it. Now, tell us again, what is the real source of the "Middle East crisis"?
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Russia Concerned Over Middle East Turmoil, Pledges Support, Putin Assures Syria's al-Assad
Created: 19.12.2006 15:55 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:07 MSK
MosNews
Russian President Vladimir Putin has voiced concern at the turmoil in the Middle East and stressed Moscow's desire for a diplomatic role in the region, as he held talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the AFP news agency reports.
"The situation in the region remains tense. We see that the region is practically moving from one conflict to another and that cannot but concern us," Putin said at the Kremlin meeting Tuesday.
Noting that he had recently hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, Putin said: "We continue in the most active way possible to participate in the Middle East peace process and continue to have contacts with all the political forces in Palestine".
Al-Assad responded by hailing Russia's efforts: "Our cooperation has become firmer recently and one of the aims of my visit is to widen that cooperation in different areas. We have a lot of areas where we can cooperate," al-Assad said. "With our efforts we play an important role in ensuring the stability of the region and we will orient others to act with the same aim," he told Putin.
Russia has been trying to restore something of its Soviet-era influence in the Middle East and the Kommersant newspaper said Putin would seek the Syrian leader's support for a long-standing Russian bid to host a Middle East conference.
News reports said earlier that Putin's talks with al-Assad would range from the situation in the Palestinian territories to Lebanon and Iraq. Russia is a member of the so-called Middle East diplomatic quartet together with the European Union, the United Nations and the United States.
But the United States and Israel have resisted the idea of Russia hosting a Middle East conference, which Moscow hopes would bring together arch foes such as Iran and Israel. Although it is relatively close to Israel, Moscow was at the forefront of objections to Israel's offensive against Lebanon's pro-Syrian Hezbollah in July-August.
Russian weapons sales to Syria were also likely to be a theme, analysts said. In an interview Monday with the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper, Syrian Vice President Faruq al-Shara hinted that Syria would like to buy more Russian weapons systems -- a trade that has angered Israel and raised eyebrows in Washington.
Kommersant said Damascus is considering buying MiG-29SMT fighter jets from Russia as well as possibly Amur-1650 submarines, Yak-130 planes and additional Pantsir-C1 air defence systems. Kommersant said Russia was looking at possibly expanding a supply base in the Syrian port of Tartus used by the Russian navy and previously the Soviet navy, with a view to turning it into a fully-fledged base and foothold in the Mediterranean for Russia's navy.
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Israel arms sales peak despite Lebanon war fallout
17/12/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)
Occupied Jerusalem: Israel's defence exports hit record levels in 2006, despite predictions they would be affected by the Israeli military's tactical setbacks during its war in Lebanon.
Foreign analysts said the month-long offensive risked tainting the "battle-proven" reputation of Israeli weaponry.
Intense scrutiny fell on Israeli air force systems such as technology designed to reduce the time taken for warplanes or helicopter gunships to detect and attack threats on the ground.
Despite this, Israel's Defence Ministry said that by the end of November arms firms had sealed $4.1 billion in new foreign orders for 2006, surpassing the previous peak of $4.02 billion reached in the same period in 2002.
Ministry spokeswoman Rachel Naidek-Ashkenazi said that although final 2006 figures would not be available until next year, she expected the upswing in sales to continue through December.
She acknowledged that international defence deals often take years to put together and the impact of the Lebanon war on Israeli clients might not yet have been felt.
However, she added, "We expect the pattern of increased sales to continue, unaffected by the recent campaign in Lebanon. Clients are prudent. They know they can trust battle-proven experience, and they go to the trouble of finding out the facts."
Comment: The war in Labanon as marketing... get us a sick bag.
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Jewish Woman beaten on Jerusalem bus for refusing to move to rear seat
Haaretz
17/12/2006
A woman who reported a vicious attack by an ad-hoc "modesty patrol" on a Jerusalem bus last month is now lining up support for her case and may be included in a petition to the High Court of Justice over the legality of sex-segregated buses.
Miriam Shear says she was traveling to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City early on November 24 when a group of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men attacked her for refusing to move to the back of the Egged No. 2 bus. She is now in touch with several legal advocacy and women's organizations, and at the same time, waiting for the police to apprehend her attackers.
In her first interview since the incident, Shear says that on the bus three weeks ago, she was slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women. The bus driver, in response to a media inquiry, denied that violence was used against her, but Shear's account has been substantiated by an unrelated eyewitness on the bus who confirmed that she sustained an unprovoked "severe beating."
Shear, an American-Israeli woman who currently lives in Canada, says that on a recent five-week vacation to Israel, she rode the bus daily to the Old City to pray at sunrise. Though not defined by Egged as a sex-segregated "mehadrin" bus, women usually sit in the back, while men sit in the front, as a matter of custom.
"Every two or three days, someone would tell me to sit in the back, sometimes politely and sometimes not," she recalled this week in a telephone interview. "I was always polite and said 'No. This is not a synagogue. I am not going to sit in the back.'"
But Shear, a 50-year-old religious woman, says that on the morning of the 24th, a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat - even though there were a number of other seats available in the front of the bus.
"I said, I'm not moving and he said, 'I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.' Then he spat in my face and at that point, I was in high adrenaline mode and called him a son-of-a-bitch, which I am not proud of. Then I spat back. At that point, he pushed me down and people on the bus were screaming that I was crazy. Four men surrounded me and slapped my face, punched me in the chest, pulled at my clothes, beat me, kicked me. My snood [hair covering] came off. I was fighting back and kicked one of the men in his privates. I will never forget the look on his face."
Shear says that when she bent down in the aisle to retrieve her hair covering, "one of the men kicked me in the face. Thank God he missed my eye. I got up and punched him. I said, 'I want my hair covering back' but he wouldn't give it to me, so I took his black hat and threw it in the aisle."
'Stupid American'
Throughout the encounter, Shear says the bus driver "did nothing." The other passengers, she says, blamed her for not moving to the back of the bus and called her a "stupid American with no sechel [common sense.] People blamed me for not knowing my place and not going to the back of the bus where I belong."
According to Yehoshua Meyer, the eyewitness to the incident, Shear's account is entirely accurate. "I saw everything," he said. "Someone got on the bus and demanded that she go to the back, but she didn't agree. She was badly beaten and her whole body sustained hits and kicks. She tried to fight back and no one would help her. I tried to help, but someone was stopping me from getting up. My phone's battery was dead, so I couldn't call the police. I yelled for the bus driver to stop. He stopped once, but he didn't do anything. When we finally got to the Kotel [Western Wall], she was beaten badly and I helped her go to the police."
Shear says that when she first started riding the No. 2 line, she did not even know that it was sometimes sex-segregated. She also says that sitting in the front is simply more comfortable. "I'm a 50-year-old woman and I don't like to sit in the back. I'm dressed appropriately and I was on a public bus."
"It is very dangerous for a group of people to take control over a public entity and enforce their will without going through due process," she said. "Even if they [Haredim who want a segregated bus] are a majority - and I don't think they are - they have options available. They can petition Egged or hire their own private line. But as long as it's a public bus, I don't care if there are 500 people telling me where to sit. I can sit wherever I want and so can anyone else."
Meyer says that throughout the incident, the other passengers blamed Shear for not sitting in the back. "They'll probably claim that she attacked them first, but that's totally untrue. She was abused terribly, and I've never seen anything like it."
Word of Shear's story traveled quickly after she forwarded an e-mail detailing her experience. She has been contacted by a number of groups, including Shatil, the New Israel Fund's Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change; Kolech, a religious women's forum; the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the legal advocacy arm of the local Reform movement; and the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA).
In the coming month, IRAC will be submitting a petition to the High Court of Justice against the Transportation Ministry over the issue of segregated Egged buses. IRAC attorney Orly Erez-Likhovski is in touch with Shear and is considering including her in the petition.
Although the No. 2 Jerusalem bus where the incident occurred is not actually defined as a mehadrin line, Erez-Likhovski says that Shear's story is further proof that the issue requires legal clarification. About 30 Egged buses are designated as mehadrin, mostly on inter-city lines, but they are not marked to indicate this. "There's no way to identify a mehadrin bus, which in itself is a problem," she said.
"Theoretically, a person can sit wherever they want, even on a mehadrin line, but we're seeing that people are enforcing [the gender segregation] even on non-mehadrin lines and that's the part of the danger," she said.
On a mehadrin bus, women enter and exit through the rear door, and the seats from the rear door back are generally considered the "women's section." A child is usually sent forward to pay the driver.
The official responses
In a response from Egged, the bus driver denied that Shear was physically attacked in any way.
"In a thorough inquiry that we conducted, we found that the bus driver does not confirm that any violence was used against the complainant," Egged spokesman Ron Ratner wrote.
"According to the driver, once he saw that there was a crowd gathering around her, he stopped the bus and went to check what was going on. He clarified to the passengers that the bus was not a mehadrin line and that all passengers on the line are permitted to sit wherever they want on the bus. After making sure that the passengers returned to their seats, he continued driving."
The Egged response also noted that their drivers "are not able and are not authorized to supervise the behavior of the passengers in all situations."
Ministry of Transportation spokesperson Avner Ovadia said in response that the mehadrin lines are "the result of agreements reached between Egged and Haredi bodies" and are therefore unconnected to the ministry.
A spokesperson for the Jerusalem police said the case is still under investigation.
Comment: What a wonderful religion Judaism is when it sanctions such abuse of women. Is it any wonder then that Zionist politicians and military personnel murder Palestinians with glee? After all, the bible says they are allowed to! That they will go to heaven faster!
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Evidence of advanced fusion devices at the WTC
20/12/2006
The Writings of a Finnish Military Expert on 9/11
1. Pulverization of 99% of concrete into ultra fine dust as recorded by official studies. Concrete dust was created instantly throughout the towers when the fusion device million degree heat rapidly expanded water vapour 1000-fold in the concrete floors.
2. Superheated steels ablating (vaporizing continuously as they fall) as seen in video clips of the towers collapsing. This requires uniform temperatures roughly twice that of thermite. Conventional demolition or explosive charges (thermate, rdx, hdx etc.) cannot transfer heath so rapidly that the steel goes above it's boiling temperature.
3. 22 ton outer wall steel sections ejected 200 meters into the winter garden. Cutting charges cannot eject heavy steels and throwing charges cannot provide the energy required without heavy, solid surface mounts.
4. 330 ton section of outer wall columns ripping off side of tower. Cutting charges cannot eject heavy steels linked together and throwing charges cannot provide the energy required without very heavy, solid surfaces to mount those charges.
5. Molten ponds of steel at the bottom of elevator shafts (WTC1, WTC2, WTC7). Massive heath loads have been present at the lower parts of these high-rise buildings. As one of the witnesses after seeing the flow of metals declared: "no one will be found alive".
6. The spire behaviour (stands for 20-30 seconds, evaporates and goes down, steel dust remains in the air where the spire was). The spire did not stand because it lost its durability when the joints vaporized.
7. Sharp spikes in seismograph readings (Richter 2.1 and 2.3) occurred at the beginning of collapse for both towers. Short duration and high power indicate an explosive event.
8. A press weighting 50 tons disappeared from a basement floor of Twin Towers and was never recovered from debris. Not possible with collapses or controlled demolitions. The press was vaporized or melted totally.
9. Bone dust cloud around the WTC. This was found not until spring 2006 from the Deutsche Bank building. (In excess of 700 human remains found on the roof and from air vents). See www.911citizenswatch.org/print.php?sid=906
10. Fires took 100 days to extinguish despite continuous spraying of water. Thermate would burn out totally and then cool down much faster, just in a few days. This long cooling time means the total heath load being absorbed into the steels of the WTC was massive, far in excess anything found in collapses or typical controlled demolitions.
11. Brown shades of color in the air due nuclear radiation forming NO2, NO3 and nitric acid. TV and documentary footage changed the color balance to blue to disguise this fact indicating complicity in the coverup.
12. Elevated Tritium values measured in the WTC area but not elsewhere in New York. Official studies stated that 8 EXIT signs from two commercial Boeing jets were responsible. The tritium in those EXIT signs is insufficient to explain the measurements (very little tritium is available for measuring after evaporation into air as hydrogen and as tritiated water vapour. This can provide conclusive proof of fusion devices and therefore US/Israeli military involvement.
13. Pyroclastic flow observed in the concrete-based clouds. Only found with volcanic eruptions and nuclear detonations. The explosion squibs cool down just a few milliseconds after the explosion or after having reached some 10 meters in the air. Pyroclastic flow will not mix with other clouds meaning very serious heath in those clouds not possible with the conventional demolition or explosive charges. The pyroclastic clouds were cooling down at the WTC but this process took some 30 seconds. See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1381525012075538113
14. Huge expanding dust clouds 5 times the volume of the building indicating extreme levels of heat generated far in excess of traditional demolition explosives.
15. Rubble height was some 10% of the original instead of 33% expected in a traditional demolition. Fusion device removal of underground central steel framework allowed upper framework to fall into this empty space and reduce the rubble height.
16. No survivors found, except some firefighters in one corner pocket in the rubble who looked up to see blue sky above them instead of being crushed by collapsing debris. Upward fusion flashlight-like beam of destruction missed this pocket but removed debris above those lucky firemen.
17. 14 rescue dogs and some rescue workers died far too soon afterward to be attributed to asbestos or dust toxins (respiratory problems due to alpha and tritium particles created by fusion are far more toxic)
18. Record concentrations of near-atomic size metal particles found in dust studies due to ablated steel. Only possible with vaporized (boiling) steels.
19. Decontamination procedure used at Ground Zero (hi-pressure water spraying) for all steel removed from site. Water spraying contains fusion radioactivity.
20. No bodies, furniture or computers found in the rubble, but intact sheets of paper covered the streets with fine dust. Items with significant mass absorbed fusion energy (neutrons, x-rays) and were vaporized while paper did not. Paper and powder theory.
21. 200 000 gallon sprinkler water tanks on the roofs of WTC1 and WTC2, but no water in the ruins. Heat of fusion devices vaporized large reservoirs of water.
22. Reports of cars exploding around the WTC and many burned out wrecks could be seen that had not been hit by debris. Fusion energy (heath radiation and the neutrons) caused cars to ignite and burn far from WTC site.
23. Wide area electrical outage, repairs took over 3 months. Fusion devices cause EM pulse with Compton scattering. See German engineers help the USA plate 5.
24. EM pulse was recorded by broadcast cameras with high quality electronic circuitry. This occurred at the same time as the seismic peaks recorded by Lamont Doherty during the beginning of the collapse. This is due to the Compton Effect and resulted in a large area power outage at the WTC.
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Iraq Manipulations
False Flag Alert! Suicide car bomber kills 11 in Baghdad
Reuters
20/12/2006
A suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into an Iraqi police checkpoint near Baghdad University on Wednesday, killing 11 people and wounding 31, an Interior Ministry source said.
The source said there were university students among the dead and wounded from the blast in the Jadriya district in the southwest of the capital.
Police checkpoints are a frequent target of militants fighting U.S.-led forces and the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government. Police normally set up a checkpoint outside the university's gates.
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Flashback: British Government's Agent Provocateurs Exposed
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
20/09/2005
There is a saying of sorts that "if you are going to do something, do
it well", and given the serious consequences, nowhere is that more true
than when you plan to engage in criminal activity. Today in Basra, Southern
Iraq, two members of the British SAS (Special Ops) were caught, 'in flagrante'
as it were, dressed in full "Arab garb", driving a car full of explosives
and shooting and killing two official Iraqi policemen.
This fact, finally reported by the mainstream press, goes to the very heart
of and proves accurate much of what we have been saying on the Signs of the
Times page for several years.
The following are facts, indisputable by all but the most self-deluded:
Number 1:
The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom
and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing
Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their
control over the greater Middle East.
Number 2:
Both the Bush and Blair governments deliberately fabricated evidence (lied)
about the threat the Saddam posed to the west and his links to the mythical
'al-Qaeda' in order to justify their invasion.
Number 3:
Dressed as Arabs, British (and CIA and Israeli) 'special forces' have been
carrying out fake "insurgent" attacks, including 'car suicide bombings'
against Iraqi policemen and Iraqi civilians (both Sunni and Shia) for the past
two years. Evidence would suggest that these tactics are designed to provide
continued justification for a US and British military presence in Iraq and
to ultimately embroil the country in a civil war that will lead to the breakup
of Iraq into more manageable statelets, much to the joy of the Israeli right
and their long-held desire for the establishment of biblical 'greater Israel'
Coming not long after the botched London bombings carried out by British MI5
where an eyewitness
reported that the floor of one of the trains had been blown inwards (how
can a bomb in a backpack or on a "suicide bomber" INSIDE the train
ever produce such an effect), more than anything else today's event in Basra
highlights the desperation that is driving the policy-makers in the British
government.
British intelligence would do well to think twice about carrying out any more
'false flag' operations until they can achieve the 'professionalism' of the
Israeli Mossad - they always make it look convincing and rarely suffer the
ignominy of being caught in the act and having the faces of their erstwhile "terrorists" plastered
across the pages of the mainstream media.
 |
| The REAL face of "Islamic Terror" - Two SAS agents caught carrying
out a false flag terror attack in Basra, Iraq September 20th 2005. |
Official:
British troops freed in jailbreak
CNN
2005/09/20
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A British armored vehicle escorted by a tank crashed into
a detention center Monday in Basra and rescued two undercover troops held
by police, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official told CNN.
British Defense Ministry Secretary John Reid confirmed two British military
personnel were "released," but he gave no details on how they were
freed.
In a statement released in London, Reid did not say why the two had been
taken into custody. But the Iraqi official, who spoke to CNN on condition
of anonymity, said their arrests stemmed from an incident earlier in the
day.
The official said two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on
civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police
officer. There were no fatalities, the official said.
The two gunmen fled the scene but were captured and taken in for questioning,
admitting they were British marines carrying out a "special security
task," the official said.
British troops launched the rescue about three hours after Iraqi authorities
informed British commanders the men were being held at the police department's
major crime unit, the official said.
Iraqi police said members of Iraq's Mehdi Army militia engaged the British
forces around the facility, burning one personnel carrier and an armored
vehicle.
Video showed dozens of Iraqis surrounding British armored vehicles and tossing
gasoline bombs, rocks and other debris at them.
With one vehicle engulfed in flames, a soldier opened the hatch and bailed
out as rocks were thrown at him. Another photograph showed a British soldier
on fire on top of a tank.
"Many of those present were clearly prepared well in advance to cause
trouble, and we believe that the majority of Iraq people would deplore this
violence," Reid said. [...]
From the Washington
Post
Iraqi security officials on Monday variously accused the two Britons they
detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives. Photographs
of the two men in custody showed them in civilian clothes.
When British officials apparently sought to secure their release, riots
erupted. Iraqi police cars circulated downtown, calling through loudspeakers
for the public to help stop British forces from releasing the two. Heavy
gunfire broke out and fighting raged for hours, as crowds swarmed British
forces and set at least one armored vehicle on fire.
Witnesses said they saw Basra police exchanging fire with British forces.
Sadr's Mahdi Army militia joined in the fighting late in the day, witnesses
said. A British military spokesman, Darren Moss, denied that British troops
were fighting Basra police.
From China
View (orginally pooled from the BBC)
Iraqi police detained two British soldiers in civilian clothes in the southern
city Basra for firing on a police station on Monday, police said.
"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station
in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover
they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua.
The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source
said. He added that the two were being interrogated in the police headquarters
of Basra.
The British forces informed the Iraqi authorities that the two soldiers
were performing an official duty, the source said. British military authorities
said they could not confirm the incident but investigations were underway.
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Iraq Special Inspector Exposes Fraud, Gets Fired By Congress
Jacob Hornberger
SWNewsHerald
December 19, 2006
Stuart W. Bowen should be grateful. He's the special inspector who was exposing fraud in federal contracts in Iraq. Consequently, Congress terminated his job.
So, why should Bowen be thanking his lucky stars? Because he got off light compared to Donald Vance, a 29-year-old American who went to Iraq as a security contractor. No doubt a bit naïve due to his age, Vance began reporting suspicious activity to the FBI about possible illegal weapons trading in the Iraqi security firm he was working with, including a steady flow of weapons to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which has been tied to death squads in Iraq.
When the firm was raided, at Vance's urging, Vance learned the hazards of being a whistleblower. He got taken into custody and was imprisoned in one of the U.S. military's infamous detention centers in Iraq. Spending 97 days in that hellhole, his confinement appears to be eerily similar to that of another American imprisoned by the Pentagon - Jose Padilla. According to the New York Times:
"American guards arrived at the man's cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep. The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared."
Vance's request to talk to a lawyer, one of the principal tenets of America's criminal justice system, was rebuffed by U.S. military authorities. After all, he was in Iraq, where that pesky U.S. Constitution isn't operative.
Giving the same response that they have in the Padilla case, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon's detentions operations in Iraq, a first-lieutenant named Lea Ann Fracasso, said that Vance was "treated fair and humanely."
The sad part of this is the distinct possibility that Fracasso, along with her Pentagon cohorts, really and truly believes this. One day, Vance wrote in his Bible: Sick, very. Vomited. Told no more phone calls til leave."
Yesterday, the federal judge in the Padilla case ordered an official examination into Padilla's mental competency, given Padilla's apparently having been subjected to the same type of mental torture that American GIs were subjected to by the North Korean communists during the Korean War.
I've said it before but it bears repeating: Heaven forbid that the American people ever permit the U.S. military to import to America the type of "freedom" and "humaneness" it has brought to the Iraqi people. But that's certainly the direction our nation continues to head in, thanks to the horrible fear of "the terrorists" that 9/11 engendered in American adults. Just ask Jose Padilla and Donald Vance.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is one of the 22 speakers at FFF's upcoming conference "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties" on June 1-4, 2007, at the Hyatt Regency Reston in Reston, Virginia.
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Propaganda Alert! Jazeera TV says to air tape by al Qaeda's Zawahri
Reuters
20/12/2006
Al Jazeera television said on Wednesday it would air a tape by al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri.
The station did not give further details in its news flash.
The tape would be the first since September 29 when Zawahri appeared in a video posted on the Internet in which he called President Bush a lying failure for talking of progress in the war on terrorism.
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Bush defies commanders by bolstering troops
Mark Tran and agencies
Wednesday December 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
George Bush today confirmed that a temporary increase in US troops for Iraq is under consideration, despite the opposition of his top generals.
In an interview with the Washington Post, the US president also acknowledged for the first time that the US is not winning the war in Iraq, reversing a declaration in November when he said: "Absolutely we're winning".
Mr Bush is expected to unveil his new strategy for Iraq early in the new year. Despite the opposition of his joint chiefs of staff and his top commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, the president appears to be leaning towards the idea of a temporary surge - six to eight months - of 20,000 to 30,000 troops in "one last big push".
The president has, however, persuaded Tony Blair of the need not to set a timetable to pull troops out of Iraq, according to Iraq's vice president.
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday, Tareq al-Hashemi reportedly said that the prime minister was originally in favour of a timetable but was "brainwashed" by Mr Bush into changing his mind on the subject.
In a speech in Dubai today, Mr Blair appeared to back the president's comments, saying that "cutting and running" from Iraq would not just be a "breach of faith [but also] disastrous for our own wider interests".
Mr Bush was asked whether a troop increase in Iraq was even viable after the Republican defeat in the November midterm elections, Mr Bush replied: "Yes, all options are viable."
Gen Abizaid has resisted the idea with the argument that the presence of US troops is part of the problem as it breeds resentment among Iraqis. The joint chiefs fear that an increase would accomplish little as the insurgents would simply lie low until the extra US troops leave.
But the imminent retirement of Gen Abizaid, as commander of US forces in the Middle East, in March would pave the way for a change of plans for Iraq.
Gen Abizaid submitted his retirement documents just over a month ago, shortly before Donald Rumsfeld was forced out as defence secretary. Gen Abizaid had wanted to retire earlier but the move was blocked by Mr Rumsfeld, who insisted his war commanders stay in place.
Gen Abizaid has been the primary architect of US military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan since becoming head of the US central command more than three years ago.
While top commanders question the value of a troop increase for Iraq, they have begun making preparations for such a move, according to US media reports.
Central command has made two separate requests to the new defence secretary, Robert Gates, for additional forces in the Middle East, including an army brigade of about 3,000 troops to be used as a reserve force in Kuwait and a second navy carrier strike group to move to the Persian gulf.
Mr Gates, who arrived in Baghdad today, has yet to approve the moves, which could increase US forces in the region by as many as 10,000 troops. The additional carrier strike group would have the useful dual purpose of sabre-rattling towards Iran while increasing military capabilities in Iraq.
An increase in US military strength in Iraq would fly in the face of the Baker-Hamilton report, but Mr Bush has made pretty clear his lack of enthusiasm for its two key recommendations.
The Iraq Study Group urged the Bush administration to shift the emphasis in Iraq from combat to training and to launch a diplomatic initiative, including direct talks with Iran and Syria.
Mr Blair today called on moderate Muslim states to form an "alliance of moderation" to counter Iran, saying the country wanted to "to pin us back in Lebanon, in Iraq and in Palestine".
In another change of course, Mr Bush said he had ordered Mr Gates to develop a plan to increase the troop strength of the army and marine corps, amid warnings that Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the US military to breaking point.
Gen Peter Schoomaker, the army's chief of staff, warned Congress last week that the active-duty force "will break" under the strain of current operations.
"We need to reset our military," Mr Bush said. Mr Rumsfeld had opposed an increase in troop levels in keeping with his vision of a smaller army relying on advanced technology.
The US army has already temporarily increased the number of troops from 482,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 to 507,000 today and soon to 512,000. But the army wants to make that 30,000-soldier increase permanent and then add between 20,000 and 40,000 more on top of that.
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Spam: Bush reveals plan to expand military size
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-20 07:13:52
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush said Tuesday that he plans to expand the size of the U.S. military to meet the challenges of "a long-term global war against terrorists."
In an interview with The Washington Post at the White House, Bush said it was a response to warnings that sustained deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the armed forces to near the breaking point.
He said he has instructed newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Robert Gates to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces.
The president gave no estimates about how many troops may be added but indicated that he agreed with suggestions in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the current military is stretched too thin to cope with the demands placed on it.
The decision comes at a time when he is rethinking his strategy in Iraq and considering, among other options, a short-term surge in troop levels to try to secure violence-torn Baghdad.
In describing his decision, Bush tied it to the broader struggle against extremists around the world rather than Iraq specifically.
"It is an accurate reflection that this ideological war we're in is going to last for a while and that we're going to need a military that's capable of being able to sustain our efforts and to help us achieve peace," he said.
Bush said he has not yet made a decision about a new strategy for Iraq and would wait for Gates to make a trip to Iraq to assess the situation for himself.
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Report: Bush administration split over military plan for Iraq
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-19 23:54:19
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Bush administration is split over the idea for a surge in troops to Iraq, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
White House officials are aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report quoted U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate as saying.
Sending 15,000 to 30,000 more troops for a mission of possibly six to eight months is one of the central proposals on the table as the White House reviews its policy and attempts to reverse the steady deterioration in Iraq.
However, the Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching onto the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives.
The chiefs have taken a firm stand, as they believe the strategy review will be the most important decision on Iraq to be made since the March 2003 invasion.
At regular interagency meetings and in briefing U.S. President George W. Bush last week, the Pentagon has warned that any short-term mission may only set up the United States for bigger problems when it ends.
The concerns raised by the military are sometimes offset by concerns on the other side.
For instance, those who warn that a short-term surge would harm longer-term deployments are met with the argument that the situation is urgent now.
Which way Bush is leaning remains unclear.
"The president's keeping his cards pretty close to his vest... and I think people may be trying to interpret questions he's asking and information he's asking for as signs that he's made up his mind," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
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U.S. soldiers' suicide rate in Iraq doubles in 2005
Reuters
20/12/2006
Suicides among U.S. soldiers in Iraq doubled last year over the previous year to return to a level seen in 2003, U.S. Army medical experts said on Tuesday.
Twenty-two U.S. soldiers in Iraq took their own lives in 2005, a rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers. In 2004, the rate was 10.5 per 100,000 and in 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the figure was 18.8 per 100,000.
The figures cover U.S. Army soldiers only. They do not include members of other U.S. military services in Iraq such as the Marine Corps.
Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army's surgeon general, cautioned against overinterpreting the figures, saying suicide rates tended to fluctuate from year to year.
"We think that the numbers are so rare to begin with that it's very hard to make any kind of interpretation," he said at a news conference to present a study on the mental health of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
"We have not made a connection between the stress on the force and some massive or even significant increase in suicides," he said.
While every suicide was one too many, Kiley said, the suicide rate among soldiers was lower than the average among civilians of the same age and gender.
The survey, a snapshot of the morale and mental health of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in late 2005, found 13.6 percent of the soldiers reported symptoms of acute stress and 16.5 percent reported a combination of depression, anxiety and acute stress.
Those rates were lower than in 2003 but higher than in 2004, the experts said.
Comment: Oh what a lovely war! Just to make it clear, US soldiers are killing themselves because of what they have done and seen done to innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Now tell me, how do you think this has happened? Do you think that perhaps the people directing this war are in fact emotionless psychopaths?
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Bush Government lying about levels of violence in Iraq
Reuters
06/12/2006
WASHINGTON - U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said.
In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture.
The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. "Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence," it said.
"The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases." It said, for example, that a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack, and a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count, either. Also, if the source of a sectarian attack is not determined, that assault is not added to the database of violence incidents.
"Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals," the report said.
A request for
Pentagon comment on the report's assertions was not immediately answered.
Some U.S. analysts have complained for months that the Pentagon's reports to Congress on conditions in Iraq have undercounted the violent episodes. Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a November report that the Pentagon omits many low-level incidents and types of civil violence.
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U.S. defence chief in Iraq, Bush concedes war in trouble
Last Updated: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 | 5:45 AM ET
CBC News
New U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates made a surprise visit to Iraq on Wednesday one day after U.S. President George W. Bush conceded American forces are not winning the war and may need more troops.
Gates, who was sworn in on Monday, said he was in Iraq to see for himself what is happening.
"The whole purpose is to go out, listen to the commanders, talk to the Iraqis, and see what I can learn," Gates told reporters on Tuesday before boarding a plane in the U.S. capital.
Gates was being joined on the trip by U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for meetings with Iraqi military and political leaders.
Pace, meanwhile, found his words being quoted on Tuesday by Bush during an Oval Office interview with the Washington Post.
'Not winning, not losing'
"You know, I think an interesting construct that Gen. Pace uses is, 'We're not winning, we're not losing.' There's been some very positive developments," the president said.
"And you take a step back and look at progress in Iraq, you say, well, it's amazing - constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, which is a remarkable development in itself," he said.
Bush also indicated he agreed with officials in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill who say the military is stretched too thin, and said he plans to expand the size of the U.S. military to deal with the global war against Islamist extremists.
"I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops - the army, the marines," Bush told the Post.
"And I talked about this to Secretary Gates and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea."
Bush did not say how many troops might be added.
He said he disagreed with former secretary of state Colin Powell's statement on CBS' Face the Nation Sunday that "the active army is about broken."
'Need to reset'
"I haven't heard the word 'broken,' " the president said, "but I've heard the word, 'stressed.'... We need to reset our military. There's no question the military has been used a lot. And the fundamental question is: Will Republicans and Democrats be able to work with the administration to assure our military and the American people that we will position our military so that it is ready and able to stay engaged in a long war?"
Bush said the decision to expand the military was a response to the broader war against Islamist extremists, and not specifically Iraq.
"It is an accurate reflection that this ideological war we're in is going to last for a while and that we're going to need a military that's capable of being able to sustain our efforts and to help us achieve peace," he said.
Bush said he has not yet made a decision about a new strategy for Iraq, which he is expected to announce next month. He said he was waiting for Gates to return from Iraq to get a first-hand look at the situation.
"I need to talk to him when he gets back," the president said. "I've got more consultations to do with the national security team, which will be consulting with other folks. And I'm going to take my time to make sure that the policy, when it comes out, the American people will see that we ... have got a new way forward."
But Bush has been considering a plan to send up to 30,000 or more troops to Iraq for six to eight months in an effort to secure Baghdad, where sectarian violence has climbed to record levels.
Some top generals, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have reportedly rejected the idea of a "surge," saying it would be ineffective and could lead to more attacks from al-Qaeda.
Comment: Bush's "new way forward" is going to be the smae, old way forward. More guns, more troops, more death, more chaos.
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If US leaves Iraq we will arm Sunni militias, Saudis say
December 14, 2006
The Guardian
- Fears of massacre prompt king's warning to Cheney
- Iranian influence across region adds to concern
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia warned the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, that the kingdom would provide money and arms to Sunni militias in Iraq if America withdrew its troops from the country, it emerged yesterday.
The conversation, during a visit by Mr Cheney to Riyadh last month, was the most serious indication to date of Saudi concerns about a possible massacre of the minority Sunni community in Iraq in the event of a withdrawal of US forces, as well as rising Iranian influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.
Saudi Arabia has been concerned for months about rising domestic pressure on George Bush to bring US troops home from Iraq, despite the administration's avowals that it has no plans for a troop withdrawal. Those fears were exacerbated by the Iraq Study Group's report, which recommends the withdrawal of combat forces in Iraq in early 2008 as well as the opening of diplomatic negotiations between the US and Syria and Iran.
Since then Mr Bush has held consultations with the Pentagon and state department officials in what seems an attempt to show the White House's commitment to carrying out a broad-based review of its policy on Iraq. The White House said it would unveil its new strategy in January.
Yesterday's New York Times reported that during the Riyadh meeting the king also expressed strong opposition to the recommendation that Washington open diplomatic talks with Iran, and called for a resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. King Abdullah said that Saudi Arabia would move quickly, but acknowledged that the intervention on behalf of Sunni tribal chiefs might help insurgent forces who have been fighting the Americans.
Saudi officials and the White House both denied the report.
"That's not Saudi government policy," the White House press secretary, Tony Snow, told reporters. "The Saudis have made it clear that they're committed to the same goals we are, which is a self-sustaining Iraq that can sustain, govern and defend itself, that will recognise and protect the rights of all, regardless of sect or religion," he said. "And furthermore, they share our concerns about the role the Iranians are playing in the region."
In Baghdad the military spokesman, Major General William Caldwell, was also sceptical. "I don't think that came from the government of Saudi Arabia," he said.
But Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution told CNN that Saudi Arabia had strong motivation to take sides in a civil war. "They're terrified that civil war will spill over into Saudi Arabia. But they're also terrified that the Iranians, backing the various Shi'ite militias in Iraq, will come out the big winner in a civil war," he said.
In addition, reports emerged last week that Saudi private citizens were funnelling money to Sunni militias in Iraq through charities or pilgrims.
The warning to Mr Cheney was the most high-level indication of Saudi concerns. In October the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said that "since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited".
The same message was delivered last month by Nawaf Obaid, a security adviser to the Saudi embassy, in the Washington Post. "One of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis," Mr Obaid wrote. "Options now include providing Sunni military leaders [primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency] with the same types of assistance - funding, arms and logistical support - that Iran has been giving to Shi'ite armed groups for years."
Prince Turki sacked Mr Obaid a week later, and the official Saudi press agency said there was no truth to his remarks. Days later Prince Turki told hi