Douglas Caddy
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He Aimed at the Stars but Hit London
By ALEX ROLAND
The New York Times Book Review
November 18, 2007
VON BRAUN
Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.
By Michael J. Neufeld.
Illustrated. 587 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
Wernher von Braun was a giant of the 20th century. But what, in the modern imagination, did he represent? Visionary science? Cynical manipulation? The marriage of science and technology? The convergence of war and peace? Was von Braun the Columbus of space? The brains of the military-industrial complex? The face of modernity? Was he a war criminal, as many of his contemporaries believed? Or was he, as Michael J. Neufeld argues in “Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War,” a modern Faust, in league with the devil?
Neufeld’s thoroughly satisfying biography confirms the broad outlines of its subject’s life as they have been known for many years. Born to aristocratic parents in 1912, von Braun told his mother when he was about 10 that he wanted his life to “turn the wheel of progress.” A precocious child, he discovered rocketry and spaceflight in his teens and committed himself to putting men (including himself) on the Moon.
Even before Hitler came to power, an officer in the German Army selected von Braun from among the membership of the Society for Space Travel, an amateur rocket group, to pursue the possible military applications of this new technology. The army sponsored von Braun’s doctoral studies in physics and engineering and promptly classified and confiscated his dissertation, completed in 1934, when he was just 22.
Over the ensuing decade von Braun worked on multiple rocket programs for Hitler’s Germany, including the ballistic missile designated by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry as Vengeance Weapon 2, or V-2. In the last days of the war, von Braun and his closest aides buried their records in a mine shaft and fled west, away from the approaching Soviet Army, to surrender to the Americans. Brought to the United States as part of Project Paperclip, von Braun and his colleagues shared with the Americans what they knew about ballistic missiles. Most found places for themselves in the emerging United States Army missile program, eventually becoming citizens and pillars of the cold war arms race.
Through all this military activity, von Braun never lost his passion for spaceflight. He desperately wanted the Jupiter intercontinental ballistic missile that he developed at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., to be the first rocket to place a man-made satellite into orbit, but the Eisenhower administration refused to launch an instrument that would raise the thorny question of overflight of Soviet territory.
When the Soviet satellite Sputnik was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, the space race was on. Von Braun and his rocket team were soon transferred to the new civilian space agency, NASA, to build the rocket that would carry humans to the Moon. The resulting Saturn launch vehicle, still the most powerful ever to leave Earth, powered the Apollo program to the fulfillment of von Braun’s dream.
It did not, however, take the route he had recommended. Instead of building a large space station in Earth orbit as a way-station to the Moon, NASA flew directly from Earth orbit to lunar orbit. When the Apollo program ended prematurely in the early 1970s, von Braun and his fellow travelers had been unable to build the infrastructure in space that they had envisioned. Disillusioned, von Braun left NASA to take a high-paying position in the aerospace industry, only to have his life cut short by cancer in 1977, at age 65.
Von Braun has been the subject of at least nine previous English-language biographies. But Neufeld’s version, exhaustively researched in German and American archives and written in clear, fast-paced prose, offers the most complete, fully documented and critical account that the imperfect documentary record is likely to yield. Neufeld acclaims him “the most influential rocket engineer and spaceflight advocate of the 20th century.” This book amply supports that judgment.
Though most previous biographies have been hagiographic celebrations, some have noted his association with — if not his commission of — war crimes in Hitler’s Germany. Neufeld also sees him as a modern-day Faust, whose power came from a bargain with the devil. The devil in Neufeld’s analogy is Nazi Germany in general and Hitler in particular, from whom von Braun personally received the cherished title of “Professor.” Neufeld scours the historical record for evidence of von Braun’s crimes, rehearsing his membership in the SS, his development of deadly weapons and, most important, his participation in the notorious slave labor program that built his V-2s at a horrible human cost.
Neufeld finds no smoking gun, no evidence that von Braun actively planned or even oversaw the crimes perpetrated on his workers, but he does believe that von Braun’s participation in the planning and operation of the Mittelwerk, the underground rocket factory manned by slave laborers from the adjacent Dora concentration camp, would make him guilty of crimes against humanity. And he demonstrates that von Braun covered up his past by dissembling and flat-out lying when confronted with the record. If not guilty of crimes against humanity, von Braun was certainly morally obtuse. Only in the summer of 1944, when the war was clearly lost, he later recalled, did there dawn on him “the realization that I might be aiding an evil regime.”
Neufeld is less attentive to the moral guilt of American leaders and institutions. Many of them aided and abetted the suppression and misrepresentation of von Braun’s history, as well as the histories of many others in Project Paperclip. In the heat of the cold war, they, too, subordinated their moral principles to what they saw as higher purposes. As the physicist Herbert York later said: “Some people regard von Braun’s unwavering dedication to the grand dream of space flight as heroic and farsighted. Others cannot overlook the grotesque means and unprincipled behavior he used to realize his dreams. I am among the latter, but in this instance I was glad to exploit his willingness to go, without argument, wherever the money was.”
Von Braun may have been, as the satirist Tom Lehrer said, “a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience,” but his keepers behaved expediently as well. To paraphrase Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox’s judgment on the Pentagon in “The Imperial Animal” (1971), if you have a von Braun, you will use him, and he will use you.
PERHAPS the rocket baron’s most lasting legacy is his vision for space travel. In the 1950s, at the height of his popularity, von Braun used public appearances, Collier’s magazine and Walt Disney television productions to sell the public an idealized model of mankind’s future in space. His launching vehicles would be used to build a space station in Earth orbit from which humans would fly to the Moon and then to Mars. Von Braun actually cared more for the Moon mission than for Mars, but he appreciated the romantic appeal of the red planet. That paradigm so captured the imagination of NASA, and the American public, that the United States has been pursuing it ever since.
Though the NASA administrator Michael Griffin has now declared the space shuttle and the space station mistakes, NASA has vowed to continue with both while beginning to pursue the “vision for space exploration” announced by George W. Bush in 2004. That vision is a slightly revised version of the von Braun model, omitting the increasingly troubled and expensive space station. For better or for worse, we remain in the thrall of von Braun’s potent imagination.
Alex Roland is a professor of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian.
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Letter by Oswald Is Found With Late Senator’s Papers
By JAMES BARRON
The New York Times
November 14, 2007
The box had sat untouched in the attic of a Washington house until recently, when the sale of the house forced some cleaning out, some poking around in long-overlooked places.
Inside the box was a manila file folder headed: “Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Inside the folder was a handwritten letter that Oswald had sent from Russia, complaining that the Soviet Union would not grant him an exit visa to the United States. It was addressed to Senator John Tower of Texas, who had lived in the house with his second wife in the 1980s.
The other items in the folder are all typewritten — letters from Mr. Tower to the State Department, letters from the American consul in Moscow to Oswald, letters from the State Department to Mr. Tower, and brief memorandums from Mr. Tower’s staff after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as Mr. Tower defended himself against the impression that he had helped clear the way for Oswald’s return to this country.
A Texas company plans to open an online auction of the items, perhaps as early as today. The company, EasySale, maintains that the letters are originals, not copies like the ones that are among Mr. Tower’s papers at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Tex. A handwriting expert hired by the company to examine the Oswald letter concluded that the tight script was Oswald’s.
The Oswald letter to Mr. Tower, who died in 1991, is undated but was widely quoted after the Kennedy assassination and again in the Warren Commission report in 1964.
It began as an appeal from a constituent: “My name is Lee Harvey Oswald, 22, of Fort Worth up till October 1959,” when, he wrote, he had gone to the Soviet Union “for a residential stay.”
After explaining his visa problem, Oswald wrote, “I beseech you, Senator Tower, to rise [sic] the question of holding by the Soviet Union of a citizen of the U.S., against his will and expressed desires!!”
According to the Warren Commission report, a caseworker in Mr. Tower’s office forwarded the letter to the State Department under a cover letter that was “machine signed by the Senator.”
A copy of the cover letter was in the attic folder, and made clear that Mr. Tower’s office was simply passing along Oswald’s plea. “I do not know Mr. Oswald or any of the facts concerning his reasons for visiting the Soviet Union; nor what action, if any, this government can or should take on his behalf,” the letter said.
Mr. Tower is known to have given the file to the Warren Commission for copying, but the originals were considered missing, said Kathryn Stallard, the archivist of the John Tower Library at Southwestern. “We have all been looking for this,” Ms. Stallard said.
EasySale’s chairman and chief executive, David J. Edmondson, said that the house, in the Kalorama section of Washington, had been owned by Mr. Tower’s second wife, Lilla Burt Cummings Tower, a Washington lawyer, who died in 1993. Mr. Edmondson said she and Mr. Tower lived in the house in the early years of the Reagan administration. They divorced in 1987, and two years later, when the first President George Bush nominated Mr. Tower to be secretary of defense, her statements about her former husband’s excessive drinking helped cost him the job. Mr. Tower denied the accusations, but the Senate rejected the nomination.
The issue of Oswald’s return to the United States dogged Mr. Tower after the Warren Commission report was released. The file in the attic contained a letter that Mr. Tower wrote to Secretary of State Dean Rusk
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To Mr. Caddy:
I am not sure that I understand your post.
The first sentence you posted in Post #1 stated that Crisman was one of the tramps arrested in DP.
Larry posted (I had read it before) that he had verified that Crisman was in Washington state on 11-22-1963. I assumed you did not know this. So Timothy Good did not do good work on the tramp issue.
To Dawn:
It seems all you do on the Forum is to post insults.
I am still in the midst of reading Timothy Good's new book, Need To Know. His documentation is impressive. However, in light of some of the postings here that contain concrete information that Crisman may not have been one of the Dallas tramps, I am writing author Good a letter, with a copy of the postings attached, to ask him what further documentation he might have to support his assertion.
My original posting is comprised 99.9 percent of quotations from Good's book, which is the source of the claim that Crisman was one of the tramps. I had never heard of Crisman before reading Good's book and hearing the author interviewed. My original posting brought out additional information about him from forum members who are better informed that I am.
I do not claim to be an expert researcher on the Kennedy assassination. I have learned a great deal from members since joining the forum, not only about the assassination but a whole host of other fascinating topics, which form a treasure trove of material deserved of further attention. I hazard to guess that there are a large number of individuals and groups out there who are very, very upset that information they thought was forever locked away in secret vaults is suddenly and continuously being thrust into the public light by forum members.
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Great post by Larry Hancock.
So many members fail to realize that debunking myths is in fact an important contribution to the search for the truth.
By the way, I do not assume Mr. Caddy is a disinformation agent. I am sure he read somewhere that Crisman was one of the tramps. But this is a good demonstration of how false information spreads. Once it gets out there, unless a writer is a careful researcher like Larry, it gets repeated and the more often it is repeated the more believable it appears to be.
I am puzzled by the above posting by Mr. Gratz. This thread was started by me with my quoting from Timothy Good's new book "Need To Know" in which the author discusses the mysterious role of Fred Crisman.
For Mr. Gratz in the same thread to post a reply, "By the way, I do not assume Mr. Caddy is a disinformation agent. I am sure he read somewhere that Crisman was one of the tramps. But this is a good demonstration of how false information spreads" confounds me.
Actually, Mr. Gratz's reply in my thread is a good demonstration of someone who posts a reply in a thread without even bothering to read the original posting, which was what the thread is all about: namely, Timothy Good's take on Mr. Crisman. I do not accuse Mr. Gratz of spreading disinformation but maybe confusion.
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How the world really works
A mind-bending article that will truly shock you. The Bush Family’s connection to organized crime is spelled out in detail.
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The mysterious role of Fred Crisman, Dallas tramp
Fred Crisman was one of the three tramps arrested in Dallas immediately after JFK’s assassination.
In regard to Crisman and JFK, below are excerpts from “Need To Know” by Timothy Good, which has just been published in paperback by Pegasus Books (New York). According to the Sunday Times (London), “The evidence that Good has amassed is too overwhelming to ignore and it is clear that a more open debate is long overdue.”
(Page 60) On 24 June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine crescent-shaped objects flying near Mount Rainier, Washington. [it was Arnold who described the objects as “flying saucers”, which subsequently led to UFOs being known by this term.]
(Page 101) On 1 August 1947, an AAF B-25 Mitchell twin-engined bomber crashed near Kelso, Washington, killing the pilots, Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank Brown, both intelligence officers from the Fourth Air Force Headquarters at Hamilton Field, California. Two others parachuted to safety. Davidson and Brown were returning from Tacoma, Washington, where they had interviewed pilots Kenneth Arnold and Captain Edward Smith, both witnesses to UFO sightings that summer. Arnold and Smith had become embroiled in the complex and sinister Maury Island incident of 21 June when, according to witnesses in a boat, including the captain, Harold Dahl, six flying objects were seen circling above Puget Sound, one spewing “slag,” of which some fell on the boat.
Arnold and Smith had introduced the officers to Fred Crisman, a mysterious character with a background in counter-intelligence (including “black operations” for the CIA) who had investigated (and “contaminated”) the case. At the end of the meeting Crisman gave the officers a heavy box containing large chunks of the recovered fragments, which were later loaded on the B-25 at McChord Field. Arnold noted that the fragments were rather different from the aluminum-type metals that he and Smith had been shown previously by Crisman.
Arnold and Smith had run into many weird and disturbing experiences during their investigations into the Maury Island case. Was the B-25 crash in any way related to its cargo, they wondered.
(Page 111- Footnote 7) Arnold, Kenneth and Palmer, Ray, The Coming of the Saucers, published by the authors, 1952. Those interested in this case, and in Crisman’s extraordinary background – including his arrest in Dallas as one of the three “tramps” following the assassination of President Kennedy – should read Maury Island UFO: the Crisman Conspiracy, by Kenn Thomas, IllumiNet Press, PO Box 2808, Lilburn, GA 30048, 1999.
(Page 420) It has long been rumored that President J. F. Kennedy, whose navy career included commanding the motor torpedo board PT-109 in the Second World War, was well-informed about the subject. In Alien Base, for instance, I allude to his secret meeting in Washington, D.C. with George Adamski, who had been contacted by extraterrestrials and who liaised with a number of high-ranking military personnel and politicians at the time, including those in the UK (such as Lord Dowding and Lord Mountbatten, on one occasion). In addition to holding a passport bearing special privileges, Adamski held a US Government Ordinance Department card which gave him access to all US military bases and to certain restricted areas. He told my friend Madeleine Rodeffer that Kennedy had a meeting with extraterrestrials at a secret Air Force Base in Desert Hot Springs, California.
In early 2006 I received some important information from an impeccable source who was close to Kennedy and a member of the White House Staff at the time that Kennedy had been granted “special access.” My source does not wish to be identified. “As you would expect from any ex-military officer,” he explained, “a strong sense of patriotism and loyalty exists, even after retirement and a long passage of time. However, the following may be helpful”:
Around 1961/62 President Kennedy expressed a wish to see the alien bodies associated with an alien crash site. He had obviously been informed of their existence and wished to see for himself the evidence. General McCue was in charge of the arrangements at the time and Air Force One was used to take Kennedy and other top brass on this visit. The purpose of the flight was closely guarded; however, the reason for Kennedy’s flight became evident to senior personnel on board through unguarded comments and the whispering which went on. Remember, even the pilots were members of the White House Staff, ex-military and trusted implicitly.
The whispering or muted talk was mainly about the metal-like material from the crash site and the unique property of this, apparently very light, flexible and seemingly indestructible, of unknown origin…and nothing like it on Earth.
Originally the alien bodies were located a [Wright-Patterson in Ohio] and later removed to Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, near [Panama City]…According to information received, the alien bodies were taken to Florida when Kennedy went to see them [at] a medical facility. They have probably been moved around over time.
[End of excerpts from "Need to Know" by Timothy Good]
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This forum once was a place of rational discussion and relevant facts related to important issues in history.
In recent months it has been turned over to disinformation scum who dump wholly irrelevant and unanalyzed garbage into it by the truckload—which not only is condoned by the administrators, but actually has been endorsed by John Simkin.
I've recently posted two parody posts in just two of the insanely off-topic and irrelevant threads that John Bevilaqua started for no other purpose except to provide a stage where he and Tim Gratz can absolutely flood the forum with this wholesale useless trash and keep their phony Punch 'n' Judy show going to drown out as much rationality as possible with demented off-topic noise. Those parody posts of mine soon will be deleted as the first of my posts in this forum to be deleted. The rest of my contributions over the past year and a half to this forum have been graciously archived by several people, and also will incrementally be deleted over time as they are reposted elsewhere in locations where reasonable and rational people maintain order and provide a safe environment for dissemination and reasoned discussion of relevant facts and truth.
While I have the greatest of admiration for what Simkin and Walker set out to do with the establishment of these forums, and while I owe a debt of gratitude to both for allowing me to present in these forums the evidence and work so hard won, I no longer wish to have my works associated with what this forum now has been converted to.
I am deeply indebted to several members of this forum for their tireless dedication to getting at the truth and the rational discussion and analysis of facts, and it has been a supreme honor to have had a chance to meet you and correspond with you. I have learned much from you. I expect you will be apprised in some way when my works are reposted elsewhere. You will be welcomed there, and I always welcome personal communication from you, which you can access with PMs through this forum until and unless Simkin or Walker elect to cancel my membership here.
Ashton Gray
The long awaited, much anticipated and most welcomed voluntary departure of that person who calls himself "Ashton Gray" will improve the forum's gene pool to such an extent that it cannot be measured.
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If one reads Peter Dale Scott's latest book or Chalmers Johnson's one sees that while the Bush II Administration may have coup de grace
rights, this has been long planned and long persued. Scott's book details how W is
just being manipulated by a hidden hand that has been behind the scenes since th
War planning what they have been. The American Economy may collapse, but those
really in control have already moved their assets offshore and into non-dollar assets. They are a step and a half ahead of the destruction they are
bringing to the average American and other being and animals/plants/protists on the planet. These are dark days for the 'rest' of us.
Relevant quotes from a front-page article in today’s New York Times, “Markets and Dollar Sink as U.S. Slowdown Grows”:
“’We are experiencing among our clients an awakening that the United States is in big trouble,” says Erik Nielsen, chief Europe economist at Goldman Sachs’”…
“The most immediate trigger for the sell-off in the dollar, traders said, was a jarring signal that suggested China might shift some of its enormous hoard of dollars and dollar-denominated assets – more than $1.4 trillion—into other currencies to get a better return on its money.”
“’We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones, and will adjust accordingly,’ Cheng Siwei, Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee at the National People’s Congress told a conference in Beijing Wednesday.”
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The collapse of the US dollar has long been discussed... ten years or more. With a deficit approaching an absolutely unreedemable $10 trillion, the dollar survives only on the the good will and the massive pool of dollar assets held by foreign central banks... all of them have a piece of the dollar.
The question (or paradox) these central banks face is how to extricate themselves from the dollar without causing immediate, and massive, losses in their own exchange values. Last I heard, 80% of the US Treasury assets were held offshore.
One day it will just collapse like a house of cards...
By then I suspect that all the juice will have already ben extracted from the USA, as Peter suggests, and the wolves will simply move on... as they always do.
David
Under Bush, the deficit has increased by $3.865 trillion, per the article below.
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National Debt at Record $9 Trillion
Wednesday November 7, 5:59 pm ET
By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer
National Debt Hits $9 Trillion for the First Time
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The national debt has hit $9 trillion for the first time.
The Treasury Department, which issues a daily accounting of the debt, said Wednesday that the debt subject to limit was at $9 trillion on Tuesday. It was $8.996 trillion on Monday.
Last month, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law an increase in the government's borrowing ceiling to $9.815 trillion. It was the fifth debt limit increase since Bush took office in January 2001. Those increases have totaled $3.865 trillion.
The administration contends the rising debt reflects such factors as slow economic growth during the 2001 recession, the Sept. 11 attacks and the cost of fighting terrorism.
Democrats place much of the blame for the exploding debt on Bush's first-term tax cuts, which they say are tilted to the wealthy. The administration says those tax cuts helped to jump-start the economy and resulted in falling budget deficits in recent years.
The tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2010. The administration and Republicans in Congress want to see them made permanent; many Democrats would like to see them revamped to provide more benefits to lower and middle-income taxpayers.
The budget deficit for the 2007 budget year, which ended Sept. 30, was $162.8 billion, the lowest in five years.
In 2004, the deficit was $413 billion, a record in dollar terms.
The national debt is the total of the annual budget deficits plus money that the government borrows from the Social Security and other government trust funds.
The total national debt is actually higher than $9 trillion because it includes borrowing by some agencies that are not covered by the congressional debt limit. That total was $9.086 trillion on Tuesday.
It took the country from George Washington until Ronald Reagan to reach the first $1 trillion in debt.
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Supermodel Spurns the Dollar
Dollar's Fall Collapses the American Empire; Bring Those 737 Overseas Military Bases Home!
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
www.counterpunch.org
November 7, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11072007.html
The US dollar is still officially the world's reserve currency, but it cannot purchase the services of Brazilian super model Gisele Bundchen. Gisele required the $30 million she earned during the first half of this year to be paid in euros.
Gisele is not alone in her forecast of the dollar's fate. The First Post (UK) reports that Jim Rogers, a former partner of billionaire George Soros, is selling his home and all possessions in order to convert all his wealth into Chinese yuan.
Meanwhile, American economists continue to preach that offshoring is good for the US economy and that Bush's war spending is keeping the economy going. The practitioners of supply and demand have yet to figure out that the dollar's supply is sinking the dollar's price and along with it American power.
The macho super patriots who support the Bush regime still haven't caught on that US superpower status rests on the dollar being the reserve currency, not on a military unable to occupy Baghdad. If the dollar were not the world currency, the US would have to earn enough foreign currencies to pay for its 737 oversees bases, an impossibility considering America's $800 billion trade deficit.
When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, foreigners will cease to finance the US trade and budget deficits, and the American Empire along with its wars will disappear overnight. Perhaps Bush will be able to get a World Bank loan, or maybe one from the "Chavez bank," to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Foreign leaders, observing that offshoring and war are accelerating America's relative economic decline, no longer treat the US with the deference to which Washington is accustomed. Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, recently refused Washington's demand to renew the lease on the Manta air base in Ecuador. He told Washington that the US could have a base in Ecuador if Ecuador could have a military base in the US.
When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez addressed the UN, he crossed himself as he stood at the podium. Referring to President Bush, Chavez said, "Yesterday the devil came here, and it smells of sulfur still today." Bush, said Chavez, was standing "right here, talking as if he owned the world."
In his state of the nation message last year, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that Bush's blathering about democracy was nothing but a cloak for the pursuit of American self-interests at the expense of other peoples. "We are aware what is going on in the world. Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, and he eats without listening, and he's clearly not going to listen to anyone." In May 2007, Putin criticized the neocon regime in Washington for "disrespect for human life" and "claims to global exclusiveness, just as it was in the time of the Third Reich."
Even America's British allies regard President Bush as a threat to world peace and the second most dangerous man alive. Bush is edged out in polls by Osama bin Laden, but is regarded as more dangerous than Iran's demonized president and North Korea's Kim Jong-il.
President Bush has achieved his dismal world standing despite spending $1.6 billion of hard-pressed Americans' tax money on public relations between 2003 and 2006.
Clearly, America's leader and America's currency are poorly regarded. Is there a solution?
Perhaps the answer lies in those 737 overseas bases. If those bases were brought home and shared among the 50 states, each state would gain 15 new military bases.
Imagine what this would mean: The end of the housing slump. A reduction in the trade deficit.
And the end of the war on terror.
Who would dare attack a country with 15 new military bases in every state in addition to the existing ones? Wherever a terrorist turned, he would find himself surrounded by soldiers.
All of the dollars currently spent abroad to support 737 overseas bases would be spent at home. Income for foreigners would become income for Americans, and the trade deficit would shrink.
The impact of the 737 military base payrolls on the US economy would end the housing crisis and bring back the 140,000 highly paid financial services jobs, the loss of which this year has cost the US $42 billion in consumer income. Foreclosures and bankruptcies would plummet.
If this isn't enough to turn the dollar around, President Bush's pledge not to appoint an Attorney General if Michael Mukasey is not confirmed offers more promise. If the Democrats will defeat Mukasey's nomination, there are other superfluous cabinet departments that can be closed down in addition to the US Department of Torture and Indefinite Detention.
The American empire is being unwound on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The year is two months from being over, but already in 2007, despite the touted "surge," deaths of US soldiers are the highest of any year of the war.
The Taliban are the ones who are surging. They have taken control of a third district in Western Afghanistan. Turkey and the Kurds are on the verge of turning northern Iraq into a new war zone, another demonstration of American impotence.
Bush's wars have endangered America's puppet regimes. Bush's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is fighting for his life. By resorting to "emergency rule" and oppressive measures, Musharraf has intensified his opposition. When Musharraf falls, thanks to Bush, the Islamists will have nukes.
American generals used to say that the wars Bush started in the Middle East would take 10 years to win. On Oct. 31 General John Abizaid, former commander of US forces in the Middle East, put paid to that optimistic forecast. Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Gen. Abizaid said it would be 50 years before US troops can leave the Middle East.
There is no possibility of the US remaining in the Middle East for a half century. The dollar and US power are already on their last legs, unbeknownst to Democratic leaders Pelosi and Reid who are preparing yet another blank check for Bush's latest request for $200 billion in supplementary war funding.
There isn't any money with which to fund Bush's lost war. It will have to be borrowed from China.
The Romans brought on their own demise, but it took them centuries. Bush has finished America in a mere 7 years.
Even as Gisele throws off the dollar's hegemony, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Columbia are declaring independence of the IMF and World Bank, instruments of US financial hegemony, by creating their own development bank, thus bringing to an end US suzerainty over South America.
An empire that has lost its backyard is finished.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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Israel's Dilemma in Palestine
A Land With People, For a People with a Plan
By LUDWIG WATZAL
November 5, 2007
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/watzal11052007.html
Two rabbis, visiting Palestine in 1897, observed that the land was like a bride, "beautiful, but married to another man". By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for a Jewish "homeland" in Palestine, the indigenous inhabitants had to leave. Where should the people of Palestine go? Squaring that circle has been the essence of Israeĺs dilemma ever since its establishment and the cause of the Palestinian tragedy that it led to. It has remained insoluble. Ghada Karmi's new book, Married To Another Man, Israeĺs Dilemma in Palestine, (published by Pluto Press, London-Ann Arbor) shows that the major reason for this failure was the original and unresolved Zionist quandary of how to create and maintain a Jewish state in a land inhabited by another people. Zionism was never able to resolve the problem of "the other man".
There are only two ways: Either the "other man" had to be eradicated, or the Jewish state project had to be given up. Israel did not do either. It succeeded in 1948 in expelling and keeping out a large number of Palestinians, but Israel was never able to "cleanse" the land of Palestine entirely. The fundamental mistake of the Zionists was their belief that "the entire land of Palestine was Jewish and the Arab presence in it a resented foreign intrusion". All in all, the Zionists were "relatively" successful, but for the indigenous owners of the land it was a catastrophe which has been going on until today. "If Israel remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not survive. In the end the region will be stronger than Israel, in the end the indigenous people will be stronger than Israel, " as Akiva Eldar quoted the former Mazpen member Haim Hangebi in the Israeli Daily Haaretz on August 8, 2003. The author concludes: "Zionisḿs ethos was not about peaceful co-existence but about colonialism and an exclusivist ideology to be imposed and maintained by force."
Ghada Karmi is a renowned commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a well-known figure on British radio and TV. She was born in Jerusalem, and forced to leave as a child in 1948. She grew up in Britain where she became a physician, academic and writer. Currently, Karmi is a research fellow and lecturer at the Insitute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written several books, including In Search of Fatima, which was widely praised.
The Zionist dilemma was perfectly and bluntly expressed by the so-called "post-Zionist" representative and professor, Benny Morris, which led not only to an uproar in the scientific community, but also to a deep disappiontment, because Morris was considered to belong to the "new historians". In his interview with the daily Haaretz and in his article in The Guardian he presented himself as an ardent Zionist. He encapsulates all Zionisḿs major elements, its inherent implausibility as a practical enterprise, its arrogance, racism and self-righteousness, and the insurmountable obstacle to it of Palestinés original population, which refuses to go away. For his colonialist and racist view he was severely critiziced by Baruch Kimmerling and many others who could not understand his attitude.
Morris said incredible things: "A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population." According to him the Zionists made a mistake to have allowed any Palestinans to remain. "If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer of 1948. (...) In other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves (...) in a situation of warfare (...) acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential (...) If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified." Morris concludes, Zionism is faced with two options: perpetual cruelty and repression of others, or the end of the enterprise. These alternatives give the whole enterprise an apocalyptic touch. For the time being, the Israeli security establishment has chosen the "iron wall"-concept which refers to a wall of bayonets.
Ghada Karmi shows in one of her chapters,"The Cost of Israel to the Arabs", that the price they had to pay was horrendous. She holds not only Israel but also the West, especially the United States of America, is responsible for the rejectionist attitude of the Israeli political class. They just did never consider any compromise. In this chapter the author describes the damage that Israeĺs creation inflicted on the Arabs, how it has retarded their development and provoked a reactive and dangerous radicalization. The Arabs are always asked to be realistic and recognise the facts on the ground. "The Arabs were expected to make peace with Israel - and to love it as well." Under the surface Israel has made much progress towards normalisation with the Arab world. The Arab leaders have to conceal that truth from their own populations. Karmi views Western policy in Israeĺs case rather strategic than ideological. The installation of the Jewish state as the local agent of Western regional self-interest was an effective way of dividing the Arabs, so as to ensure that they remained dependent and subjugated." Egypt and Jordan are the best examples.
In the Chapter "Why do Jews support Israel?" the author asks "Why did a project, which was, on the face of it, implausible in the first place and inevitably destructive of others, succeed so well? Just as importantly, why did it continue to receive support, despite a clear record of aggression and multiple breaches of international law against its neighbours that ensured its survival - not just as a state but as a disruptive force?" A number of disparate factors account for the unconditional support for Israel: the Holocaust and its associated trauma and guilts, the exigencies of Western regional policy, religious mythology, so-called common values, and Israel as the "only democracy in the Middle East" et cetera. It is difficult to find a similar phenomenon for a state in the 21st Century that gets away with vast human rights violations, colonial subjugation of another people and a disdain of international law. Not only for the American Jewish community but also for many liberal Jews "Israel had taken on a mythic quality, part-identity, part-religion, and its dissolution, as a Jewish state, became psychologically and emotionally unthinkable. The obverse of this coin was of course a paranoid suspicion and hatred of anyone who threatened Israel in the slightest way." Karmi describes the Zionist desperate attempt to prove an unbroken chain between the Jews of Palestine and those of Europe. "Put like this, the absurditiy of the idea is obvious, but that in fact was the proposition Zionists wanted people to believe in order to justify the Jewish `return` to the ́homeland`." Because the Zionist claim rested on such shaky grounds, Jewish researchers "tried to use genetics as a way of demonstrating a link between European (Ashkenazi) Jews and their supposed Middle Eastern origins by way of finding a common ancestry with Middle Eastern Jews".
The author discusses the relationship between the US and Israel and the dominant influence of the "Israel lobby", especially AIPAC which adopted an right-wing posture, both in its support for the Likud party in Israel and the political right in the US, including the Christian Zionists whose belief system goes like follows: They adhere literally to the Old Testament. Fundamental was the return of the Jews to the land of Israel, which was given them by God through the covenant with Abraham. According to this legacy all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates was granted to the Jews. The Jewish return to Palestine (Israel) was essential as a prelude to Christ́s Second Coming; in that sense, Jews were the instrument by which divine prophecy would be fulfilled. However, they were obliged to convert to Christianity and rebuild the Jewish Temple. Seven years of tribulation would follow, culminating in a holocaust or Armageddon, during which the converted Jews and other godless people would be destroyed. Only then would the Messiah return to redeem mankind and establish the Kingdom of God on earth where he would reign for a thousand years. The converted Jews, restored as God́s Chosen People, would enjoy a privileged status in the world. At the end of all this, they and all the rightous would ascend to heaven in the final `Rapture`. The Jewish role in all this meant: "Jews restored to Israel and converted, leading to the Second Advent, leading to mankind́s redemption."
In chapter four, five and six the author critizices the so-called peace process, Arafat́s destructive final role and Israeĺs attempt to revive the Jordanian option. In signing the Oslo agreement, "Arafat legitimized Zionism, the very ideology that hat created and still perpetuates the Palestinian tragedy". The Israeli aim to destroy the Palestinans could not have been better described as in the words of the Israeli sociologist professor Baruch Kimmerling who wrote in his book Politicide that the process of gradual military, political and psychological attrition whose aim was to destroy the Palestinians as an independent people with a coherent political and social existence would make them vanish by their fragmentation and irrelevance. "Forty years of Israeli politicide had done its work on the Palestine question as a national cause. The Palestinians, already in an unenviable position of physical fragmentation after 1948, became politically fragmented with the Israeli occupation." In her chapter "Solving the problem Karmi argues that a two-state solution is out of reach. Consequently, she calls in chapter seven for a one-state solution. "In a single state, no Jewish settler would have to move and no Palestinian would be under occupation." The author thinks that creating a Jewish state was "crazy" at Herzĺs time and even now therefore "creating a unitary state of Israel/Palestine, far less implausible than the Zionist project ever was, should be no less successful".
Refering to Hangebís statement that Israel as a "colonial state" cannot survive, Karmi proposes an unthinkable idea: "The best solution to this intractable problem is to turn back the clock before there was any Jewish state and return history as from there." But at the end, she turns back to realism: "The clock will not go back and, although the Jewish state cannot be uncreated, it might be, so to speak, unmade. The reunification of Palestinés shattered remains in a unitary state for all its inhabitants, old and new, is the only realistic, humane and durable route out of the morass. It is also the only way for the Israeli Jewish community (as opposed to the Israeli state) to survive in the Middle East."
Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as an editor and a journalist in Bonn, Germany. He has written several books on Israel and Palestine.
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I doubt that the story Douglas shares, if true (and I have no reason to question his belief in its veracity), can be eclipsed in terms of its importance to the development of the deepest possible understanding of the forces that killed John Kennedy.
From whom was the Air Force officer's visit to Moscow kept secret? His own chain of command?
With whom did he meet while in the U.S.S. R.? "Rogue" military and intelligence operatives?
Again we must confront the notion of "a treasonous cabal of hard-line American and Soviet intelligence agents [and military officers] whose masters were above Cold War differences."
For these vile human beings, ending the conflict in Southeast Asia under any circumstances -- including ostensible "victory" -- could be construed only as defeat.
So too their heirs and the "war on terror."
Fascinating tale. And just one of many.
For example: There's the story of Nixon in Viet Nam, personally delivering a crate of gold bars to "Charlie" in exchange for captured civilian personnel.
Charles
My impression from the source who told me this story is that the secret meeting in Moscow in the midst of the Viet Nam War was not a rogue operation but a well-planned meeting of the top military leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It lasted a full week, which showed that
the subjects discussed were of great significance to all concerned.
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Wasn't there a regular shipping route of heroin from Vietnam to the US, via US military cargo aircraft carrying bodies of servicemen who had been killed in combat? As I recall, this was set up by Bill Colby and was known as the "Long silver train" - (named after the colour of the metal containers of the cadavers, I believe?).
It is also very similar in stye to Operation Watch Tower, that saw large quantities of cocaine being flown into the US, thanks to the Pentagon.
David
The movie, “American Gangster,” is based on a true story involving the use of military caskets to smuggle heroin into the U.S. from Viet Nam. It chronicles how many of the members of the N.Y. Police squad in charge of investigating narcotics went to jail for their corrupt participation in the scheme.
Today’s N.Y. Times headline below declares that “The War on Poppy Succeeds…” in one province but the article’s fourth paragraph states that “the Afghan and Western governments [have] focused on the problem of soaring Afghan opium production, which hit record levels this year and remains a booming industry…”
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The War on Poppy Succeeds, but Cannabis Thrives in an Afghan Province
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
November 4, 2007
KHWAJA GHOLAK, Afghanistan — Amid the multiplying frustrations of the fight against narcotics in Afghanistan, the northern province of Balkh has been hailed as a rare and glowing success.
Two years ago the province, which abuts Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was covered with opium poppies — about 27,000 acres of them, nearly enough to blanket Manhattan twice. This year, after an intense anti-poppy campaign led by the governor, Balkh’s farmers abandoned the crop. The province was declared poppy free, with 12 others, and the provincial government was promised a reward of millions of dollars in development aid.
But largely ignored in the celebration was the fact that many farmers in Balkh simply switched from opium poppies to another illegal crop: cannabis, the herb from which marijuana and hashish are derived.
As the Afghan and Western governments focused on the problem of soaring Afghan opium production, which hit record levels this year and remains a booming industry, cannabis cultivation increased 40 percent around the country, to about 173,000 acres this year — from about 123,500 acres last year, the United Nations said in an August report. And even though hashish is less expensive per weight than opium or heroin, the report said, cannabis can potentially earn a farmer more than opium poppies because it yields twice the quantity of drug per acre and is cheaper and less labor intensive to grow.
“As a consequence,” the United Nations report warned, “farmers who do not cultivate opium poppy may turn to cannabis cultivation.”
Many farmers in Balkh have done just that, officials and residents say, and the province now has one of the most bounteous cannabis crops in the country.
The plant is certainly not hard to find. It lines the main highways leading into Mazar-i-Sharif, the provincial capital, and is visible to passing drivers. The crop’s chief byproduct, hashish, is sold openly at many roadside fruit and grocery stands, particularly around Balkh, the ancient citadel town about 15 miles west of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Late on an October afternoon, Muhammad Ayud, 30, a kindly sharecropper, was finishing a day of work at the three-acre parcel he farms here in this poor village just outside the town of Balkh. His plot was covered by a forest of cannabis plants, some more than nine feet tall.
“This is nothing,” he said, gesturing toward the towering plants. “If you give it real fertilizer, you’d see how tall it grows!”
Last year Mr. Ayud’s parcel was mostly opium poppies. But his crop was wiped out by government officials during a campaign led by the provincial governor, Atta Mohammad Noor, who jailed dozens of growers for disobeying him and personally waded into several poppy fields swinging a stick at the flower stems.
Mr. Ayud, one of only two wage earners in his 16-member family, lost most of his expected earnings for the year, about $1,000, he said.
This year he planted cannabis instead, with some cotton as a fallback in case the government followed through on its promises to eradicate the illicit crop. It was a return to a family tradition, he said. His father and grandfather grew cannabis here.
Mr. Ayud said he knew it was illegal to grow cannabis, but that it was the only crop that would produce enough profit to feed his family. “I don’t have anything else to grow,” he said. The difference in potential earnings is vast: cannabis can earn about twice the profits of a legal crop like cotton, local officials say.
Farmers in this region have cultivated cannabis for more than 70 years and, by the estimates of several Balkh residents, at least half the adult male population smokes hashish. Resinous, pungent and black, the hashish is sold in thin, palm-size sheets that resemble large tire patches and sell for about a dollar each. Hashish from this area — called Shirak-i-Mazar, or Milk of Mazar — was once prized by smokers around the world, though its primacy has since been supplanted by varieties from other countries.
Many farmers here, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, process the cannabis into hashish in their homes, then sell it to traffickers who come to their doors to pick it up. The best hashish is exported, residents here say, while the inferior stuff is consumed nationally.
Mr. Atta says he has a plan to eradicate cannabis next growing season. Farmers have begun to harvest their current crop, and officials say they do not want to destroy the farmers’ livelihood without giving them time to plant an alternative.
“Marijuana is not difficult to control, like poppy,” the governor said in an interview in October in his vast, opulent office in Mazar-i-Sharif. “It’s very easy to eradicate. It’s a very simple issue.”
But Mr. Atta said he was still waiting for the development money that the central government and international community had promised Balkh in return for ridding itself of opium poppies. The money — he puts it at more than $5 million; officials in the central government say it is closer to $3 million — is earmarked for a range of projects including rural development programs to promote farming alternatives to poppies and cannabis.
Mr. Atta cautioned that unless the money arrived promptly, he could not guarantee that the farmers would eschew poppies.
“It’s the responsibility of the central government and international community to improve the lives of farmers, which they aren’t doing,” he said. “Well, we’ll try our best to not let them grow poppy, but it’s going to cause problems.”
Many farmers around the town of Balkh suggested that forswearing cannabis might be harder than poppies. Not only are cannabis and hashish a more integral part of their customs, they said, but beyond cannabis there are no profitable alternatives.
The farmers said they would not grow cannabis only if the government provided an alternative source of livelihood, or improved the market for their legal crops.
“If, in the future, the government helps the farmers — and really helps — we will destroy all the poppy and cannabis,” said Hoshdel, 40, a well-weathered farmer in Khwaja Gholak who has nine children. “If they don’t help us, I swear I’ll grow it.”
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Last night I saw the new hit movie, “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
Scenes in the movie brought back memories of conversations that I had 10 years ago with an acquaintance, a retired Military Policeman (MP).
The MP’s assignment during the Viet Nam war was to serve as bodyguard to the chief U.S. Air Force General there.
Among the startling revelations told me by the retired MP were:
(1) In the midst of the war in Viet Nam, his boss, the chief U.S. Air Force General, along with other key U.S. military leaders in Viet Nam, flew on a secret mission to Moscow. They stayed there for a week, conferring with the Soviet’s top military brass. The MP and the other bodyguards assigned to the U.S. military leaders were given their own quarters during the visit and were well taken care of by their Soviet hosts while the high level talks took place.
(2) During the war, LIFE magazine published a sensational photo story about a huge warehouse in South Viet Nam were siphoned U.S. military equipment was for sale to whoever wanted it. Anything and everything was for sale, no questions asked. The MP, in his role as bodyguard to the chief U.S. Air Force General, accompanied his boss on at least one visit to the warehouse for the latter’s purpose of making certain the operation was running smoothly.
(3) After the Viet Nam war, the MP was assigned to the Las Vegas area. There he developed a private security firm on the side that provided protection to celebrities when they were in Las Vegas. Without warning, he suddenly received new orders assigning him to Alaska, forcing him to cease the lucrative operation of his security firm. Apparently, someone wanted him out of Las Vegas and had enough Pentagon pull to have new orders cut for him.
In Alaska, his duty was to meet and search U.S. military air craft that landed at a military air base. One night, on what he thought would be a routine occasion, he approached a military air craft that had just landed from Viet Nam. He had with him two dogs trained to sniff out contraband. The plane had only one passenger: a high ranking U.S. General. The MP was shocked to find that the entire plane from one end to the other was filled with bales of marijuana. The MP immediately alerted his superiors at the base and filed a written report. However, the plane was soon allowed to take off with the passenger and illegal load aboard. For months thereafter the MP and his family received deadly threats and were subjected to physical harassment in a calculated campaign to keep the criminal incident covered up.
Back to why seeing “American Gangster” had an impact on me: The movie, based on a true story, provides scenes where U.S. Military air craft from Viet Nam bring into the U.S. loads of pure heroin in an operation orchestrated by a Harlem drug lord.
I had always thought that I would never live to see the day when what the MP told would come to public light. But with the release of the movie, a portion is told in a no-holds-barred form.
Now I wonder if I shall ever see the day when we find out why the top U.S. military leaders, from Viet Nam and the Pentagon, met for a week with their counterparts in Moscow in the midst of the war in Viet Nam.
Also, I wonder if I shall see the day when we find out about the shipments of heroin into the U.S. aboard military aircraft flown from Afghanistan. If our invasion of Iraq was about oil, our invasion of Afghanistan was about heroin. Under the Tabiban, the poppy crop was decimated. Under the U.S. military now running that country, with the Tabiban’s power greatly reduced, the poppy crop has never been larger.
Maybe 30 years from now a movie will be made about it.
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Report: U.S. Upgrading Diego Garcia Base For Attack on Iran
The Scottish newspaper The Herald is reporting the US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangars on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for possible strikes on Iran. The U.S. has used Diego Garcia during the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bush Requests $88 Million To Fit Bunker Busting Bombs on B-2 Bombers
In Washington the Bush administration has requested $88 million to fit bunker busting bombs to B-2 stealth bombers. Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned if the proposal is linked to an attack on Iran. Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia said "My assumption is that it is Iran, because you wouldn't use them in Iraq, and I don't know where you would use them in Afghanistan."
U.S. & France Criticize El Baradei's Comments on Iran
This comes as the UN Nuclear watchdog Mohamaed El Baradei is being criticized by some for publicly saying there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
French defense minister Herve Morin: "Everyone has their view. Our information, and it is backed up by other countries, is contrary to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's comments)."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack brushed aside El Baradei's comments and urged him to not to speak about diplomatic issues. McCormack said: "He will say what he will. He is the head of a technical agency. I think we can handle diplomacy on this one."
from www.democracynow.org Oct 30, 07
Its comming soon...folks...wake up!
30 Senators warn Bush that he has no authority to attack Iran
AFP"
Published: Thursday November 1,
Thirty US senators wrote to President George W. Bush Thursday, warning he had no authority to launch military action against Iran, and expressing concern about the administration's "provocative" rhetoric.
The senators, 29 Democrats and one independent, urged the resolution of disputes with the Islamic Republic through diplomacy.
"We wish to emphasize that no congressional authority exists for unilateral military action against Iran," the letter signed by senators including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden said.
The letter warned that a resolution passed by the Senate in September, calling for the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group, should not be used as a pretext for war.
It hit out at "provocative statements and actions" by the administration on Iran, after Bush last month warned Tehran must be barred from nuclear weapons to avoid the prospect of "World War III."
"These comments are counterproductive and undermine efforts to resolve tensions with Iran through diplomacy," the letter, coordinated by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, said.
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a fierce critic of the administration's policies, sent his own letter this week to Bush, reportedly calling on him to open direct talks with Tehran.
His staff confirmed the letter had been sent, but declined to release a copy.
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Report: U.S. Upgrading Diego Garcia Base For Attack on Iran
The Scottish newspaper The Herald is reporting the US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangars on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for possible strikes on Iran. The U.S. has used Diego Garcia during the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bush Requests $88 Million To Fit Bunker Busting Bombs on B-2 Bombers
In Washington the Bush administration has requested $88 million to fit bunker busting bombs to B-2 stealth bombers. Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned if the proposal is linked to an attack on Iran. Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia said "My assumption is that it is Iran, because you wouldn't use them in Iraq, and I don't know where you would use them in Afghanistan."
U.S. & France Criticize El Baradei's Comments on Iran
This comes as the UN Nuclear watchdog Mohamaed El Baradei is being criticized by some for publicly saying there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
French defense minister Herve Morin: "Everyone has their view. Our information, and it is backed up by other countries, is contrary to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's comments)."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack brushed aside El Baradei's comments and urged him to not to speak about diplomatic issues. McCormack said: "He will say what he will. He is the head of a technical agency. I think we can handle diplomacy on this one."
from www.democracynow.org Oct 30, 07
Its comming soon...folks...wake up!
Letting the Cat Out of the Bag
Attacking Iran for Israel?
By RAY McGOVERN
www.counterpunch.org
October 31, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern10312007.html
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is at her mushroom-cloud hyperbolic best, and this time Iran is the target. Her claim last week that "the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American security interests in the Middle East and around the world" is simply too much of a stretch.
To gauge someone's reliability, one depends largely on prior experience. Sadly, Rice's credibility suffers in comparison with Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Basing his judgment on the findings of IAEA inspectors in Iran, ElBaradei reports that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program there.
If this sounds familiar it is, in fact, déjà vu. ElBaradei said the same thing about Iraq before it was attacked. But three days before the invasion, American nuclear expert Dick Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert, "I think Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong."
Here we go again. As in the case of Iraq, US intelligence has been assiduously looking for evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran; but, alas, in vain. Burned by the bogus "proof" adduced for Iraq-the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes-the administration has shied away from fabricating nuclear-related "evidence." Are Bush and Cheney again relying on the Rumsfeld dictum, that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?" There is a simpler answer.
Cat Out of the Bag
The Israeli ambassador to the US, Sallai Meridor, let the cat out of the bag while speaking at the American Jewish Committee luncheon on Oct. 22. In remarks paralleling those of Rice, Meridor said Iran is the chief threat to Israel. Heavy on the chutzpah, he then served gratuitous notice on Washington that countering Iran's nuclear ambitions will take a "united United States in this matter," lest the Iranians conclude, "come January '09, they have it their own way."
Meridor stressed that "very little time" remained to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. How so? Even were there to be a nuclear program hidden from the IAEA, no serious observer expects Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon much sooner than five years from now.
Truth be told, every other year since 1995 US intelligence has been predicting that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in about five years. It has become downright embarrassing-like a broken record, punctuated only by so-called "neo-conservatives" like James Woolsey, who in August publicly warned that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt Tehran's nuclear weapons program.
Woolsey, self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," put it this way: "I'm afraid that within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [the Iranians] could have the bomb."
The day before Ambassador Meridor's unintentionally revealing remark, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated, "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." That remark followed closely on President George W. Bush's apocalyptic warning of World War III, should Tehran acquire the knowledge to produce a nuclear weapon.
The Israelis appear convinced they have extracted a promise from Bush and Cheney that they will help Israel nip Iran's nuclear program in the bud before they leave office. That is why the Israeli ambassador says there is "very little time"-less than 15 months.
Never mind that there is no evidence that the Iranian nuclear program is any more weapons-related than the one Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld persuaded President Gerald Ford to approve in 1976. Westinghouse and General Electric successfully lobbied for approval to sell the Shah for $6.4 billion the kind of nuclear facilities that Iran is now building, but the deal fell through when the Shah was ousted in 1979.
With 200-300 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, the Israelis enjoy a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. They mean to keep that monopoly and Israel's current leaders are pressing for the US to obliterate Iran's fledgling nuclear program.
Anyone aware of Iran's ability to retaliate realizes this would bring disaster to the whole region and beyond. But this has not stopped Cheney and Bush in the past. And the real rationale is reminiscent of the one revealed by Philip Zelikow, confidant of Condoleezza Rice, former member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and later executive director of the 9/11 Commission. On Oct. 10 2002, Zelikow said this to a crowd at the University of Virginia:
"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is-it's the threat to Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name...the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
Harbinger?
The political offensive against Iran coalesced as George W. Bush began his second term, with Cheney out in front pressing for an attack on its nuclear-related facilities. During a Jan. 20, 2005 interview with MSNBC, just hours before Bush's second inauguration, Cheney put Iran "right at the top of the list of trouble spots," and noted that negotiations and UN sanctions might fail to stop Iran's nuclear program. Cheney then added, with remarkable nonchalance:
"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
Does this not sound like the so-called "Cheney plan" being widely discussed in the media today? An Israeli attack; Iranian retaliation; the United States springing to the defense of its "ally" Israel?
A big fan of preemption, the vice president was the first U.S. official to speak approvingly of Israel's air attack on Iraq's reactor at Osirak in 1981. He included that endorsement in his important speech of Aug. 26, 2002, in which he set the terms of reference for the subsequent campaign to persuade Congress to approve war with Iraq.
Cheney has done little to disguise his attraction to Israel's penchant to preempt. Ten years after the attack on Osirak, then-Defense Secretary Cheney reportedly gave Israeli Maj. Gen. David Ivri, commander of the Israeli Air Force, a satellite photo of the Iraqi nuclear reactor destroyed by U.S.-built Israeli aircraft. On the photo Cheney penned, "Thanks for the outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981."
Nothing is known of Ivri's response, but it is a safe bet it was along the lines of "we could not have done it without your country's help." Indeed, although the U.S. officially condemned the attack (the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein's Iraq at the time), intelligence and operational support that the Pentagon shared with the Israelis made a major contribution to the success of the Israeli raid. With Vice President Cheney now calling the shots, similar support is a virtual certainty in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran.
It is no secret that former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was already pressing in 2003 for an early preemptive strike, insisting that Iran was likely to obtain a nuclear weapon much earlier than the time forecast by U.S. intelligence. Sharon even brought his own military adviser to brief Bush with aerial photos of Iranian nuclear-related installations.
More troubling still, in the fall of 2004 Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and as Chair of the younger Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, made some startling comments to the Financial Times.
A master of discretion with the media, Scowcroft nonetheless saw fit to make public his conclusion that Sharon had Bush "mesmerized;" that he had our president "wrapped around his little finger." Needless to say, Scowcroft was immediately ousted from the advisory board and is now persona non grata at the White House in which he worked for so many years.
An Unstable Infatuation
George W. Bush first met Sharon in 1998, when the Texas governor was taken on a tour of the Middle East by Matthew Brooks, then executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Sharon was foreign minister at the time and took Bush on a helicopter tour of the Israeli occupied territories. An Aug. 3, 2006 McClatchy wire story by Ron Hutcheson quotes Matthew Brooks:
"If there's a starting point for George W. Bush's attachment to Israel, it's the day in late 1998, when he stood on a hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, with eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, 'Amazing Grace.' He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience. He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved."
Bush made gratuitous but revealing reference to that trip at the first meeting of his National Security Council on Jan. 30, 2001. After announcing he would abandon the decades-long role of "honest broker" between Israelis and Palestinians and would tilt pronouncedly toward Israel, Bush said he had decided to take Sharon "at face value" and unleash him.
At that point the president brought up his trip to Israel with the Republican Jewish Coalition and the flight over Palestinian camps, but there was no sense of concern for the lot of the Palestinians. In Ron Suskind's Price of Loyalty, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who took part at the NSC meeting, quotes Bush: "Looked real bad down there," the president said with a frown. He then said it was time to end America's efforts in the region: "I don't see much we can do over there at this point."
O'Neill reported that Colin Powell, the newly minted but nominal secretary of state, was taken completely by surprise at this nonchalant jettisoning of more nuanced and balanced longstanding policy. Powell demurred, warning that this would unleash Sharon and "the consequences could be dire, especially for the Palestinians." According to O'Neill, Bush just shrugged, saying, "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things." O'Neill says that Powell seemed "startled."
It is a safe bet that the vice president was in no way startled.
What Now?
The only thing that seems to be standing in the way of a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is unusual-but-sensible foot-dragging by the U.S. military. It seems likely that the senior military leadership has told the president and Cheney: This time let us brief you on what to expect on Day 2, on Week 4, on Month 6-and on the many serious things Iran can do to Israel, and to us in Iraq and elsewhere.
CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon is reliably reported to have said, "We are not going to do Iran on my watch." And in an online Q-and-A on Sept. 27, award-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest spoke of a possible "revolt" if pilots were ordered to fly missions against Iran. She added:
"This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief, has said...that the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Besides, it's not the 'war' or 'bombing' part that's difficult; it's the morning after and all the days after that. Haven't we learned that (again) from Iraq?"
How about Congress? Could it act as a brake on Bush and Cheney? Forget it. If the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with its overflowing coffers supports an attack on Iran, so will most of our spineless lawmakers. Already, AIPAC has succeeded in preventing legislation that would have required the president to obtain advance authorization for an attack on Iran.
And for every Admiral Fallon, there is someone like the inimitable retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a close associate of James Woolsey, "cakewalk" Ken Adelman and other "neo-cons." The air campaign "will be easy," says McInerney, a FOX pundit who was a rabid advocate of shock and awe over Iraq. "Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can't penetrate," he adds, and several hundred aircraft, including stealth bombers, will be enough to do the trick:
"Forty-eight hours duration, hitting 2,500 aim points to take out their nuclear facilities, their air defense facilities, their air force, their navy, their Shahab-3 retaliatory missiles, and finally their command and control. And then let the Iranian people take their country back."
And the likely White House rationale for war? Since, particularly with the fiasco of Iraq as backdrop, it will be a hard sell to promote the idea of an imminent threat from a nuclear-armed Iran, the White House PR machine has already begun focusing on other "evidence"- amorphous so far-indicating that Iran is supporting those who are "killing our troops in Iraq."
The scary thing is that Cheney is more likely to use the McInerneys and Woolseys than the Fallons and Caseys in showing the president how "easily" it can all be done-Cakewalk II.
Madness.
It is not as though our country has lacked statesmen wise enough to warn us against foreign entanglements and about those who have difficulty distinguishing between the strategic interests of the United States and those of other countries:
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
(George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
A shorter version of this article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.
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Well, it provided a few good laughs!
*********************************************************
"Well, it provided a few good laughs!"
Try this one on your "funny-bone" for size, my beloved infidel.
http://wlym.com/PDF-77-85/CAM8304.pdf
Anton Chaitkin is a member of this forum, as well.
Your,
Femme Nikita
Over the years I have received telephone calls from Anton, who asked for information that I might have on specific topics. I always found that he had diligently done his research beforehand on the topics, with the net result being that he provided me with valuable insights to which I otherwise would not have been privy.
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Posted on Sun, Oct. 07, 2007
Nuke transportation story has explosive implications
BY ROBERT STORMER
SPECIAL TO FORT WORTH (TEXAS) STAR-TELEGRAM
Last month, six W80-1 nuclear-armed AGM-129 advanced cruise missiles were flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana and sat on the tarmac for 10 hours undetected.
Press reports initially cited the Air Force mistake of flying nuclear weapons over the United States in violation of Air Force standing orders and international treaties, while completely missing the more important major issues, such as how six nuclear cruise missiles got loose to begin with.
Opinion columns and editorials appeared in America's newspapers, some blasting the Air Force for flying nukes over the U.S. and some defending the Air Force procedure. None of the news reports focused on the real questions of our nuclear security.
Let me be very clear here: We are not talking about paintball cartridges or pellet gun ammo. We are talking nuclear weapons.
There is a strict chain of custody for all such weapons. Nuclear weapons handling is spelled out in great detail in Air Force regulations, to the credit of that service. Every person who orders the movement of these weapons, handles them, breaks seals or moves any nuclear weapon must sign off for tracking purposes.
Two armed munitions specialists are required to work as a team with all nuclear weapons. All individuals working with nuclear weapons must meet very strict security standards and be tested for loyalty -- this is known as a "Personnel Reliability Program." They work in restricted areas within eyeshot of one another and are reviewed constantly.
All security forces assigned are authorized to use deadly force to protect the weapons from any threat. Nor does anyone quickly move a 1-ton cruise missile -- or forget about six of them, as reported by some news outlets, especially cruise missiles loaded with high explosives.
The United States also does not transport nuclear weapons meant for elimination attached to their launch vehicles under the wings of a combat aircraft. The procedure is to separate the warhead from the missile, encase the warhead and transport it by military cargo aircraft to a repository -- not an operational bomber base that just happens to be the staging area for Middle Eastern operations.
Yes, we still do fly nuclear warheads over the United States today. We also drive them over land as well. That's not the point.
This is about how six nuclear advanced cruise missiles got out of their bunkers and onto a combat aircraft without notice of the wing commander, squadron commander, munitions maintenance squadron (MMS), the B-52H's crew chief and command pilot and onto another Air Force base tarmac without notice of that air base's chain of command -- for 10 hours.
It is time that we got to the bottom of it through a comprehensive investigation.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff, to lead an independent inquiry into the implications of the incident. That is in addition to the existing Air Force investigation headed by Maj. Gen. Douglas Raaberg, director of air and space operations at Air Combat Command, which is responsible for all Air Force bombers and fighters.
The questions that must be answered:
1 Why, and for what ostensible purpose, were these nuclear weapons taken to Barksdale?
2 How long was it before the error was discovered?
3 How many mistakes and errors were made, and how many needed to be made, for this to happen?
4 How many and which security protocols were overlooked?
5 How many and which safety procedures were bypassed or ignored?
6 How many other nuclear command and control non-observations of procedure have there been?
7 What is Congress going to do to better oversee U.S. nuclear command and control?
8 How does this incident relate to concern for reliability of control over nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere?
9 Does the Bush administration, as some news reports suggest, have plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons?
10 If this was an accident, have we degraded our military to a point where we are now making critical mistakes with our nuclear arsenal? If so, how do we correct this?
Yes, heads must roll and careers will end. But let's make sure that this includes the ranks from general officers to noncommissioned ones.
Or is this to be the Air Force version of the Abu Ghraib investigation?
Robert Stormer of Chicago is a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, serving with the Navy's Supervisor of Salvage, and was a specialist in weapons retrieval. He is a marine engineer and marine salvage specialist.
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Weekend Edition
October 6 / 7, 2007
New Revalations About the Attack on the USS Liberty
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
By RAY McGOVERN
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern10062007.html
Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat-Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again-and not only on Capitol Hill.
Seldom has the Lobby's power been as clearly demonstrated as in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:
o Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
o The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
o By that time 34 of the Liberty's crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a forty-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire. Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice tapes and transcripts heard and seen by many intelligence analysts, material that shows beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
The Ugly Truth
But the truth will out-eventually. All it took in this case was for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down, off the hook for suppressing-even destroying-damning evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ship." the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: "Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly 1967 incident."
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today. It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this sensitive story.
A Marine Stands Up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of "Leper!" were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers. Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That's what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
o First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called "neo-conservatives" running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the "enduring" military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.
o Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its entire crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could-literally-get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
"Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir."
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
"Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir."
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest-and most easily identifiable-ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still alive; one of Lockwood's shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard-even after almost 40 years.
What Else We Know
John Crewdson's meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his book "Body of Secrets" and recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating. The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray the incident as merely a terrible mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain's father) to "inquire into all the facts and circumstances." The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out "cover-up."
Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004 in which he described himself as "outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of 'mistaken identity.'" Boston continued:
"The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded-a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory: James Bamford, in "Body of Secrets," adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.
Other Indignities
Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty's skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River. A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal."
Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an associate of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for almost 60 years, shared the following:
"The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed."
Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.
As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel's prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:
"In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders. Israel's illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims "hate us."
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
A shorter version of this article appeared originally on Consortiumnews.com
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Various people have predicted Bush was “about” to attack Iran since at least 2004. Though I don’t put anything past him I hope that he not so insane as to attempt such a thing. I imagine doing would me wide scale resistance in the US military.
Weekend Edition
September 8 / 9, 2007
CounterPunch Diary
Will the US Really Bomb Iran?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09082007.html
"They're about taking out the entire Iranian military."
This particular spine-chiller comes from Alexis Debat, excitingly identified as "director of terrorism and national security" at the Nixon Center. According to Debat, the big takeout is what the U.S. Air Force has in store, as opposed to mere "pinprick strikes" against the infamous nuclear facilities.
Predicting imminent war on Iran has been one of the top two items in Cassandra's repertoire for a couple of years now, rivaled only by global warming as a sure-fire way to sell newspapers and boost website hits.
Debat was re-roasting that well-scorched chestnut, the "Shock and Awe" strategy, whereby-back in March of 2003-the U.S. Air Force proposed to reduce Iraq's entire military to smoldering ruins. In the event, "Shock and Awe" was a resounding failure, like all such pledges by Air Force commanders to destroy the enemy's military since the birth of aerial bombardments nearly a century ago. Such failures have never stopped the US Air Force from trying once again, and there are no doubt vivid attack plans now circulating the government.
Will it come to pass? In his memoirs, I Claud (which I'm happy to say CounterPunch Books/AK Press will be republishing next spring) my father offers a useful journalistic recipe on this matter of prediction.
Will it come to pass? In his memoirs, I Claud (which I'm happy to say CounterPunch Books/AK Press will be republishing next spring,) my father offers a useful recipe on this matter of prediction.
One morning, as we at length relaxed at breakfast by a brazier on the terrace of the Café du Dôme, he [Robert Dell, the diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian] said to me: "Do you want to get what used to be called a 'scoop' for your horrid little paper every day?" (The "horrid little paper" was, of course, the Daily Worker, whose diplomatic correspondent I then was.)
"That would be nice."
"Well then, all you have to do is to read all the continental papers available every morning, take lunch with one or more of Europe's leading politicians or diplomats, make up your mind what is the vilest action that, in the circumstances, the French, British, Italian or German government could undertake, and then, in the leisure of the afternoon, sit down at your typewriter and write a dispatch announcing that that is just what they are going to do. You can't miss. Your news will be denied two hours after it is published and confirmed after twenty four."
So, whether in 24 hours or 24 days or at some point before the end of his term, we should predict Bush will send the bombers on their way to Teheran to destroy the usual targets--power stations and kindred civilian infrastructure, hospitals, maybe a few bomb shelters crammed with women and children.
But will it really come to pass?
Despite the unending stream of stories across the months announcing that an attack on Iran is on the way, I've had my doubts. Amid the housing slump here, with the possibility of an inflationary surge as the credit balloon threatens to explode, would the US government really want to see the price of gas at the pump go over $5? What would Hugo Chavez do? Even a hiccup in flows from Venezuela would paralyze refineries here, specifically designed for Venezuelan crude. China has a big stake in Iran. It's also Uncle Sam's banker. The Chinese don't have to destroy the dollar, merely squeeze its windpipe, or revalue their currency enough to double retail prices in Wal-Mart. The Republicans and the presidential candidates wouldn't want that on the edge of an election year.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff know the Iraq War has almost broken the US Army. Wouldn't they adamantly oppose the notion of an attack on Iran, which would see Shiite resistance groups in Iraq cut US supply convoys from Kuwait bringing fuel and water to the big US bases? Wouldn't Shiite forces as a whole finally commence a campaign of eviction of the American occupier? Wouldn't this puncture the fantasy that General Petraeus' "surge" is working?
The other side of the ledger isn't hard to fill in either. The oil companies like a crisis that sends up the price of their commodity. The Chinese are a prudent lot and don't want to rock the world economy. Politically, both they and Russia would like to see the US compound the disaster in Iraq and get into a long-term mess in Iran. Israel wants an attack on Iran, and the Israel lobby calls the shots in US foreign policy. What Israel wants, Israel gets. The US peace movement is in disarray, and sizable chunks of it would be delighted to see bombs shower down on the woman-hating ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad, the holocaust denier.
Amid the disaster of their Middle Eastern strategy Bush and his advisors may hype themselves into one last desperate throw, emboldened by the fact that the selling of the surge has been a success even though all the Democrats need to do is cite the UN, which says the number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has gone from 50,000 to 60,000 a month. Or quote Associated Press which counted 1,809 Iraqi civilians killed in August, compared with 1,760 in July. The Sunni split in Anbar province is not one likely to be replicated in Baghdad or elsewhere and anyway had nothing to do with the hike in US troop levels. Bush didn't dare go to Baghdad.
Weigh it all up, and you'd be foolish to bet that an attack on Iran couldn't happen. I knew Noam Chomsky used to be dubious about the likelihood of a U.S. attack emailed his last week to ask if he is still of that opinion. Here's his answer.
"Yes, I was quite sceptical. Less so over the years. They're desperate. Everything they touch is in ruins. They're even in danger of losing control over Middle Eastern oil -- to China, the topic that's rarely discussed but is on every planner or corporation exec's mind, if they're sane. Iran already has observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- from which the US was pointedly excluded. Chinese trade with Saudi Arabia, even military sales, is growing fast. With the Bush administration in danger of losing Shiite Iraq, where most of the oil is (and most Saudi oil in regions with a harshly oppressed Shiite population), they may be in real trouble.
"Under these circumstances, they're unpredictable. They might go for broke, and hope they can salvage something from the wreckage. If they do bomb, I suspect it will be accompanied by a ground assault in Khuzestan, near the Gulf, where the oil is (and an Arab population -- there already is an Ahwazi liberation front, probably organized by the CIA, which the US can "defend" from the evil Persians), and then they can bomb the rest of the country to rubble. And show who's boss."
The peace movement had better pull itself together, remembering that should the bombs start to fall on Tehran, most of the Democrats in Congress will be on their feet, cheering.
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September 6, 2007
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters
By WILLIAM GRIMES
The New York Times
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
484 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/books/06....html?ref=books
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” arrives carrying heavy baggage. John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, set off a furor last year by arguing, in an article that appeared in The London Review of Books, that uncritical American support for Israel, shaped by powerful lobbying organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, does grave harm to both American and Israeli interests.
A bitter debate has raged ever since, with accusations of anti-Semitism leveled by, among others, Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the principal lobbying organizations taken to task by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.
“The Israel Lobby,” an extended, more fully argued version of the London Review article, has done nothing to calm the waters. The authors have been barred from making appearances by at least one university and several cultural centers to discuss their subject, and continue to reap a whirlwind of criticism and abuse. If they were looking for a fight, they have found it.
Slowly, deliberately and dispassionately Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt lay out the case for a ruthlessly realistic Middle East policy that would make Israel nothing more than one of many countries in the region. On those occasions when Israel’s interests coincide with America’s, it should count on American support, but otherwise not. What Americans fail to understand, the authors argue, is that most of the time the two countries’ interests are opposed.
The reason they do not realize this, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt insist, can be explained quite simply: The Israel lobby makes sure of it. Working closely with members of Congress, public-policy organizations and journals of opinion, energetic, well-financed groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, along with dozens of political-action committees, perpetuate the myth, as the authors see it, of Israel as an isolated, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies and in need of America’s unstinting financial and military support.
This lobby is particularly adept at stifling debate before it begins, the authors argue. “Whether the issue is abortion, arms control, affirmative action, gay rights, the environment, trade policy, health care, immigration or welfare, there is almost always a lively debate on Capitol Hill,” they write. “But where Israel is concerned, potential critics fall silent and there is hardly any debate at all.”
There is nothing underhanded or devious about this, the authors say. Like the National Rifle Association or the AARP, the Israel lobby relies on the traditional political weapons available to any special-interest group in pressing its agenda. It just happens to be unusually skillful and effective.
“It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel’s case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state,” they write.
The problem, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, is that Israel has become a strategic liability with the end of the cold war and a moral pariah in its dealings with the Palestinians and, most recently, the Lebanese. Uncritical American support for its closest Middle East ally has damaged American credibility in the Arab world, encouraged terrorism, stymied the search for a solution to the Palestinian problem, and in every way made America’s international position weaker and more dangerous.
Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel’s foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself. They describe a virtual rogue state, empowered by American wealth and might, that blocks peace at every turn, threatens its cowering neighbors with impunity, crushes the national aspirations of the Palestinians and, whenever the opportunity arises, bites the hand that feeds it.
Working tirelessly in the background is the Israel lobby, playing Iago to America’s Othello, leading president after president down ever more dangerous paths. Without intense pressure from the Israel lobby, the authors argue, America would not have undertaken the war in Iraq.
Most American readers will bristle at the authors’ characterization of Israel. This is to be expected, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, because of the completely false image of Israel and its history that has been manufactured by the Israel lobby. As a result, Americans completely misinterpret the Palestinian issue and fail to support a productive policy that would tilt away from Israel and toward the Palestinians.
The authors state, on several occasions, their belief that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist, but the effect of their book is to leave it dangling by a moral and strategic thread. In essence they call for the United States to cut Israel loose, to return more or less to American policy before the 1967 war, when the United States tried to occupy a middle ground between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Strangely, the authors do not itemize the fabulous benefits delivered by this approach in the 1950s and ’60s.
It is a little odd that so chilly a book should generate such heat. Most of Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt’s arguments are familiar ones, and it is hardly inflammatory to point out that the major Jewish organizations tend to take a much tougher line on, say, a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, the Iraq war or settlements in the West Bank, than most American Jews favor. The writers stand on eminently defensible ground when they argue for a more constructive, creative American role in peace talks.
The general tone of hostility to Israel grates on the nerves, however, along with an unignorable impression that hardheaded political realism can be subject to its own peculiar fantasies. Israel is not simply one country among many, for example, just as Britain is not. Americans feel strong ties of history, religion, culture and, yes, sentiment, that the authors recognize, but only in an airy, abstract way.
They also seem to feel that, with Israel and its lobby pushed to the side, the desert will bloom with flowers. A peace deal with Syria would surely follow, with a resultant end to hostile activity by Hezbollah and Hamas. Next would come a Palestinian state, depriving Al Qaeda of its principal recruiting tool. (The authors wave away the idea that Islamic terrorism thrives for other reasons.) Well, yes, Iran does seem to be a problem, but the authors argue that no one should be particularly bothered by an Iran with nuclear weapons. And on and on.
“It is time,” Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt write, “for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country.” But it’s not. And America won’t. That’s realism.
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August 27 2007
A Global Justice Movement
Why the US and Israel Should Lose Middle East Wars
By BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst
www.counterpunch.org
August 27, 2007
George W. Bush has once again thrown down the gauntlet. The Mideast wars of the United States, he announced to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention on August 22, must end only with a U.S. victory. He has not wavered in this position since September 11, 2001.
The unspoken but real purpose of his efforts has been and will be to concentrate increasing power over the Middle East in the hands of the small group of rich and greedy elites who rule the U.S. and Israel today, and perhaps he will achieve this goal. The more important result, however, will be the elimination of any movement toward greater global justice, stability, and peace in the world for decades to come.
It is past time to challenge the arrogant Mr. Bush directly.
For overwhelming moral reasons, I do not want the U. S. and Israeli governments to be victorious in any present or future Middle East wars. I want them to lose such wars.
U.S. policies in the Middle East since 9/11 have already caused a million or so killings and have created more injustice in the world than existed formerly. Every day results in more killings, more injustice. Unless might does indeed make right, we have no right whatever to win these wars. We should lose them.
If the U.S. were to "win" these wars, whatever that means, more of the world's people than at present would be ruled by the U.S. Most of these people do not want to be ruled by the U.S. -- which makes the wars themselves anti-democratic. That fact alone is reason enough to conclude that our country should lose these wars.
My personal belief is that the United States and Israel will inevitably lose these wars over time in any case. If this loss is in fact inevitable, conventional wisdom would argue that it is better for the loss to happen rapidly in order to hold casualties down. In a continuing civil war over which outsiders have limited control, however, conventional wisdom may not apply.
Nevertheless, a truly rapid -- meaning within the next six months -- acceptance of defeat by the U.S. and Israel of their own Mideast policies would probably offer the only possibility of mitigating the blame assigned to these two nations by the rest of the world for future mass killings of human beings throughout this unstable area.
Much of global public opinion will in any case correctly attribute a large residual responsibility to the U.S. and Israel for the utterly disproportionate and one-sided killings already carried out since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Further killings that occur during even a short and rapid transition to inevitable U.S. and Israeli defeat will only enlarge this residual. But a short, quick, and determined acceptance of defeat will still reduce to some extent the charges of U.S. responsibility for future killings.
A lasting peace in the Middle East will only happen, of course, if the U.S. and Israel are wise enough publicly (and honestly) to end their drive for joint imperium over the Middle East and Central Asia and also to cease their efforts to bring about regime change in Iran and Syria. In other words, as has long been the case, the U.S. and Israel will need to make serious long-term changes in their own foreign policies if they wish to avoid a conflict lasting for generations that ultimately they cannot win.
As of now, no evidence exists that either country is willing even to consider such policy changes, and no evidence exists that either the Republican or Democratic Parties in the U.S., any political parties in Israel, the military-industrial complexes of the U.S. and Israel, the Israel lobby in the U.S., the U.S. Protestant Christian Right, the Catholic Church, or the ruling elites of any EU states will bring one jot of meaningful pressure to bear on the Israeli or the U.S. government to change their policies.
If change is to come, it must come from ordinary voters, particularly in the U.S., applying pressure on the various groups listed above, or from ordinary people succeeding in setting up new groups or parties that will succeed in bringing greater pressure to bear. The pressures must be very strong and very explicit. People must emphasize day after day to both Democratic and Republican members of Congress and to every presidential candidate that the U.S. must first and foremost change its own policies. And people must emphasize to all politicians that the Israel lobby is one of the strongest forces pressing both Democrats and Republicans not to change U.S. policies, thereby preventing healthy political debate in the country. This must stop.
Finally, my hope is that sensible U.S. voters will agree with the opinions summarized here and in addition create a groundswell of support for the immediate impeachment and conviction of Bush and Cheney. This is the only action, in my view, that opens up the possibility of rapidly bringing about the necessary changes in U.S. policies.
Other Considerations
Let's say it bluntly. War with Iran is inevitable before January 2009 unless Bush and Cheney are both impeached first. New Israeli-U.S. hostilities in Lebanon are also likely. Either warfare or covert actions conducted by the U.S. and/or Israel to bring about regime change in Syria are also probable.
But those of us in the U.S. who claim to be peace activists ought to be ashamed. With rare exceptions, the powers in the movement are confident that things are already going our way, what with the Democratic Party's success in the 2006 congressional elections and the continuing disaster the Bush administration faces in Iraq. Most self-labeled peace activists think the odds so favor further Democratic victories that, as a group, we do not need to run any risks or do anything new to take the presidency away from the Republicans in 2008. It's old hat, maybe, but the best thing to do, most peace activists believe, is just to keep talking about withdrawal from Iraq, while patting ourselves on the back and emphasizing to each other that we are being admirably mature and responsible in not moving too fast toward actual withdrawal.
So let's admit that many of us sustain ourselves with hot air even when the subject is limited to Iraq. Let's admit too that few want to discuss the role Israel played in encouraging the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, because that would be unnecessarily criticizing Israel. In fact, both the Israel lobby and the Israeli government probably concluded as early as May 2003 that they had already achieved their own principal objectives in Iraq, and that it was counterproductive for them to waste their own credibility by continuing to oppose every aspect of the U.S. peace movement's criticism of the war. Even before things began going wrong in the war's execution, Israeli propagandists were soft-pedaling their own top officials' support for the war. But underneath, the support was definitely there, hard and firm.
When it comes to matters in the Middle East other than Iraq, most peaceniks are even less willing to address questions of the Israel lobby's involvement in U.S. policymaking. Talking about this would be the surest way to reveal the disunity and embarrassing differences within the so-called peace movement. In order to avoid an open discussion, it is easier for most of us simply to ignore the voluminous evidence that both the lobby, and senior U.S. officials who are in effect part of the lobby, are pushing the U.S. toward war, particularly with Iran, but also toward regime change in Syria and resumed hostilities in Lebanon. If it comes to war with any or all of these countries, most peace types note that they are not pushing for it, and they will silently hope more wars do not erupt, but they will not make a lot of noise about stopping such wars before they start. In this, they are simply following most of the leaders of the Democratic Party.
All of this, of course, is logically nonsensical. Take a minute and think of the mess the peace movement has created. First, the very name reflects the movement's shallowness. What good is a hypocritical, utterly out-of-touch and ineffective "peace movement," when beyond question ordinary people on this earth want justice before they want peace? The U.S. government and its ultra-close ally Israel actually want more unjust colonial wars and covert action to strengthen their own already unjust influence over a major part of the globe, in this case the Middle East. Peace above all is for those who support the status quo, but if you're in that category you're in a small minority. So let's banish the peace movement and get a global justice movement going. Peace may be all right long-term, but if you're one of the angry billions on this earth constantly surrounded by a stench of injustice that smothers all hope, chances are that, in your mind, peace should follow justice, not precede it. Chances are, in fact, that you have no favorable thoughts of any type about U.S. peaceniks.
Let's look at another question that is not just about the Middle East but is about the broader Islamic world as well. It seems clear that Samuel Huntington's concept of a clash of civilizations has expanded its intellectual appeal since September 11, 2001. We do indeed seem to have an example of a clash of civilizations that has become a growing force today. This force is nourished by the desire of Muslims for real freedom from the increasing political domination over the Islamic peoples by Western (Christian and Jewish) parts of the world. The principal Islamic motivation has little to do with "hatred of our freedoms." The Islamic hatred (and it does exist) is aimed at U.S., Israeli, and Western policies.
Huntington's book was published in the mid-1990s, and the events of September 11 can be seen as a major example of this type of clash of civilizations. The point to be made here is that ideas in the book, conveniently titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, lend themselves to being twisted fairly easily into ideas that the neocons, the Israel lobby, recent Israeli governments, EU elites, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Christian Right in the U.S., and the Bush administration itself all have established as part of their own views toward the Islamic world. The book therefore becomes an object of considerable value to the present rulers of the United States and Israel, since it can be seen as providing intellectual justification not only for the special relationship between these two nations, but also for the newly cordial ties of the European Union to U.S. and Israeli policies.
Those among us who wish to counter the notion that a clash of civilizations justifies what the U.S. and Israel are doing in the Middle East today should stand up and state their opposition loudly and directly. Supporters of the concept that the "clash" is a significant part of the present global political system seem to suggest that the very existence of the clash makes unjust, oppressive treatment of Islamic people somehow acceptable. But we should point out that the existence of a real clash is questionable, and that in any case injustice and oppression are never acceptable. People everywhere should realize that in this increasingly globalized world the importance of nationalism is beginning to fade. All of us should begin thinking much more about what are the best policies for the entire world to pursue, not what are the best policies for their own nations. To start this ball rolling, those who happen to live in the U.S. should stop thinking of themselves as exceptional. Americans are perfectly average -- no better and no worse than average people everywhere else. There are some -- a few -- exceptional people anywhere you look, but most of us do not make the cut.
We should emphasize that in today's world a Middle East empire dominated jointly by two nationalist powers, the U.S. and Israel, is not only anti-democratic, but is impossibly anachronistic as well
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
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Sometimes it is difficult to conceive of an event as simply a coincidence. It is easy in the JFK case to view events as part of or proof of a conspiracy when they might be only coincidences.
As proof that strange coincidences do happen, last night I switched from news coverage of the tragic bridge accident in Minneapolis to watch "CSI Miami". In the opening minutes, a large yacht crashed into a bridge in Miami, collapsing the bridge and sending cars crashing in to the water. The scenes looked just like the actual news scenes from Minneapolis. It was eerie.
So this just proves that odd coincidences can indeed occur.
The case for conspiracies
As JFK proves, the theories are usually much more interesting than the truth.
By Meghan Daum
Los Angeles Times
August 4, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...inion-rightrail
Since the May release of his 1,612-page book, "Reclaiming History," criminal prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has been appearing on everything from C-Span to "The Colbert Report" telling the world that JFK's death had nothing to do with a government conspiracy. By most accounts, he's made a pretty airtight case.
Bugliosi, famous for prosecuting Charles Manson and for coauthoring the book about the case, "Helter Skelter," has spent 20 years examining just about every theory ever put forth about the assassination. "It's my view that it's impossible for any reasonable, rational person to read this book without being satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone," Bugliosi told the New York Times in May. Since then, overwhelmingly favorable reviews have suggested that the days of the grassy knoll-Mafia-missing bullets conspiracy theories might at last be over.
Despite the sense that Bugliosi's is the final word, for some people the simple explanation remains less compelling than the labyrinthine alternatives. It was notable that Tuesday, the print edition of the New York Times published a two-page ad, an "open letter" from one Paul Kuntzler, declaring that "President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered by vice president London [sic] Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy. . . ." The letter went on to implicate Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Arlen Specter, the United States military, the Ford Motor Co., Life magazine and something Kuntzler called "big Oil of Midland, Texas," among many others.
Who is Kuntzler? Since he included his telephone number at the bottom of his letter, I called him to find out. As you might imagine, I learned more than can possibly fit in this space, but the basics are these: He's 65, a former exhibits and sales director of the National Science Teachers Assn. and once a prominent D.C.-based gay activist. He first became interested in the JFK assassination in 1991 after reading Jim Marrs' book, "Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy" (this was also, incidentally, the year of Oliver Stone's film "JFK," which Kuntzler calls "98% accurate").
In 2004, Kuntzler's longtime partner, Stephen Miller, died of complications from AIDS and left him Miller Reporting Co., which had transcribed documents that Kuntzler believes are relevant to the assassination. Following the company's demise (Kuntzler referred to "millions in estate taxes"), he sold the building that housed it, using the money to pay off his credit card debts (including $25,000 he spent organizing an assassination panel discussion last year) and spent $186,000 on the New York Times ad. Altogether, Kuntzler estimates he's spent a quarter of a million dollars on what he calls "the last opportunity for the American public to have confirmation on what happened on Nov. 22, 1963."
"I don't have much money left," he added. "I expect that once the truth comes out, I'll go on a speaking tour. If not, I'll have to take out another mortgage on my house."
After I talked to Kuntzler, I called Bugliosi, who listed for me many of the same points he made on C-SPAN and "The Colbert Report," including his belief that the Stone film is "one continuous lie, [other than] he did have the correct date and the correct victim."
"I didn't read [Kuntzler's letter] carefully," Bugliosi told me. "But I went through it enough to see that he was regurgitating all the old hoary theories that even those in the mainstream community have rejected. He's not even reading mainstream conspiracy dogma."
We then spent some time talking about why, despite the conventional wisdom that the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation, the human mind seems so naturally drawn to the complexities and innuendoes of conspiracy theories. Bugliosi admitted that they are usually more interesting than the truth. In the case of President Kennedy, he said, they point to a kind of collective inability to accept that such a monumental, historical event could be caused by a single, ordinary person.
"It gives more meaning to his life and death," Bugliosi said, "to believe dark forces are responsible for his death. Jackie herself said we don't even have the satisfaction of him being killed for a cause."
That makes sense. But speaking of simple explanations, what about the fact that every once in a while a conspiracy theory comes along that has some truth to it? Take, for example, this particular moment in this particular nation. You don't have to believe in fake moon landings or even stolen elections to sense that we're experiencing one of the most secretive periods in recent political history. When it comes to the current state of things, smelling a rat isn't necessarily contingent on living in your mother's basement and wearing T-shirts that say things like "Inside Job!" It's simply a matter of paying attention.
Then again, there's such a thing as paying too much attention. "If you're a parent and your child gets interested in the JFK case, it's toxic," Bugliosi told me. "It's caused divorces, bankruptcies and suicides."
"My mother and my sisters received copies of the ad via FedEx," Kuntzler told me. "They knew how much I was spending. Well, actually, I haven't told my mother yet."
mdaum@latimescolumnists.com
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Excerpts from Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot by Jerry Zeifman, former Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee(1995)
"After Hale's disappearance, Lindy and Hale's brother, a Jesuit priest in New Orleans, were fearful that he had been murdered because of his inside knowledge about the role of the FBI, CIA, and organized crime in events leading up to the Kennedy assassination--knowledge that he had acquired as a member of the Warren Commission and that might also have some relevance to Watergate.
Congresswoman Boggs had expressed her fears to Congressman Bill Hungate as well as to me and Peter Rodino in the strictest confidence."
"In 1971 Boggs had made an extraordinary speech on the House floor. The then-majority leader accused the Department of Justice of using "Gestapo-like" police-state tactics that included bugging the offices and homes of members of Congress and other political leaders--and in some cases using illegally obtained information to blackmail public officials."
"The unreported truth was that when Boggs made the speech he ws undergoing psychiatric treatment for manic depression, and the CIA and FBI were concerned that his judgement had become sufficiently impaired to endanger national security."
Also killed with Rep. Boggs was Rep. Nick Begich, Sr. of Alaska.
His son, Dr. Nick Begich, is a frequent guest on the international radio show coasttocoastam. He has commented on his father’s death several times when being interviewed, always leaving the impression that he thinks there is more to the story that just a tragic plane crash.
His website is www.earthpulse.com. Below is his biography as posted on the coasttocoastam web site under guests who have been interviewed.
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Dr. Nick Begich serves as Executive Director of The Lay Institute on Technology, Inc., a Texas non-profit corporation. He is also the publisher and co-owner of Earthpulse Press Incorporated, an Alaska based organization. Dr. Begich is the eldest son of the late United States Congressman from Alaska, Nick Begich Sr., and political activist Pegge Begich. He is well known in Alaska for his own political activities. He was twice elected President of both the Alaska Federation of Teachers and the Anchorage Council of Education. He has been pursuing independent research in the sciences and politics for most of his adult life.
Begich received his doctorate in traditional medicine from The Open International University for Complementary Medicines in November 1994. He co-authored with Jeane Manning the book Angels Don't Play This HAARP; Advances in Tesla Technology. Begich has also authored Earth Rising I & II, both with the late James Roderick. He has published articles in science, politics and education and is a well known lecturer, having presented throughout the United States and in nineteen countries. He has been featured as a guest on thousands of radio broadcasts reporting on his research activities including new technologies, health and earth science related issues. He has also appeared on dozens of television documentaries and other programs throughout the world including BBC-TV, CBC-TV, and TeleMundo.
Washington Post: FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes
Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.
By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews
Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.
The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.
In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."
A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.
But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.
"We cannot afford to be misleading to a jury," the lab director wrote to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in late summer 2005 in a memo outlining why the bureau was abandoning the science. "We plan to discourage prosecutors from using our previous results in future prosecutions."
Despite those private concerns, the bureau told defense lawyers in a general letter dated Sept. 1, 2005, that although it was ending the technique, it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis." And in at least two cases, the bureau has tried to help state prosecutors defend past convictions by using court filings that experts say are still misleading. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis.
For the majority of affected prisoners, the typical two-to-four-year window to appeal their convictions based on new scientific evidence is closing.
Dwight E. Adams, the now-retired FBI lab director who ended the technique, said the government has an obligation to release all the case files, to independently review the expert testimony and to alert courts to any errors that could have affected a conviction.
"It troubles me that anyone would be in prison for any reason that wasn't justified. And that's why these reviews should be done in order to determine whether or not our testimony led to the conviction of a wrongly accused individual," Adams said in an interview. "I don't believe there's anything that we should be hiding."
The Post and "60 Minutes" identified at least 250 cases nationwide in which bullet-lead analysis was introduced, including more than a dozen in which courts have either reversed convictions or now face questions about whether innocent people were sent to prison. The cases include a North Carolina drug dealer who has developed significant new evidence to bolster his claim of innocence and a Maryland man who was recently granted a new murder trial.
Documents show that the FBI's concerns about the science dated to 1991 and came to light only because a former FBI lab scientist began challenging it.
In response to the information uncovered by The Post and "60 Minutes," the FBI late last week said it would initiate corrective actions including a nationwide review of all bullet-lead testimonies and notification to prosecutors so that the courts and defendants can be alerted. The FBI lab also plans to create a system to monitor the accuracy of its scientific testimony.
The Post-"60 Minutes" investigation "has brought some serious concerns to our attention," said John Miller, assistant director of public affairs. "The FBI is committed to addressing these concerns. It's the right thing to do."
The past inaction on bullet-lead contrasts with the last time the FBI's science was called into question, in the mid-1990s, when 13 lab employees were accused of shoddy work and of giving overstated testimony involving several disciplines, including explosives as well as hair and fiber analysis. Back then, the Justice Department reviewed hundreds of cases in which FBI experts testified, and it notified prisoners about problems that affected their convictions. The government did so because prosecutors have a legal obligation to turn over evidence that could help defendants prove their innocence.
Current FBI managers said that they originally believed that the public release of the 2004 National Academy of Sciences report and the subsequent ending of the analysis generated enough publicity to give defense attorneys and their clients plenty of opportunities to appeal. The bureau also pointed out that it sent form letters to police agencies and umbrella groups for local prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers.
Even the harshest critics concede that the FBI correctly measured the chemical elements of lead bullets. But the science academy found that the lab used faulty statistical calculations to declare that bullets matched even when the measurements differed slightly. FBI witnesses also overstated the significance of the matches.
The FBI's umbrella letters, however, glossed over those problems and did little to alert prosecutors or defense lawyers that erroneous testimony could have helped convict defendants, one of the recipients said.
"Frankly, the letters that they sent them, you know, were minimizing the significance of the error in the first place," said defense lawyer Barry Scheck, whose nonprofit Innocence Project has helped free more than 200 wrongly convicted people. The letters said that "our science wasn't really inaccurate. Our interpretation was wrong. But the interpretation is everything."
The FBI said last week that the 2005 letters "should have been clearer." Scheck has now been asked to assist the FBI's review.
Since 2005, the nonpartisan Forensic Justice Project, run by former FBI lab whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, has tried to force the bureau to release a list of bullet-lead cases under the Freedom of Information Act. The Post joined the request, citing the public value of the information. But the government has stalled, among other things seeking $70,000 to search for the documents.
"By stonewalling and delaying the release, Justice has ensured that wrongfully convicted citizens are deprived of their right to appeal or seek post-conviction relief because the statute of limitations in many states has expired," said David Colapinto, the lawyer for the group.
As part of its review, the FBI will release all bullet-lead case files involving convictions.
The Scope of the Cases
Most of the estimated 2,500 instances in which the FBI performed bullet-lead exams involved homicide cases that were prosecuted at the state and local levels, where FBI examiners often were summoned as expert witnesses for the prosecution.
To compile an independent list, The Post and "60 Minutes" conducted a nationwide review, interviewing dozens of defense lawyers, prosecutors and scientific experts. The effort also included a sweep of electronic court filings conducted by four summer associates at the New York law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom.
In many of the cases that raise the most compelling questions, the inmates might have a hard time winning the public's sympathy. Some had criminal backgrounds and most were convicted with at least some additional circumstantial evidence linking them to gruesome crime scenes. But the common thread is that removing the flawed bullet-lead evidence has created reasonable doubt about guilt in the minds of legal experts, the courts and at least one juror.
In North Carolina, Lee Wayne Hunt, 48, remains in prison after being convicted 21 years ago of a double murder. Hunt was an admitted marijuana dealer, but has steadfastly denied involvement in the killings. The FBI testified that its bullet-lead analysis linked fragments from the victims to a box of bullets connected to Hunt's co-defendant. That was the sole forensic evidence against Hunt. State prosecutors recently conceded that the analysis should not be considered "scientifically supported and relied upon."
In addition, the attorney for Hunt's co-defendant, who committed suicide in prison, has since declared that his client carried out the murders alone.
Despite both developments, Hunt has been denied a new trial.
"What they're relying on here is technicalities to keep an innocent man in prison," said Richard Rosen, Hunt's attorney.
Another North Carolina case highlights the impact that FBI bullet-lead testimony had on local jurors. James Donald King faces execution after being convicted of killing his two wives. He admitted to killing his first wife, spent time in prison, was released on parole, remarried and then was convicted of murdering his second wife.
The court is considering whether to grant a new trial.
"If the state had not introduced evidence linking a bullet in Mr. King's car to the bullet fragments in the victim, there would have been reasonable doubt in my mind as to Mr. King's guilt," juror Michelle Lynn Adamson said in an affidavit supporting his appeal.
Other defendants have had mixed results:
• In Maryland, the Court of Appeals last year reversed the murder conviction of Gemar Clemons and ordered a new trial, concluding that the FBI's bullet-lead conclusions "are not generally accepted within the scientific community and thus are not admissible."
• In New Jersey, courts have reversed and reinstated convictions in cases involving bullet lead. The conviction of one defendant, Michael Behn, was reversed, but he recently was re-convicted on other evidence.
• Shane Ragland's conviction in the 1994 killing of a University of Kentucky football player was reversed after Kathleen Lundy, an FBI bullet-lead examiner, pleaded guilty to giving false testimony in his case about bullet-lead manufacturing. A few weeks ago, Ragland pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and is now free.
Ernest Roger Peele, a retired FBI agent who testified about bullet matching in 130 cases, stands by his testimony but said that sometimes the nuances of science get "lost in the adversarial nature of the courtroom." He said he would no longer tell jurors that bullets can be linked to specific boxes because of the science academy's findings.
Peele, who said he was frustrated that he was never contacted by the academy, added that his bullet matches were meant to be "a part of a puzzle" and never the only forensic evidence. "Is it possible there are innocent people in jail? Yes. Is it possible that bullet lead was part of that process? Yes."
The Origins of the Science
The FBI's bullet-lead analysis was created more than four decades ago to link suspects to crimes in cases in which bullets had fragmented to the point where traditional firearms tracing -- based on gun-barrel groove markings -- would not work.
So FBI scientists used chemistry to try to find matches. Their assumption was that bullets made from the same batch of lead would have the same chemical composition. U.S. bullet-makers recycle lead from car batteries and melt it down in huge amounts, and it was believed that each batch would produce bullets sharing the same trace elements.
The FBI first used the technique after Kennedy's assassination, hoping to determine whether various bullet fragments came from the same gun. In July 1964, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the commission investigating the assassination that the bureau's findings were "not considered sufficient" to make any matches.
By the early 1980s, the bureau was the only practitioner of the science and routinely used it to help state and local police link crime-scene bullets to those in a gun or a box owned by a suspect. There are few federal murder statutes, but the FBI routinely helps local law enforcement by providing forensic expertise in homicide cases.
In the mid-1990s, Lundy used the science to help prove that Clinton White House lawyer Vincent W. Foster committed suicide, internal FBI documents show.
In the early days, bullet fragments were subjected to neutron beams that would allow scientists to measure the presence and amounts of at least three chemical elements: antimony, arsenic and copper. If two bullets had similar measurements of those three elements -- the FBI allowed for a small margin of error -- they were declared a match.
In 1996, the bureau switched to a new method called "inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy," in which scientists identified and measured seven trace elements in the bullets, adding the elements bismuth, cadmium, tin and silver. The goal was to increase the precision of the tests. But at the same time that it was measuring more elements, the FBI doubled the margin of error for declaring matches.
"Not enough suspects were being caught in the new net using seven elements, so they chose to use a bigger net," said Clifford Spiegelman, a statistician at Texas A&M University who reviewed the FBI's statistical methods for the science academy.
The bureau conducted a study in 1991 that called bullet-lead analysis a "useful forensic tool" that produced "accurate" and "reproducible" matches.
The study, however, raised two concerns.
First, it found that bullets packaged 15 months apart -- a span that assumed separate batches of lead -- had the exact composition, potentially undercutting the theory that each batch was unique.
Second, it found that bullets in a single box often had several different lead compositions. That finding, it cautioned, should have "significant impact on interpretation of results in forensic cases."
Peele, the retired bullet-lead examiner, was the primary author of that study. He said he still felt comfortable having told jurors in the past that bullets from the same box could be expected to match, as long as his remarks were carefully qualified.
In the Hunt case, he testified that his match of the crime-scene bullets to those in the suspects' box was "typical of everything we examined coming from the same box or the next closest possibility would be the same type, same manufacturer, packaged on or about the same day."
Peele said that he always tried to tell jurors that some bullets in the same box might not match. Still, he said it was reasonable for jurors to conclude that matching bullets could have come from the same box. "I don't think it's misleading as long as it's fully explained," he said.
Some of Peele's colleagues went further. FBI examiner John Riley told a Florida jury: "It is my opinion that all of those bullets came from the same box of ammunition." A New Jersey prosecutor suggested that the bullets matched by the FBI were as unique as a "snowflake or fingerprint."
Today, the FBI regards all such testimony as inaccurate. "The science does not and has never supported the testimony that one bullet can be identified as coming from a particular box of bullets," said Adams, the retired FBI lab director.
A Challenge From Within
The FBI's about-face was prompted by a challenge from within its ranks.
William Tobin, an FBI lab metallurgist for a quarter-century, won accolades working on cases such as the crash of TWA Flight 800, in which he helped prove that the plane was downed by an accidental fuel-tank explosion, not terrorism. Shortly before he retired, Tobin was approached by a woman who believed that the bullet-lead science used against her brother, a New Jersey murder defendant, was flawed. Still employed by the bureau, Tobin was not permitted to help.
But when he retired in 1998, he decided to look further. Bullet matching had always been done by the lab's chemists, and as a metallurgist, Tobin wondered about their assumptions. Soon he joined with Erik Randich, a metallurgist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
By 2001, the two had finished a study that challenged the key assumptions that the FBI had been making about bullet lead. They found that bullets made from the same batch did not always match, because subtle chemical changes occurred throughout the manufacturing process.
Tobin bought bullets at several stores in Alaska and found that a large number of bullets with the same composition and manufacturing date were often sold in the same community, suggesting that it was wrong to assume that a bullet match could be narrowed to one suspect.
"It hadn't been based at all on science but, rather, had been based on subjective belief," Tobin said in an interview. "Courts, and even practitioners, had been seduced by the sophistication of the analytical instrumentation for over three decades."
Soon, Tobin began appearing as a witness for defendants challenging FBI bullet-lead matches. Courts began to take notice, too, and the FBI suddenly faced a barrage of questions about a science that had gone unchallenged for three decades.
Adams asked the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 to examine the FBI's work, temporarily halting new bullet-lead matches. Two years later, the academy's findings stunned the bureau.
The panel concluded that although the FBI had been taking accurate bullet-lead measurements in its lab, the statistical methods and its expert testimonies were flawed.
The science "does not . . . have the unique specificity of techniques such as DNA," and "available data does not support any statement that a crime bullet came from a particular box of ammunition," the panel concluded. All the FBI could say going forward was that bullets made from the same batch "are more likely" to match in chemical makeup than those made from different batches. Adams soon declared that such testimony was so general that it had no value to jurors, and he ended the technique.
The FBI Response
The FBI went on the offensive to portray its decision in the best light.
In a news release dated Sept. 1, 2005, the bureau declared that it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis" but that it was ending the technique because of the questions about its "relative probative value," the "costs of maintaining the equipment" and the "resources necessary to do the examinations."
The bureau also sent form letters to the more than 300 police agencies it had assisted with the science and to the umbrella groups representing local prosecutors and local criminal defense lawyers so they could "take whatever steps they deem appropriate."
The letters cited the academy's report but did not call attention to the magnitude of the FBI's internal concerns.
For instance, the letters stated that the impact of the academy's findings "on previously issued examination reports remains unaddressed." In fact, the FBI had conducted its own review to determine how often bad statistics led to mistaken matches.
In March 2005, the chief of the FBI chemistry unit that oversaw the analysis wrote in an e-mail that he applied one of the new statistical methods recommended by the National Academy of Sciences to 436 cases dating to 1996 and found that at least seven would "have a different result today." Marc A. LeBeau estimated that at least 1.4 percent of prior matches would change.
If the FBI employed other statistical methods the number of non-matches would be "a lot more," LeBeau wrote. In fact, when the bureau tested one method recommended by the academy on a sample of 100 bullets, the results changed in the "large majority of the cases," he wrote.
Despite the concerns, the FBI provided affidavits in at least two cases seeking to help prosecutors sustain convictions that were based on bullet-lead matches.
In one such affidavit introduced in Maryland, the FBI cited the academy's report but did not mention it faulted the bureau's statistical methods.
That omission concerns the chairman of the academy panel.
The affidavit "does not discuss the statistical bullet-matching technique, which is key and probably the most significant scientific flaw found by the committee," said Kenneth MacFadden, a private chemistry expert.
MacFadden and Spiegelman said they also believed the affidavit was misleading, because it estimates that the maximum number of .22-caliber bullets in a batch of lead was 1.3 million. The academy said the number could be as high as 35 million.
In a May 12, 2005, e-mail, the deputy lab director told LeBeau, "I don't believe that we can testify about how many bullets may have come from the same melt and our estimate may be totally misleading."
FBI officials said Friday they will stop using the affidavit.
"They said the FBI agents who went after Al Capone were the untouchables, and I say the FBI experts who gave this bullet-lead testimony were the unbelievables," Spiegelman said.
"60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft and producers Ira Rosen and Sumi Aggarwal, Washington Post research editor Alice Crites and staff researcher Madonna Lebling, and freelance researcher Jilly Badanes contributed to this report.