Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Israel Lobby Calls for an ‘Iranian Pearl Harbor’

When the Bush-Cheney administration was in power, Dick Cheney tried hard to find an excuse for military attacks on Iran. After all, according to Gen. Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 1997 to 2000, Cheney and other hawks had plans for attacking and destroying seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa over five years in order to transform them into U.S. client states, and he wanted to “accomplish” as much as possible before leaving office. Various options were considered. As reported by Seymour Hersh, in late 2007 the Bush-Cheney administration received congressional approval for its request for $400 million to launch major covert operations against Iran, and a presidential finding signed by Bush authorized a secret program for destabilizing Iran by supporting puppet groups purporting to represent the Iranian Arabs living in the oil province of Khuzestan, the Baluchi people, and other separatist “organizations.” Aside from terrorist operations that killed many innocent Iranians, the program failed. Other venues were also tried, ranging from fabrications about Iran’s alleged interference in Iraq to huge shows of force in the Persian Gulf and a campaign of lies and exaggerations.

Another option that was considered was provoking the Iranians to attack the U.S. forces, hence justifying counterattacks by the U.S. Given the long history of the attacks by the U.S. Navy on Iranian ships and offshore oil installations in the Persian Gulf, and the destruction by the U.S. Navy of the Iranian passenger jet in July 1988 that killed 290 people, creating an “incident” in the Persian Gulf to justify the attacks seemed only “natural.” Then, in January 2008 five Iranian patrol boats supposedly made aggressive moves toward three U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz. Bush called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and it appeared momentarily that Cheney’s wish had been realized. But less than a week later the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the threatening radio transmission that the press had initially reported coming from the boats. In fact, it had come from a prankster.

Hersh also revealed that in 2008 some administration officials met in Cheney’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran. As Hersh explained, “There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT [patrol] boats. Put Navy SEALs on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Strait of Hormuz, start a shoot-up …. It was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans.” But, the War Party learned a lesson: To gain public support for attacking Iran, create the “right” incident.

Four years later, the idea is surfacing again, with the War Party and the Israel lobby calling for an “Iran Pearl Harbor.” Although under Yukiya Amano, the politicized International Atomic Energy Agency has been highly critical of Iran, it still reports consistently that it has found no evidence that Iran has diverted its enriched uranium to a non-peaceful purpose and, in fact, Iran has recently diverted it to peaceful purposes — fabricating fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor that produces medical isotopes for 850,000 Iranian patients annually. Senior Obama administration officials have also emphasized over the past several months that Iran is not making nuclear weapons and has not even made the political decision to move forward toward building them. Over the past several years there have been several analyses arguing that the U.S. can live with an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and that such an Iran will even be a stabilizing factor in the Middle East.

Thus, the War Party’s hope for “justification” for war with Iran based on its nuclear program has been quashed, at least for now. It has therefore revived the idea of creating the “right incident” for provoking a war with Iran and gaining the public’s support for it too.

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Monday, October 29, 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012

In Amerika there will never be a real debate

God help them if Obama and Romney ever had to participate in a real debate about a real issue at the Oxford Union. They would be massacred.

The “debates” revealed that not only the candidates but also the entire country is completely tuned out to every real problem and dangerous development. For example, you would never know that US citizens can now be imprisoned and executed without due process. All that is required to terminate the liberty and life of an American citizen by his own government is an unaccountable decision somewhere in the executive branch.

No doubt that Americans, if they think of this at all, believe that it will only happen to terrorists who deserve it. But as no evidence or due process is required, how would we know that it only happens to terrorists? Can we really trust a government that has started wars in 7 countries on the basis of falsehoods? If the US government will lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to invade a country, why won’t it lie about who is a terrorist?

America needs a debate about how we can be made more safe by removing the Constitutional protection of due process. If the power of government is not limited by the Constitution, are we ruled by Caesar? The Founding Fathers did not think we could trust a caesar with our safety. What has changed that we can now trust a caesar?

If we are under such a terrorist threat that the Constitution has to be suspended or replaced by unaccountable executive action, how come all the alleged terrorist cases are sting operations organized by the FBI? In eleven years there has not been a single case in which the “terrorist” had the initiative!

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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Ordinary citizens play no role in US electoral process

“The average citizen has absolutely none (no role in the elections). If you just reflect on the immense amount of money that’s being spent on the campaigns, two billion dollars by each candidate, that in and of itself indicates that the common man has no place, no role in the electoral process. I mean, our guest [another guest in the show] said that we don’t have control that we have lost control, well, we never had control,” said Darnell Summers with the Berlin-based Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) in a recent Press TV interview.

Summers stressed that the United states has always been and continues to be a ‘slavocracy’ as the common American has never had the power to influence the country’s political process ever since the establishment of the state.
“We have a situation where the United States started as a ‘slavocracy’. From the very beginning a large section of the people living in the country, the European settlers and the Indians of course, they didn’t have any, the indigenous people they had no say in the workings of the political aspect of the United States government from the very beginning and that pattern has continued.”  
The analyst argued that the majority of Americans are devoid of political power in today’s America as they used to be in the past when the course of US politics was dominated by the slave owners who were also the possessors of the country’s wealth and controllers of its economy.

“The slave owners they had the mass great fortunes, controlled the economy, north and south and everything was based upon that particular foundation, Slavocracy, then to what some people called democracy, however, the situation for the majority of people in the United States has remained the same - They remain politically powerless,” he said.
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Monday, October 22, 2012

US Election Concern: What Is There To Vote For?

As Americans prepare to go to the polls, the airwaves are littered with paid advertising of the crassest and most manipulative kind. Political issues packaged by ad agencies are flooding the arena of politics with nasty negative ads.

So far, the two parties and their backers have spent a half billion dollars on political advertising with much of the placements still to come in the next few weeks. CBS reports the “spend” will top a billion dollars —just on ads.

AP warns: “Get ready, presidential swing states. Now the campaign ad crush — and TV spending spree — really begins.”

This is occurring even as the economy and unemployment remain major issues. Millions of Americans are broke and hurting as poverty grows, but there seems to be no shortage of money to grease politics.

It’s being called a “deluge,” leading many Americans, according to USA Today, to wish the election was already over.

The political pros call it “the air war”—ironically, a military metaphor—as the media sells message points the way they sell soft drinks while political personalities and their speechwriters provide buzz words and superficial slogans to define their differences.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Who Is Responsible for the Mess in Libya?

How many times have you heard the truism that in modern-day America the cover-up is often as troubling as the crime? That is becoming quite apparent in the case of the death of Chris Stevens, the former U.S. ambassador to Libya.

Stevens and three State Department employees were murdered in the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last month, on September 11th. About an hour before the murders, the ambassador, who usually resides in the U.S. embassy in Tripoli but was visiting local officials and staying at the consulate in Benghazi, had just completed dinner there with a colleague, whom he personally walked to the front gate of the compound. In the next three hours, hundreds of persons assaulted the virtually defenseless compound and set it afire.

Around the same time that these crimes took place in Benghazi, a poorly produced, low-grade 15-minute YouTube clip was going viral on the Internet. The clip shows actors in dubbed voices portraying the prophet Mohammed and others in an unflattering light. The Obama administration seized upon the temporary prevalence of this clip to explain the assault on the consulate. Indeed, the administration sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to represent it on five Sunday morning TV talk shows on September 16th, to make the claim that the attack on the consulate was a spontaneous reaction to the YouTube clip, that it could not have been anticipated, and that the perpetrators were ordinary Libyans angry at the freedom moviemakers in America enjoy.

Soon, U.S. intelligence reports were leaked that revealed that the intelligence community knew the attack was not as described by Rice. The intelligence folks on the ground in Libya reported before September 16th that the attack was well organized, utilized military equipment and tactics, and was carried out by local militias with ties to al-Qaida. In response to these leaks, the State Department, for which Rice works, acknowledged that the assault was an organized terrorist attack.
 
The Obama administration has publicly rejected the intelligence leaks and insisted as recently as last week during the vice presidential debate that "we" did not know the assault was an act of terrorism against American personnel and property. The word "we" was uttered by Vice President Biden, whose credibility hit a new low when he insisted that the government did not know what we now know it knew. A day after the debate, the White House claimed that the "we" uttered by Biden referred to the president and the vice president, and not to the federal government or the State Department. This is semantics akin to Bill Clinton's "it depends what the meaning of 'is' is."

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Behind the Benghazi Cover-Up

On Sept. 11, scores of men with automatic weapons and RPGs launched a night assault on the U.S.
 compound in Benghazi, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, and set the building ablaze. Using mortars, they launched a collateral attack on a safe house, killing two more Americans, as other U.S. agents fled to the airport.

On Sept. 14, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the attack came out of a spontaneous protest caused by an anti-Muslim video on YouTube.

On Sept. 16, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice told the entire nation the attack had not been premeditated or preplanned but emanated from a spontaneous protest of the nasty video.

On Sept. 25, Obama at the United Nations mentioned the video six times.

But when they were pushing this tale, what did the White House actually know?

For we have now learned that the assault was observed in near real time by the State Department’s Charlene Lamb, who was in contact with the security section at the Benghazi compound.

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Friday, October 12, 2012

Financial Crime in London’s “Parasites Paradise”, Or the Best Sanctuary Money Can Buy

Whenever financial swindlers prosper at the expense of investors or a bank jiggers interest rates to bugger their competitors or tax evaders flee fiscal crises or rent gouging petrol monarchies recycle profits or oligarchs pillage economies and drive millions to drink, drugs and destitution they find a suitable secure sanctuary in London. They are wooed and pursued by big British realtors eager to sell them multi-million dollar estates, trophy properties and landmark mansions.

Pompous and pretentious British academics convince them to send their progeny to six digit private schools, promising them that when they graduate they will be speaking English through their nasal cavities, rolling their r’s and mastering the art of eloquent but vacuous elocution. British governments, Labor, Liberal, and Conservative, in the best and most hypocritical legal traditions, fashion the legal loopholes to attract the biggest and wealthiest parasites of the world.

Crime Wave Sweeps City of London

A veritable crime wave1 has invaded the City of London, where millionaire investment bankers cook the books for billionaire clients and bilk the Treasury to pay their fines and flout the Law. Courses in business ethics are obligatory at Oxford and Cambridge since it has become standard operating procedure for mega-swindlers to plead guilty, to pay a fine and avoid jail and to solemnly promise to never, ever, flout the law… until the next mega-deal.

London has become the center of global financial capital by engaging in long term large scale active collaboration with multi-billion pound drug, arms, people smuggling and sex-slave cartels. The “Brits” specialize in laundering funds from the Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Nigerian narco-kings. Albanian white slavers have their ‘private bankers’ at prestigious City banks with a preference for graduates of the London School of Economics. Bi-lingual Greek kleptocrats, lifelong billion dollar tax evaders, fleeing from their pillaged homeland have their favorite real estate brokers, who never engage in any sort of naughty ‘due diligence’ which might uncover improper tax returns. The City Boys with verve and positive initiative, aided and abetted by the hyper-kinetic “Tony” Blair’s open door policy to swindlers and saints of all colors and creeds, welcomed each and every Russian gangster-oligarch-democrat, especially those who paid cash for multi-pound ‘Olde English’ landmark estates’.

The London Sanctuary for the world’s richest plunderers and parasites offers unprecedented services, especially protection from extradition and criminal prosecution at the site of their crimes. Impartial British legal and judicial officials are experts in citing constitutional precedents that, in strict regard for the established legal order, uphold the denial of extradition, denying the legal and justice systems of every pillaged country and the cries of justice of the impoverished Irish, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Mark Dankof Responds to the ADL Hit Piece on Press TV Iran

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL)has reared its head again in another attack on Press TV Iran and those who appear in that venue. This published projectile out of New York appears as the "ADL Report: Iranian Government’s Press TV Promotes Anti Semitism to Global Audience."

It must be fairly noted that this latest broadside represents an actual improvement in methodsemployed by the American domestic wing of the Israeli Mossad intelligence organization. In this new case, at least the ADL has taken public responsibility for the demonization, innuendo, and ad hominem attacks they periodically launch on their opponents.

Such is not always the case. It is a matter of public record that Rabbi Ariel Tuchman, the Director of the Library and Research Center of the ADL in New York, and an Assistant Director of their Civil Rights Division, was deliberately concealing his identity from the public in a series of anonymous assaults being directed against critics of the Israel Lobby and the government of Israel on an Internet site called JHate. That scam was detected and traced. Other anonymous sites of this ilk have surfaced since.

The ADL is obsessed with what it defines as Hate Speech. The charge of Hate Speech comes into play any time the Zionist enterprise is criticized, or the ADL and its sister organizations in the Israeli Lobby are criticized or challenged. This term and its employment are absolutely Orwellian in scope. What the ADL is truly opposed to is Free Speech and the free exchange of ideas in the national and international public marketplaces of information and analysis. (I understand that my current targeting by their New York headquarters had as much to do this time with my conversations with Fars News Agency of Iran, including my chats with Fars on Israel’s role in anti-Islamic Defamation; the connections of Israel and The Lobby to the MEK Delisting Campaign; and worst of all, Israel’s role in the events of 9-11.)

Why is this so? The reason is simple and obvious. The ADL cannot stand on its own record which includes the Stalinist profiling dossiers their New York office develops on American political dissidents for subsequent distribution and use by their Regional Offices in the United States, the news media, and most ominously of all, both Federal and State governments. In 2002, the San Francisco Superior Court awarded former Congressman Pete McCloskey a $150,000 court judgment against the ADL in a illegal domestic spying case. In March of 2001, a U. S. District Judge upheld a $10.5 million judgment against the ADL in a defamation of character litigation that saw the ADL convicted in April of 2000 by a Federal Jury in Denver.

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Monday, October 8, 2012

Hegemony and Propaganda: The Importance of Trivialisation in Cementing Social Control

Knowledge in modern societies has expanded to the point whereby specialisms and sub-specialisms are the norm. It is just not possible for one person to have in-depth knowledge of every discipline. We must rely on others to convey such knowledge, usually in relatively simplistic terms. Most of us have to take at face value many of the ideas and concepts that we are bombarded with in this age of instant, mass communications and information overload.

People tend to like simplicity. In many instances, not possessing sufficient expertise on matters, they require it. They require easily manageable packages of knowledge, and these packages become taken for granted stocks of ‘common sense’ knowledge that enable them to cope, however faulty or misrepresented that ‘knowledge’ may be.

Politicians and the media also recognise people’s need for simplicity. And here lies the problem, particularly in an increasingly complex and confusing world. In order to rally the masses around certain ideas and to make things ‘simple’ for them, both politicians and the media have to a large extent taken their cue from Edward Bernays, the father of advertising, propaganda and public relations. This is where simplicity morphs into manipulation.

Bernays knew how to manipulate groups of people and get the masses hooked on the products and messages of modern society. We are now all subjected to this type of manipulation each and every day by the incessant bombardment of commercials.

It was the late US academic Rick Roderick who noted the trend towards the banality, simplification and trivialisation that the ad industry excels in is now prolific throughout society. He referred to a rampant phenomenon of important issues and problems being reduced to a fad of some kind through continuous repetition. For example, political debates that are seemingly in deadlock like gay rights and abortion issues, although important, have become almost a pointless debate. The same few points are being thrown around so often that they’ve almost become a fad. This doesn’t mean that the issues themselves aren’t important; it just means that they’ve been reduced to something resembling sound-bite debates.

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Thursday, October 4, 2012

Why I Dislike Israel

Even those pundits who seem to want to distance U.S. foreign policy from Tel Aviv’s demands and begin treating Israel like any other country sometimes feel compelled to make excuses and apologies before getting down to the nitty-gritty. The self-lacerating prologues generally describe how much the writer really has a lot of Jewish friends and how he or she thinks Israelis are great people and that Israel is a wonderful country before launching into what is usually a fairly mild critique.

Well, I don’t feel that way. I don’t like Israel very much. Whether or not I have Jewish friends does not define how I see Israel and is irrelevant to the argument. And as for the Israelis, when I was a CIA officer overseas, I certainly encountered many of them. Some were fine people and some were not so fine, just like the general run of people everywhere else in the world. But even the existence of good upstanding Israelis doesn’t alter the fact that the governments that they have elected are essentially part of a long-running criminal enterprise judging by the serial convictions of former presidents and prime ministers. Most recently, former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape, while almost every recent head of government, including the current one, has been investigated for corruption. Further, the Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away.

The most recent outrage is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direct interference in U.S. domestic politics through his appearance in a television ad appearing in Florida that serves as an endorsement of Republican candidate Mitt Romney. The Netanyahu ad and his involvement in the election has been widely reported in the media and has even been condemned by several leading Jewish congressmen, but it has elicited no response from either Obama or Romney. Both should be condemning in the strongest terms the completely unprecedented intervention by a foreign head of government in an American election. That they are saying nothing is a testament to the power that Israel and its friends in Congress and the media have over the U.S. political establishment. Romney might even privately approve of the ads, as he has basically promised to cede to Netanyahu the right to set the limits for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

And why is Benjamin Netanyahu in such a lather? It is because President Barack Obama will not concede to him a “red line”that would automatically trigger a U.S. attack on Iran. Consider for a moment the hubris of Netanyahu in demanding that Washington meet his conditions for going to war with Iran, a nation that for all its frequently described faults has not attacked anyone, has not threatened to attack anyone, and has not made the political decision to acquire a nuclear weapon in spite of what one reads in the U.S. press. At the U.N., Netanyahu’s chart showing a cartoon bomb with a sputtering fuse reminiscent of something that might have been employed by an anarchist in the 1870s failed to pass any credibility test even for the inevitable cheerleaders in the U.S. media. If the U.S. is to go to war based on a Netanyahu cartoon then it deserves everything it gets when the venture turns sour, most likely Iraq Redux, only 10 times worse.

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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Israel’s Hypocrisy on a Nuclear Middle East

When world leaders packed their bags and headed home last week, there was one lingering memory of the General Assembly’s high-level debate: Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic presentation of a cartoonish nuclear red line, which hit the front pages of most mainstream newspapers in the United States.

The Israeli prime minister warned Iran against crossing that red line even though the Jewish state itself had crossed it when it went nuclear many moons ago.

As Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Middle East Report, told IPS, “The real absurdity of Netanyahu lecturing the world about nuclear weapons was precisely that — an Israeli leader lecturing the world about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.”

The fact of the matter is that not only is Israel the region’s sole nuclear power, and not only has it on previous occasions all but threatened to use these weapons of mass destruction, but it has since its establishment consistently and steadfastly rejected ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Rabbani said.

“It’s a bit like listening to [Hustler magazine publisher] Larry Flynt denouncing pornography — though to be fair to Flynt, it’s unlikely he will reach the levels of hypocrisy displayed by Netanyahu,” said Rabbani, a Middle East expert who has written extensively on the politics of the volatile region.

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