Police charge Fort Stewart soldier with staging shooting to avoid
Iraq

RANDY PENNELL
Associated Press
Thu, Dec. 16, 2004
http://www.ledger-
enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/politics/10433554.htm


PHILADELPHIA - Police arrested a Fort Stewart, Ga., soldier Thursday
after he allegedly had his cousin shoot him so he wouldn't have to
return to Iraq.

Army Spc. Marquise J. Roberts, of Hinesville, Ga., suffered a minor
wound to the leg from a .22 caliber pistol, police said. He was
treated at a hospital, then arrested after he allegedly confessed to
having made up a story about the shooting.

Police charged Roberts with filing a false report.

Roberts, 23, was on a two-week leave from the Army's 3rd Infantry
Division, which led the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and is scheduled
to return to Iraq within the next few months.

Police said Roberts, who was in Iraq for seven months, was
distraught about having to return to combat duty, and wanted to stay
with his family.

Lt. Col. Cliff Kent, a spokesman for the 3rd Infantry, said Roberts
had been scheduled to return from leave to Fort Stewart this week.

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Fifth Columnists
by Taki
The American Conservative
January 17, 2005

They were originally Falangist sympathizers inside Madrid during the
Spanish Civil War, prepared to side with General Franco's four
columns that were besieging the city. By 1939, as Germany and France
were poised for war, French Fifth Columnists were busy undermining
those who preached resistance to German demands. Until now, America
has not had a Fifth Column in its midst, unless one counts the media
during the war in Vietnam. (Roosevelt unfairly and needlessly
detained Japanese-Americans during World War II as potential Fifth
Columnists, when he should have been detaining some of his cabinet.)

The first real case (Benedict Arnold aside) of Fifth Columnists
inside America working for foreign interests are the neo-
conservatives, the best known of whom include David Frum, William
Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle,
Paul Wolfowitz, and the egregious Douglas Feith, as close to being a
foreign agent as is possible to be but still holding on to his job
at the Pentagon.

America's Fifth Columnists aim to shape United States foreign policy
to suit Israeli interests. The gruesome carnage in Iraq is proof
that this administration is ready to fight Israeli battles to the
last American marine.

We have lost more than 1,200 dead, 30,000 wounded, and have killed an
unknown number of Iraqis, not all of them insurgents or terrorists.
We have military hospitals full of blind and crippled young men and
women, while thousands of Iraqis and their children are mortared and
shot daily. Despite the bloodshed, however, victory in Iraq is still
up for grabs. Not only have the neocons not bothered to apologize,
they want more blood.

Mind you, there are no Frums dying among our troops. Instead, they
are ensconced inside the Beltway appearing on television and egging
the president on to Tehran and Demascus.

In a soundbite age, "War on Terror" has a good ring to it. Once upon
a time, Christian missionaries tried to vanquish "evil savages" by
teaching them religion. Now we try to teach them democracy.

The way America's Fifth Column operates is a simple one. It uses the
charge of anti-Semitism to smear honorable conservatives who do not
believe that Uncle Sam's and Israel's interests are one and the same.
(The most outrageous example was when Midge Decter accused the
venerable conservative Russell Kirk of anti-Semitism.)  David Frum,
a sleazy self-promoter, infamously painted conservative writers like
Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Samuel Francis, Tom Fleming, and
others as unpatriotic Americans, forgetting to mention that in his
book "unpatriotic" means not serving the interests of the state of
Israel.

Norman Podhoretz's "World War IV" is a blueprint for an endless
campaign to destroy all of Israel's enemies. Why are these bogus
patriots getting away with such stuff? Alas, it is a very easy
question to answer.

With 85,000 members, a staff of 165, and a $33.4 million annual
budget, AIPAC, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, is
Washington's most influential and most feared lobby. It is forceful,
extremely aggressive, and more or less calls the tune inside the
Beltway where the Middle East is concerned. Woe to the politician
who ignores its wishes. He will be targeted, his opponents showered
with donations, his reputation immediately shredded by charges of
anti-Semitism.

Neocons work closely with AIPAC and the Israeli embassy. As Philip
Giraldi wrote in this magazine, "Principal neocons have been accused
of illegally providing classified information to Israel. None was
ever prosecuted."  Last I heard AIPAC was busy accusing the FBI and
CIA of pursuing a vendetta against Israel and the Pentagon, while
neocon Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute alleges
that the Franklin affair was motivated by anti-Semitism.

America's pro-Israel stand is nothing new. Israel is, after all, our
closest ally in the region, despite the spying it regularly conducts
on Uncle Sam. If there ever was a one-sided marriage, this is it.  As
Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, "there is a steadily
rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy
of Islam is JIA--Jews, Israel and America, all lumped together in a
single threat." Friedman goes on to say that Arab satellite
television stations show split-screen images of Israelis bashing
Palestinians and Americans beating up Iraqi insurgents. Nothing new
here.

Arab preachers, mostly paid by our other "allies," the Saudi rulers,
explain all the world's ills by wrapping them up in JIA.  But Arab
lies and outrageous anti-Western propaganda aside, the Bush regime's
total embrace of Ariel Sharon makes it impossible to know where
American policy stops and Sharon's begins.

Now, with Colin Powell gone, my fears are that Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith--two of
the most bluster-prone cheerleaders of the Iraq War and of Ariel
Sharon's brutal and expansionist strategy on the West Bank--will
enjoy even more power and influence. Under normal circumstances,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and others would have been dismissed on
the spot, and neocon propagandists such as Frum, Kristol, Podhoretz,
Perle, and their ilk denounced as working for a foreign power.

But we are not living in normal times. This is the time of AIPAC, and
woe to those who oppose America's Fifth Column, starting with poor
little me.

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British Muslims subjected to racism post 9/11:
Study!:
ANI
December 18, 2004
http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=48633


[World News]: London, Dec 18 : A recent study has
revealed that Muslims in Britain, are increasingly
being subjected to racism, in the aftermath of the
September 11, WTC attacks.

According to Ananova, the Islamic Human Rights
Commission, in its report titled - 'Social
Discrimination: Across the Muslim Divide' has stated
that as many as 80 percent of the people surveyed have
said that they have faced discrimination because of
their religion.

The report further states that compared to 2000, where
only 45 percent of the people belonging to the Muslim
faith faced discrimination, the present statistics are
nearly double the previous and are certainly a cause
of concern.

Experts have said that such high levels of racial
discrimination will adversely affect moves by the UK
government to bring Muslims in the UK into mainstream
British society and has therefore urged the government
to initiate far- reaching, systemic action as a matter
of urgency.

"This report reveals that prejudice against Muslims
pervades all aspects of society and has become normal
and is even considered justifiable in social circles.
This is a wake-up call for Britain. The British
Government cannot continue to ignore the depth and
nature of anti-Muslim prejudice in the UK. This report
conveys British Muslims expectations of their
government to protect their rights and create a space
for their civic participation free from harassment,
discrimination and violence," the paper quoted IHRC
spokesman Arzu Merali as saying.

The report further adds that rather than laws aimed at
protecting the Muslims, what is more needed are
emphatic behaviour by the English towards their
Muslims citizens.

"British society needs fair and consistent
anti-discrimination legislation, but it also needs an
attitude change and this can only come about when
government kick starts the processes required to make
anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination an abhorrence
not only under the law but, in peoples minds," he
further added. (ANI)

http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=48633

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CIA SURROGATE SPREADING DISINFORMATION IN U.S.
http://alternet.org/mediaculture/20760/

EARTHA MELZER, IN THESE TIMES - Just before the election, a film
about Iraq hit art house theaters around the country. "Voices of
Iraq" claimed to be a groundbreaking film in which "150 DV cameras
[are] distributed across Iraq for the Iraqi people to show the world
who they are and what Iraq will be."

The results? People seem happy that Saddam is gone and optimistic
that, if the United States stays in Iraq, democracy will prevail.
They seem unafraid of bombs going off nearby. People say Saddam
funded al Qaeda. Former Iraqi political prisoners are shown laughing
off the stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib – what Arab man
wouldn't want a female American soldier to play with his penis?. . .

"Voices of Iraq" was promoted as a project in which "thousands of
ordinary Iraqis become filmmakers" as the cameras are passed hand to
hand and – amazingly – all returned to the filmmakers. But Archie
Drury, the Gulf War vet and actor who went to Iraq with the cameras,
told me that he actually shot some of the footage himself. Drury
also said that the Iraq Foundation was "extremely helpful" to him as
he tried to figure out how to get around and who to give the cameras
to. The foundation also supplied the torture footage.

The Iraq Foundation, based in Washington, is funded by the State
Department and the National Endowment for Democracy.

THIRD WORLD TRAVELER - The NED was set up in the early 1980s under
President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about
the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. ; The latter was a
remarkable period. ; Spurred by Watergate-the Church committee of
the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller
Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating
the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about
the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the
CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an
exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much
embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these
awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of
these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-
The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED
would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for
decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with
CIA covert activities. It was a masterpiece. Of
politics, of public relations, and of cynicism. Thus it was that in
1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support
democratic institutions throughout the world through private, non-
governmental efforts". Notice the "non-governmental-part of the
image, part of the myth.

In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the
federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial
statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to
itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps
to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US
government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED
is a GO. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation
establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A
lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/National%20EndowmentDemo.html

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LEADERS FEAR PROBE WILL FORCE PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY TO FILE AS 'FOREIGN
AGENT' COULD FUEL DUAL LOYALTY TALK
Ori Nir, Forward, 12/30/04
http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?id=2460

WASHINGTON = As the Department of Justice intensifies its
investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,
Jewish communal leaders fear that the goal of the probe is to compel
the powerful lobbying organization to register as a "foreign agent"
representing the government of another country.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential organizations on
Capitol Hill, Aipac is registered with Congress as a lobbying group.
Under American law, registering as a foreign agent would require
Aipac to provide significantly more detailed information about its
aims and activities to the government - thereby robbing the group of
a key weapon: the ability to operate behind the scenes...

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Spy chief says 200,000 fighters in Iraq
Aljazeera
Monday 03 January 2005
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8F661038-B3AD-4EB2-B5A0-
739FEDA1F597.htm


---
photos:

Shahwani: The Iraqi resistance is larger than the US
army in Iraq
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/8F661038-B3AD-4EB2-B5A0-
739FEDA1F597/59474/1E5B7AFE7ECB4C6584D7343F2ABAB9BB.jpg


Shahwani questioned the value of destroying Falluja
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/8F661038-B3AD-4EB2-B5A0-
739FEDA1F597/59475/849210959DF5474A8808988EBD75A9D5.jpg

---



The head of the Iraqi intelligence service has
estimated that there are more than 200,000 active
fighters and sympathisers in the war-torn country.

Service director General Muhammad Abd Allah Shahwani
told journalists on Monday that his assessment
included 40,000 fulltime fighters and about 200,000
Iraqis involved part-time.

He added that part-timers were also likely to be
providing everything from intelligence to logistics
and shelter.

"I think the resistance is bigger than the US military
in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000
people," he added.

The numbers far exceed any figure presented by the US
military in Iraq, which has struggled to control the
country since ousting the former government in April
2003.

Past US military assessments on fighter numbers have
been increased from 5000 to 20,000 full and part-time
members in the past half year, most recently in
October.

Assessment details

Shahwani said "the resistance" enjoys wide backing in
the provinces of Baghdad, Babil, Salah al-Din, Diyala,
Nineveh and Tamim.

He said fighters have gained strength through Iraq's
tight-knit tribal bonds and links to the old
400,000-strong Iraqi army, dissolved by the US
occupation in May 2003 two months after the US-led
invasion.

"People are fed up after two years without
improvement. People are fed up with no security, no
electricity, people feel they have to do something,"
he said.

"The army was hundreds of thousands. You would expect
some veterans would join with their relatives, each
one has sons and brothers."

The intelligence chief added that some city
neighbourhoods and small towns around central Iraq had
become virtual no-go zones despite US military efforts
in Samarra and Falluja.

He also named areas in Baghdad itself where various
groups had become virtually untouchable.

Falluja's failure

And in stark contrast to many US assessments of
success in Falluja, the spy chief said the November
campaign against the town was far from a military
triumph.

"What we have now is an empty city almost destroyed
and most of the insurgents are free. They have gone
either to Mosul or to Baghdad or other areas."

Shahwani stopped short of saying that anti-US fighters
were now taking control of the situation in Iraq, but
warned: "I would say they aren't losing."

US analyst comments

Defence experts have broadly accepted the new
assessment as valid.

Bruce Hoffman, who served as an adviser to the US
occupation in Iraq and now works for US-based
thinktank Rand Corporation, said he believed the
estimate, though it said it was impossible to know for
sure.

And Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the
Washington-based Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, put Shahwani's estimates on an
equal footing with the American's.

"The Iraqi figures do recognise the reality that the
insurgency in Iraq has broad support in Sunni areas
while the US figures down play this to the point of
denial."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8F661038-B3AD-4EB2-B5A0-
739FEDA1F597.htm

============
For faith and country: Iraqi resistance fights on :

Theirs is a story rarely told, a brief insight into the lives of
thousands of Iraqi men who have spent the past 18 months fighting a
costly guerrilla war against the most powerful army in the world.
Rory McCarthy speaks to two fighters

http://207.44.245.159/article7504.htm

As a US general conceded Iraqi cells are getting more effective,
Rory McCarthy speaks to two fighters

12/16/04 "The Guardian" -- He sat at a plain white table in a
deserted building not far from Haifa Street, a stronghold of
militancy in the heart of the Iraqi capital. Before him was a tray
bearing cups of sweet dark tea and a plate of bananas, and as
American helicopter gunships carved circles in the sky above, he
described how he had become the commander of a hardline Islamic cell
in the Iraqi insurgency. The man, in his mid-30s with a trimmed dark
beard, studious black-rimmed spectacles and a red-and-white keffiyeh
thrown loosely over his shoulders, gave his name only as Abu
Mojahed.

Before the war he had been a labourer in Baghdad and was jailed four
times under Saddam Hussein's regime because of his adherence to the
Salafi creed of Sunni Islam, a strict and conservative belief. He
would gather with friends for secret Salafi classes and discussions.

He did not fight when America invaded last year, but did not welcome
the war either. "I didn't fight. I stayed at home. If you fight for
Saddam and he wins, you are not winning. If America wins, you are
not winning," he said. "They freed us from evil but they brought
more evil to the country."

As the weeks passed, the clerics in the mosques instructed him and
his friends to take up arms."We fight the Americans because they are
non-believers and they are coming to fight Islam, calling us
terrorists," he said.

The real resistance

Theirs is a story rarely told, a brief insight into the lives of
thousands of Iraqi men who have spent the past 18 months fighting a
costly guerrilla war against the most powerful army in the world.

Their motivations vary: some are undoubtedly from Saddam's military
and intelligence apparatus, others fight to defend tribal or
nationalistic honour, but alongside them a much more extreme Islamic
militancy has emerged.

The US military has in the past dismissed the fighters as "anti-
Iraqi forces" and "terrorists". Several US commanders announced that
the back of the insurgency has been broken by the assault on
Falluja.

However, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy chief of US central
command, told Reuters yesterday: "[The insurgency] is becoming more
effective. They may use doorbells today to blow things up. They may
use remote controls from toys to morrow. And as we adapt, they
adapt."

The Iraqi fighters, who describe themselves as the "mujahideen", the
holy warriors, or for the more secular, the "muqawama", the
resistance, insist there is more fighting still to come.

In the past year Haifa Street, in an area full of narrow alleyways
in a poor Sunni area on the banks of the Tigris river, has become a
focal point - even though it is near the heavily-fortified Green
Zone, which houses the US and British embassies and the Iraqi
interim government.

Insurgents have laid dozens of bombs beneath the road surface and
still appear to be largely in control of the area.

Three groups are understood to operate there: Tawhid and Jihad, the
group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; the
Islamic Army, another extreme group also responsible for kidnappings
and beheadings; and a third group of fighters whose name is unclear.
Abu Mojahed said he spoke for all three groups, whom he called
the "Haifa mujahideen".

He said his targets were the US military and "those supporting
them", and that his men had attacked helicopters, tanks and
individual soldiers, although he would not describe specific
incidents. Unlike other more secular elements in the insurgency, the
Salafis have their own agenda for the future of their country,
shaped in a language of anger, revenge and rigid Islamic
conservatism.

"We fight for our land, against those who are fighting Islam, for
our country and for our women," he said.

"Our goal is to fight whoever fights us and not just the Americans.
And we want this country ruled by the Tawhid and Sunna," he said.
The two words are fundamentals for the Salafis: Tawhid meaning
monotheism and Sunna the ways of the Prophet Muhammad. "If that
doesn't happen, that means all of us die because we fight until the
last breath," he said.

In a second interview, conducted several miles away, a young fighter
from a different group spoke of his motivation. He said he fought
for his religion. He used a more secular Arabic vocabulary and,
typical of many in the insurgency, appeared to have no clear agenda
for his country's future.

He gave his name as Abu Abdul Rahman, and sat with a red-and-white
keffiyeh wrapped so uncomfortably tight around his face that his
dark brown eyes were only occasionally visible.

"Before the war I was an ordinary person living my life and minding
my own business," he said. "After the Americans came and invaded my
country there was no war to go to except jihad."

Abu Rahman, 25, had been a student, working occasionally. He said he
had not supported Saddam, but had chosen not to fight the regime.

From bad to worse


"You could say we were hypnotised by it," he said. Like others, he
was grateful that the war brought the dictator's fall, but was
angered by the American occupation that followed. "Thanks to the
Americans for getting rid of Saddam, but no thanks for still staying
in Iraq," he said.

"The idea of jihad came step by step as I watched what the Americans
were doing to our country," he said. "In the beginning we were only
cousins and friends, and later other people came to join us, people
who were presented to us by the sheikhs."

He appeared undeterred by the strength of the US military arsenal,
and spoke keenly of martyrdom. "My group and I, we always race to
death, so we may die and go to heaven. Our goal is to get the
invaders out of our country, and from all the Arab countries, and I
hope that after we get them out we will have a couple of moments of
peace in our life."

He fought in Falluja in April, during the first attempt by the US
marines to take control of the city. "There are many people who have
died in my group," he said. "But only one of them really broke my
heart. He was a cousin of mine, but it was written for him to be in
heaven." The emir, or commander, of their group was also killed in
Falluja in April. "He was a friend from childhood," Abu Rahman said.

Because of the intense fighting, it took five days to retrieve the
emir's body. "He was always telling us to pray for him to die that
day. He would fight with us, not like those leaders who stay in the
back. We made a celebration like a wedding party when he died."

Abu Rahman said that although he belonged to a tribe, his motivation
was religious, not tribal. He also said some Iraqi police and
soldiers should not be touched, and were "serving for the good of
their country". Foreign contractors should not be targeted either,
he said.

In the end, he said, it was the lack of reconstruction and the
continued occupation that had left people so embittered.

"We don't want them, thanks. We can rebuild our own country, we have
a long and ancient history. All we are asking is for them to pull
out."

Copyright: The Guardian

===

An online archive of soldier's photos:

- Warning - Contains graphic images depicting the reality of war.
http://www.undermars.com/gallery52.html

================
Iraq Insurgency Growing 'More Effective'-US General:
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?
type=worldNews&storyID=7103835
Wed Dec 15, 2004 12:02 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A bold, innovative insurgency has become more
effective against U.S. supply lines in Iraq and explosive attacks
have slowed military operations there, a senior American general
said on Wednesday.
"They have had a growing understanding that where they can affect us
is in the logistics flow," Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy
chief of the U.S. Central Command, told reporters.

"They have gotten more effective in using IEDs (improvised explosive
devices)," Smith added at Pentagon briefing. The insurgency "has
become more effective."

Smith said U.S. forces in Iraq now totaled 148,000 troops -- up from
138,000 at the start of this month and near the 150,000 planned to
protect national elections in January -- but that explosives placed
beside roads were hindering military operations and reconstruction
nearly two years after the U.S.-led invasion of that country.

"Yes, they are," Smith replied when asked if response to such
attacks were slowing down operations. "They cause us to re-route
vehicles. They cause us to have to employ tactics - although the
tactics are generally successful - in avoiding them. And (they)
cause us to have to convoy where maybe otherwise we would prefer to
move in smaller numbers."

"So it is having an impact."

====================
public order rules posted in Fallujah
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 07:16:38 +0500


http://dc.indymedia.org/feature/display/110750/index.php

-  All residents must submit to bio-ID and must wear ID badges at
all times.

- No one can enter or leave Fallujah without special authorization.

- Movement within Fallujah restricted to neighborhood of residence.

- No privately owned vehicles allowed within the confines of the
city.

- Anyone may be arrested and detained at any time for any reason.

- Those who violate curfew or movement restrictions may be shot on
sight.

- All male inhabitants must do forced labor as ordered

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Free Speech in Israel Only Free for Jews, Not Arabs
By Ray Hanania
PalestineChronicle.com
Thursday, December 30 2004


Occasionally, you might read a letter or an opinion written by an
Israeli Arab in one of Israel's leading newspapers. Certainly, there
are very few Arab columnists, but those that do appear are limited
to a narrow vision of self-deprecating themes.

One of the complaints from Israelis is that when Arabs do express
their opinions, they are "racist" and "anti-Semitic", the usual
response to anything critical of Israeli policies towards Arabs.

Yet the Israelis are the first on their feet to criticise Arab
speech. They especially love to exaggerate the complaint that
official Arab texts and literature disparage the Israelis.

One of the most popular accusations is that the Arabs deny Israel's
existence and exclude Israel from its maps. Of course, the Israelis
are experts on this subject as they often do unto others what they
complain bitterly others do unto them.

Most maps of Israel only show Israel in Israel. Most Israeli maps
don't even acknowledge the existence of the "occupied territories",
which are nowadays reclassified as "disputed territories". Few
identify the West Bank, Gaza Strip or East Jerusalem as being
Palestinian or Palestine.

When the Israelis do identify the territories with a dashed green
line, they usually refer to them as Judea and Samaria, supposedly
the names given to the regions in Biblical times. I guess we
understand that to many Israelis, Biblical references are a matter
of convenience as their maps fail to refer to most of Israel as
belonging to the Canaanites.

The Israelis always use exceptions among Arab literature to
exaggerate their claims against the Palestinians, ignoring the many
examples that exist everyday in their own society, especially among
the settlers who use Israeli government texts and texts they produce
on their own that reflect fundamental racist views of all
Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.

This week, during a trial of five Islamists in Haifa, the judge
allowed "expert testimony" from prosecution witness Dr. Rafi
Israeli.

As reported in Haaretz, he testified that the Arab mentality is made
of "a sense of being a victim", "pathological anti-Semitism" and "a
tendency to live in a world of illusions."

A lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University, he added
that the Arabs neglect sanitation in their communities. "Most of the
Arab villages are dirtier, physically - it's a fact," he said.

Imagine the uproar from the Israelis if a Palestinian professor
expressed similarly racist stereotypes of Jews in, say, an Israeli
or American university.

Israelis love to point out the racism of others. It helps strengthen
their defence against Palestinians whose homes and land they have
stolen over the years. It helps justify the illegal violations of
Palestinian rights that have continued undeterred since 1948 in
Israel and the occupied territories.

Yes, many of the Palestinian villages are "dirtier" than many
Israeli villages and cities. But maybe someone might ask why.

I did. I interviewed Tawfiq Zayad, the late mayor of Nazareth, the
Arab city in the Galilee.

Israel created a new city called Nazareth Ilit. It is for Jews only.
A few Arabs make it into the city, but racism stirs them out
quickly.

Zayad explained that Israel provides endless government funding to
Jewish cities and Jewish citizens, but offers far less support to
Arab cities.

Some Palestinians argue the intent is clear, a part of the Israeli
mentality to make life so miserable for Arab Christians and Muslims
in Israel and the occupied territories that they will flee so the
privileged people of Israel can enjoy their comforts unbothered by
the "riff raff".

Israeli textbooks are replete with passages denying Palestinian
rights, denying Israeli state terrorism against Palestinian
civilians, denying Palestinian grievances and portraying
Palestinians who challenge Israel as extremists, fanatics and
terrorists. These are "acceptable" to many Israelis.

Week after week, officials in Israel's government express the most
outrageous and egregiously racist views of Palestinians and Arabs.

Sure, there is an outcry from some Israelis. There are many good
Israelis who oppose this racism and who fight hard to end it and
achieve a just peace.

But Israelis still need far more effort before they can step out of
their glass houses.

-Ray Hanania, a US-based Arab Media Watch member and award-winning
writer. He can be reached at www.hanania.com.

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Col. David Hackworth : Army recruiters face big challenge

Since this tragic war kicked off in March 2003, the United States
has evacuated
an estimated 50,000 killed or wounded in action and non-battle
casualties from
Iraq back to the States - leaving 50,000 slots that have had to be
filled.


With no end in sight in Iraq, Army recruiters face big challenge
Col. David Hackworth
Published: Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004
http://snipurl.com/bg0w

We'll soon have 150,000 U.S. troops stuck in the ever-expanding
Iraqi quagmire, a number that will probably grow even larger before
Iraq holds elections presently scheduled for the end of January '05.

Maintaining such a force is a logistical and personnel nightmare for
every grunt in Iraq. And according to several Pentagon number
crunchers, it's also driving the top brass bonkers.

Meanwhile the insurgents continue cutting our supply lines and
whacking our fighting platoons and support troops, who lose strength
daily as soldiers and Marines fall to enemy shots, sickness or
accidents. Empty platoons lose fights, so these casualties have to
be replaced ASAP.

Since this tragic war kicked off in March 2003, the United States
has evacuated an estimated 50,000 killed or wounded in action and
non-battle casualties from Iraq back to the States - leaving 50,000
slots that have had to be filled.

The job of finding fresh bodies to keep our units topped off falls
mainly to the Army Recruiting Command. But the "making-quota" jazz
put out by the Recruiting Command and the Pentagon to hype their
billion-dollar recruiting effort, with its huge TV expenditure and
big expansion of recruiters during the past year, is pure
unadulterated spin. Not that this is anything new. The recruiting
bosses have a sorry reputation for using smoke and mirrors to cover
up poor performance.

"Hack, here's a snapshot of how little of our 1st Quarter mission
has been achieved," says an Army recruiter. "Look at it from a
perspective of a business releasing quarterly earnings information.
To keep unit manning levels up out in the field, especially in Iraq,
there's no question our recruiting mission is in serious trouble.

"These are totals for the 41 USAREC (Recruiting Command) Battalions,
so these stats represent the USAREC mission accomplishment:

"Regular Army Volume (all RA contracts):

"Mission: 25,322

"Achieved: 12,703 (50.17 percent)

"Army Reserve Volume:

"Mission: 7,373

"Achieved: 3,206 (43.48 percent)."

The Army National Guard is faring no better. A Guard retention NCO
says: "The word is out on the streets of Washington, D.C. `Do not
join the Guard.' I see these words echoing right across the U.S.A."

By the end of this recruiting year, the Regular Army, Reserves and
Guard could fall short more than 50 percent of its projected
requirement, or about 60,000 new soldiers. And according to many
recruiters, quality recruits are giving way to mental midgets who
have a hard time telling their left foot from their right.

Shades of our last years in Vietnam.

"The bottom line is that Recruiting Command is in trouble, " says
another recruiter with almost 30 years of service. "The Army has re-
instituted `stop loss,' which is basically a backdoor draft. They're
stopping people from retiring or completing their enlistment and
leaving the Army. They do this fairly often, mostly in August and
September, depending upon how far behind they believe they'll be at
the end of September.

"I believe the Army will have to drastically change what they offer
to enlistees to overcome what's happening in Iraq. The war is ugly,
and not many kids want to enlist to be blown up."

Moms and dads are outraged about desperate Army recruiters on a
relentless campaign to sign up their teenagers. High-school kids are
actually running away from recruiters like they were George Romero's
living dead.

"Recruiters have called my son a minimum of 20 times in the two
years since he finished high school," a dad reports. "The phone
calls usually come in clusters. I answered five calls in a two- or
three-week span. Each time a recruiter calls, he receives the same
polite, respectful response from me or my son . . . no interest, and
please take the name off the list. When asked why the name hasn't
been removed, excuses are made. While recruiters are brief with me,
when my son is on the phone, the sales tactics are clever, prolonged
and very high-pressure.

"I took the latest recruiting call. This time I also called the
supervisor at the local Army recruiting office, who's promised to
take his name off the list. She made excuses for the repeated calls
despite the fact that five calls were on her watch."

Unless a miracle happens and the new Iraqi security force decides to
stop running and start fighting, we'll be in Iraq for a long time.
Most likely with a draftee force.

Retired Army Col. David Hackworth is a syndicated columnist. Send
mail to P.O. Box 5210, Greenwich, CT 06831. Eilhys England
contributed to this column.

==========================
"I don't support this war"


Sailor who refused to go to Iraq:
"I don't support this war"
December 17, 2004
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/524/524_01_RefusedToGo.shtml


JUSTIN AKERS and NICOLE COLSON report on the U.S. government's
latest schemes in its occupation of Iraq--and the growing discontent
of U.S. soldiers sent to die for oil and empire.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THIRD CLASS Petty Officer Pablo Paredes stood on the pier of the
32nd Streeet naval base in San Diego, Calif., as his ship the USS
Bonhomme Richard left for the Persian Gulf without him. "Like a
cabinet member, I resign," read his simple black T-shirt.
Paredes, who is publicly against the U.S. war in Iraq, sent shock
waves up the military chain of command by refusing to board his
ship.

"I don't want to be a part of a ship that's taking 3,000 Marines
over there, knowing a hundred or more of them won't come back," he
told the San Diego Union Tribune. "I can't sleep at night knowing
that's what I do for a living. "I'd rather do military prison time
than six months of dirty work for a war that I and many others do
not support."

You wouldn't know it from the still gung-ho rhetoric of the Bush
administration, but a growing number of soldiers are beginning to
voice their frustration and anger at the military--not only for
shipping them off to an unjust, illegal war, but for gambling with
their lives.

That's what led National Guard troops to confront Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Kuwait last week. "Why do we
soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap
metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?"
asked Army Spc. Thomas Wilson.

Rumsfeld's response? "You can have all the armor in the world on a
tank, and a tank can be blown up," he lectured. In other words, shut
up and don't complain.

You couldn't ask for a better illustration of how little the
concerns--and the lives--of soldiers like Wilson mean to the Bush
administration. More than 1,270 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq.
Another 9,000 have been wounded, many of them seriously maimed. But
the Pentagon plans on sending more and more soldiers to kill and be
killed in Iraq.

On the Iraqi side, the death toll grows at an even faster pace--with
the British medical journal The Lancet estimating that more than
100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.

Washington's callous disregard for the lives it destroys--both Iraqi
and American--explains why soldiers and sailors such as Pablo
Paredes and Camilo Mejia have refused to fight, even if that means
going to jail.

For many soldiers and reservists, the military was the only readily
available job--or hope of being able to afford college. Paredes says
he was just 17 years old when he joined up. "It was absolutely on a
whim," he said. "I woke up one day and said I don't have many
choices, and this military guy keeps calling me."

Now, however, Paredes has chosen to raise his voice as loudly as
possible.

He will be speaking for more and more of the working-class men and
women sent to Iraq. As the U.S. government's lies about "democracy"
and "liberation" are further exposed, these soldiers are
increasingly recognizing that they are being used as human shields
for oil company profits and Washington's imperialist ambitions.

Like the members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, which recently
refused orders to travel in an unarmed convoy to deliver fuel. Or
the more than 5,500 service members who--according to the Pentagon's
own figures--have deserted since the war began.

Organizing among soldiers and military families has taken off, with
more than 150 people joining the newly formed Iraq Veterans Against
the War. The organization Military Families Speak Out, founded just
two years ago, has more than 2,000 members.

People like Pablo are the voice of the growing discontent among
soldiers and sailors--who together have the power to help end this
horrible war and occupation. "I know other people are feeling the
same way I am," Pablo told reporters, "and I'm hoping more people
will stand up. They can't throw us all in jail."

Turning Falluja into a prison camp

RETINAL SCANS, mandatory name tags, forced labor. It sounds like a
modern-day concentration camp--and it is.

For the survivors among the 300,000 residents of Falluja--most of
whom were forced to flee during the savage U.S. assault on their
home--returning to their lives will be a torturous process. The U.S.
has decided to turn Falluja into what military officials call
a "model city." But the "model" that the U.S. is using is that of a
police state.

Washington hopes to be able to funnel a portion of the population
back into the city in time for scheduled January elections. To do
that, U.S. forces will turn the city into a giant prison camp,
complete with martial law, curfews and worse.

"Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen
processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a
database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans,"
the Boston Globe reported. "Residents would receive badges
displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times.
Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool
of suicide bombers, would be banned."

Under one plan, U.S. and Iraqi authorities would require all of the
city's men to work in military-style battalions. As a final slap in
the face, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks or
rubble-clearing platoons--in order to rebuild the city that the U.S.
so recently demolished.

But none of that fazes U.S. officials, who insist that the only way
to keep the resistance in check is to crack down on the entire
population. "There's something to be said for a firm hand," Lt. Col.
Leonard DiFrancisci told the Globe.

U.S. soldiers who fled to Canada

JEREMY HINZMAN doesn't want to be sent back to the U.S., even though
that's his home. The former member of the 82nd Airborne who deserted
the military in January and fled to Canada is hoping that Canadian
courts will grant him and his family asylum.

"We were taught to dehumanize our enemies," he recently told a
Canadian immigration court about his military training. "You have to
find ways to dehumanize them to make it as easy as shooting a beer
can."

Jeremy applied for conscientious objector status, but the military
ignored his objections and sent him to Afghanistan in 2002. When he
received word that his unit would be re-deployed to Iraq, he fled to
Canada in the middle of the night with his wife and their infant son.

Today, Jeremy is one of three U.S. soldiers officially seeking
asylum in Canada--though antiwar activists say that there are others
in the country "anonymously."

Unfortunately, Canadian officials have ruled that evidence of the
illegality of the U.S. war on Iraq is "irrelevant" and can't be
presented in Jeremy's case. But they have already heard startling
testimony about U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

Last week, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy J. Massey, a 12-year
veteran of the military, told the court how he and his men shot and
killed four Iraqis staging a demonstration, as well as a man with
his hands up trying to surrender. During one 48-hour period, Massey
said, his platoon killed "30-plus" civilians at roadblocks.

Fearing suicide bombers, his men fired at any car that didn't stop
as they approached the roadblocks. But none of the cars turned out
to be carrying explosives or arms. In one case, Massey said, the
driver of a car leaped out with his hands up. "But we kept firing.
We killed him,"

Massey says that he complained to his superiors about the "killing
of innocent civilians," but that nothing was done.

Now, the Bush administration would like nothing more than for
Canadian officials to rule against Hinzman--and make it harder for
other soldiers to take a stand against this barbaric war on the
Iraqi people.

For more information on how to support Jeremy Hinzman, visit
www.jeremyhinzman.net.

=========================
US military sees sharp fall in black recruits :

"Bush has two daughters. Let them go over and fight," she added, to
a chorus of
"That's not our war" from the others.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2004/12/18/wus18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/12/18/ixworld.html

(Filed: 18/12/2004)

Dolly Wilson's father proudly served in the Second World War and her
husband in Vietnam. But her children will not join the military if
she has any say in it.

"We don't want our kids to go into no war for nothing," said Mrs
Wilson, snatching a cigarette with colleagues outside her Washington
office.


Marines listen to George W Bush at Camp Pendleton

"Bush has two daughters. Let them go over and fight," she added, to
a chorus of "That's not our war" from the others.

James Golladay served in the US coastguard, but would discourage his
two teenagers if they came home talking about enlisting. "I wouldn't
want them to experience anything like that," he said, as he passed a
US army recruiting office on 14th Street, Washington.

Constance Allen's husband, grandfather, uncle and son all served,
but she would "never" let her grandson join up.

Mrs Wilson, Mr Golladay and Mrs Allen are not typical of America as
a whole. But their views are enough to give the Pentagon cause for
alarm. The reason? All three of them are black.

For years, black Americans have formed the backbone of the all-
volunteer US army, filling a quarter of its ranks, though blacks
account for only 13 per cent of the population. Blacks are more
likely to treat the army as a lifelong career; a third of senior
sergeants and non-commissioned officers are black. Suddenly, that is
changing.

Apart from a sudden fall in the past two months in recruiting for
the part-time National Guard, army recruitment as a whole has held
more or less steady this year, with the help of increased enlistment
bonuses and an early call-up for some youths originally due to enter
basic training next year.

But the proportion of black recruits into the army was only 15.6 per
cent, down from 22.3 per cent in the fiscal year 2001. In the part-
time army reserve, the drop is sharper.

Army officials decline to speculate about the collapse in black
recruiting, instead noting what they call a positive development,
that army numbers will now reflect the make-up of society better.

Behind the scenes, there is more concern, according to Prof David
Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

"If there are fewer blacks coming in - and it is blacks who stay in
and become NCOs - then six, seven, eight, nine years down the road,
you can anticipate a shortage of sergeants," he said.

Prof Charles Moskos, an expert on the military and race at
Northwestern University in Chicago, said the drop-off began even
before the Iraq war, with the election of President George W Bush in
2000 in the face of overwhelming black antipathy, an attitude that
lingers to this day.

That hostility increased exponentially with the invasion of Iraq,
which was opposed by a large majority of black Americans, amid
suspicion over the reasons given for toppling Saddam Hussein and
anger at billions of dollars spent overseas, rather than at home.

Mrs Allen pointed to the rain-lashed streets of Washington, a large,
poor, mainly black city that also happens to be the nation's capital.

"You've got so many homeless people here, they were in the military,
half of them. You look at that, people ask, 'Why should I go fight
the white man's war when there's nothing for us here?' " she said.

Mr Golladay said blacks tended to join the military for stable
employment, college scholarships and the chance to learn valuable
skills.

Pentagon statistics from 2003 back him up, showing that 67 per cent
of black soldiers served in support or rearguard units, working as
technicians, medical assistants, clerks or cooks. Only 16 per cent
of black soldiers were in combat units.

Asked why blacks chose rear-line units, Mr Golloday
answered: "People looked to the military as a way of receiving
benefits. People want to transition into a civilian life later.
Being a chief gunner isn't something that people will pay a lot
for." Then he laughed, and added: "And they don't want to die."

Crucially, among older generations there are also sharp memories of
the Vietnam War, in which blacks were seen as bearing an unfair
burden of casualties. Martin Luther King spoke of it being fought by
people of colour against people of colour in the interests of whites.

Kayla Roach, a black woman, said: "I know families whose kids want
to join the military, and their parents are saying no. Maybe they
have just one or two children and it's scary to them."

The perception has spread among black Americans that in the war on
terrorism, rear-line units are as vulnerable as front-line infantry
squads.

Prof Moskos defended the US military as one of America's most
racially integrated large institutions.

"The army is not a utopia but it is the only place where whites are
routinely bossed around by blacks," he said.

To Mr Golladay, the military is not the problem. "People join
understanding that they might go to war," he said. "But this war
now, I feel it's unnecessary."

4 September 2003: Britain and US overstretched by occupation
12 October 1997: We got it wrong on blacks, [British] Army chief
admits

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Uncharged suspect kept in Canada jail:

A top Canadian court has ruled that authorities have the right to
detain a man
suspected of belonging to the al-Qaida network even though no
charges have been
laid.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/5D05AB76-9100-492C-AB37-
F58358450720.htm

http://snipurl.com/bajo


The decision from the federal court of appeal on Friday removes a
hurdle to the deportation of the suspect, Adil al-Sharqawi, a
Moroccan whom the government suspects of engaging in so-called
terrorist activities or planning to do so.



It also reinforces the government's position that it needs to have
the right to hold people such as al-Sharqawi without trial to
protect Canada's safety, particularly after the 11 September 2001
attacks on the United States.



"It is no exaggeration to say that the [al-Sharqawi] position
completely ignores the issue of national security," the court ruled.


The decision did not state how or if al-Sharqawi had posed a threat
to Canada.



Al-Sharqawi, who won permanent resident status in Canada in 1995,
had argued that the government had no right to detain him under a
security certificate - a security device that allows detention
without trial under certain circumstances.

He has been under arrest since May 2003.



The Canadian government said senior al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaida
had reported seeing al-Sharqawi in Afghanistan in 1993 and between
1997 and 1998. Another operative said he trained with him in
Afghanistan in 1998.


Right to liberty


The court said the individual right to liberty lost its meaning
when "the society charged with ensuring its protection has lost its
own right to liberty and security as the result of terrorist
activities".

Johanne Doyon, al-Sharqawi's lawyer, had argued that it was unfair
to hold him without trial and without being able to see or challenge
some of the evidence against him.



She said he would probably seek to appeal against this decision in
the supreme court.



Al-Sharqawi, who remains in a Montreal prison, is also involved in
other court proceedings revolving around whether his security
certificate is merited and if he could face torture if Canada
returned him to Morocco.



The government says it has only used security certificates 27 times
since they were introduced in 1991. Besides al-Sharqawi, three other
suspects are being held under the detention without trial law, for
allegedly having ties to Usama bin Ladin.

====

TORTURE LINK SUSPECTED: IS CANADA USING FOREIGN REGIMES TO EXTRACT
INFORMATION FROM CANADIANS?
Shelley Page, Ottawa Citizen, 12/16/04
http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/story.html?
id=710b2573-ccd4-4579-9cdd-ac6506387eb0

Muayyed Nureddin's interrogation was chilling, not just because he
was forced to lie on his stomach while his captors repeatedly lashed
his feet with a cable, but also because of the questions they asked:
the very same as CSIS agents had put to him weeks earlier at the
Toronto airport.

The 36-year-old Iraqi-Canadian wondered if the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service was behind his torture.

Nureddin, a former member of Iraq's military, came to Canada as a
refugee fleeing persecution from Saddam Hussein in 1994 and became a
citizen three years later.

Last fall, he left to visit his family in Iraq. Before boarding the
plane in Toronto, he was pulled out of line by CSIS agents who
questioned him for 45 minutes about his visits to Iraq, and about
his previous work at the Salaheddin Islamic School in Scarborough,
Ont., which is affiliated with a mosque where terror suspects such
as Ahmed Khadr worshiped.

He was allowed to leave, but was imprisoned for a month in Syria
while en route to Canada last December.

His lawyer, Barbara Jackman, claims that Nureddin's overseas torture
was ordered by CSIS, which she says is using lawless regimes to do
its "dirty work."

"CSIS didn't have any evidence he was plotting anything, they just
wanted to see what might come from an overseas detention so they
sent out an alert while he was travelling," she said in an
interview.

Since 9/11, at least eight Muslim-Canadians have been jailed outside
of Canada after being questioned first by security agents here…

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Jury Told New York Lawyer Chose to Aid Terror Message
By Gail Appleson
Reuters
January 2, 2005
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7225582

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. criminal defense lawyer
could have blocked an imprisoned Islamic cleric from
stirring his followers to renew terror attacks in
Egypt, but instead she chose to be a messenger in the
plot, a federal prosecutor said on Monday.

"She had all the power in the world to stop it,"
argued the prosecutor in closing arguments in the
closely watched case against Lynne Stewart, a liberal
New York lawyer known for representing the poor and
unpopular.

Her trial is being followed by the nation's defense
lawyers, some of whom are worried the Bush
administration is trying to intimidate attorneys who
represent suspected terrorists and other unpopular
clients.

Stewart, 65, has denied wrongdoing and her defense is
set to begin its closing arguments as early as Tuesday
afternoon.

She is charged with breaking the law while working for
radical cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. He was
convicted in 1995 of conspiring to attack U.S.
targets, in a plot that prosecutors say included the
1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center.

After Abdel-Rahman began serving a life term upon
conviction, Stewart, together with the cleric's former
paralegal and his translator, used attorney-client
visits to the prison to smuggle "terroristic" messages
to and from Abdel-Rahman, the charges say.

The three are accused of helping Abdel-Rahman
communicate with the Islamic Group, which prosecutors
say is a terrorist organization and the cleric its
spiritual leader.

Among the charges is that they helped pass messages
from Rifai Taha, a militant Islamic Group leader, to
Abdel-Rahman in prison. Taha urged the end of a
cease-fire the group had observed since its 1997
attack in Luxor, Egypt, when nearly 60 foreign
tourists were slain.

In 2000, Stewart called a Reuters correspondent in
Egypt and read a news release issued by the cleric
saying he had withdrawn his support for the
cease-fire. That correspondent was subpoenaed in the
case.

Stewart maintains that she was merely doing her job.
She said she had represented her client vigorously as
required by ethical rules that guide an attorney's
behavior.

But Andrew Dember, Assistant U.S. Attorney, told the
Manhattan federal jury that smuggling such messages
and sending out a press release calling for a return
to violence in Egypt "has absolutely nothing to do
with being a lawyer."

"It has to do with illegal matters, not legal
matters."

Stewart is named is four counts including two that
accuse her of participating in a conspiracy and
providing and concealing" material support to
terrorist activity." Those two charges carry a total
maximum prison term of 15 years.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7225582

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Israeli President Unveils Plan For 'World Knesset'

By FORWARD STAFF 12/17/04

http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=staff20041215905

(Forward) JERUSALEM - Israel's government took its first public step
last week toward the formal creation of an international
Jewish "parliament," whose purpose would be to represent Diaspora
Jews in the formation of Israeli government policies that have
potential impact on Jewish life in other countries.

The initiative was unveiled at a special Monday meeting of the
Knesset's committee for immigration and absorption, which has
responsibility for Diaspora affairs. The meeting was held at the
official residence of Israel's figurehead president, in an apparent
effort to emphasize the ceremonial significance of the initiative,
and was formally introduced by the president himself, Moshe
Katzav.

The proposal for a world Jewish consultative "parliament" was
initially raised last July in a strategic policy report submitted to
Prime Minister Sharon by the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency for
Israel, Israel's legally designated liaison to the Jewish
communities of the Diaspora. The 50-page report, an executive
summary of a 600-page document due out this month, reviewed security,
political, religious, cultural and economic conditions in Jewish
communities on every continent and made a host of recommendations
ranging from Internet use to summer camp staffing. Among the key
proposals was the formation of an international representative body
to consult with the Israeli government on decisions that may affect
Jewish security or culture in other countries.

The report was prepared by a newly-formed Jewish Agency think tank
for global Jewish policy, chaired by the former American diplomat
Dennis Ross.

After lengthy Cabinet debate, the report was approved in July and
handed by Sharon to a top aide, Yisrael Maimon, for interministerial
implementation. This week's Knesset hearing appears to be the first
formal step.

Katzav, in introducing the proposal, suggested that it be seen as a
"second house of the Knesset," to be composed of Israeli and
Diaspora Jews. The goal, he said, would be to breach the conceptual,
philosophical and experiential gaps between the two.

Hebrew University demographer Sergio DellaPergola, the principal
drafter of the Jewish Agency report, told the committee that the new
institution might be modeled on other non-binding world councils,
such as the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie, an assembly of French-
speaking nations that includes former French colonies, or the
Consiglio Generale degli Italiani all'Estero, which represents
persons of Italian extraction living around the world. A primary aim
of the council, he said, would be to foster feelings of fellowship
among Jews around the world who may share ethnic origins but little
else.

Katzav, however, in a clear allusion to the Jewish Agency report,
said the council would have policy goals along with cultural
ones. "We in Israel do not have the right to make decisions on our
own that affect world Jewry," he said. "Even if, God willing, 60% of
Jews on earth live in Israel, we still have to consult. That is why
it is important that this house shall arise."

DellaPergola testified to the committee that some 40% of the world's
Jewish population currently resides in Israel and another 40% in the
United States.

The Knesset immigration committee normally meets in the Knesset
chambers and deals mainly with immigration matters. It is chaired by
Labor lawmaker Colette Avital, a former diplomat.

Several speakers at the hearing, notably Diaspora Affairs Minister
Natan Sharansky and Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo
Avineri, spoke in sharply cautionary tones about the new body. Both
argued that such an institution might be drawn into matters properly
left to Israel's sovereign institutions, such as drafting foreign
policy or delineating national borders. Both pointed to an implicit
danger in the very use of terms such as "parliament" or "Knesset" in
the title.

The original Jewish Agency report, jointly authored by DellaPergola
and retired Brigadier General Amos Gilboa, a former deputy chief of
military intelligence, appeared to advocate precisely such a policy
role, however. The report suggested that Israeli security policies
can have the unintended effect of arousing hostility toward Jewish
communities among emigre Arab populations in places such as Europe
and Latin America, with occasionally violent results. It urged that
Jerusalem institute a formal, ongoing structure for consulting with
Diaspora communities.

The report also urged that the proposed body be involved in Israeli
decisions on matters such as conversion and Jewish education.

Speaking to the Forward afterward, Sharansky made clear that the new
body's structure and duties are far from settled. He endorsed
Katzav's "parliament" image, even suggesting that Diaspora Jews be
inducted directly into Israel's Knesset, but at the same time he
warned against Diaspora Jewish interference in Israeli security
policy.

The urgency with which Israel sees the issue was driven home by the
staff director of the Jewish Agency think tank, Avinoam Bar Yosef,
who told the Forward that his staff had been given three months by
the president to work through the issues and present a working
legislative draft.

In all, 17 speakers were invited to testify before the committee on
Monday. Nearly all lamented a sense of disconnection between
Israelis and their Diaspora cousins, and voiced hope that a sense of
common Jewish purpose could be fostered.

Retired Major General Uzi Dayan, former chief of Israel's National
Security Council and currently president of the Zionist Council in
Israel, laid out a vision whereby "Judaism is seen as more than
religion or a nationality, but as a civilization. The State of
Israel has as a duty to preserve Judaism wherever it may be, as a
higher priority even than [fostering] immigration."

Dayan's Zionist council is the Israeli wing of the World Zionist
Organization, which largely controls the Jewish Agency in
partnership with Diaspora Jewish philanthropies. Dayan himself is a
nephew of the late Israeli leader Moshe Dayan.

Advocating a greater bond between Israel and Jewish communities in
other countries, Dayan said: "We have more to learn from them than
we know. We can't keep looking at them as if they are OK but somehow
missing something. And you know, they also see us as not Jewish
enough."

Echoing other participants, Dayan called for the participation of
young people, "aged 30 and 40," in any future dialogue on the topic.

Former justice minister Yossi Beilin, chairman of the left-wing
Yahad-Meretz party, recommended to the committee that the new body
be called an asefah or "assembly," rather than a "parliament," to
avoid any risk of compromising the rights of Israel's non-Jewish
citizens. "It should be left undefined," Beilin said, "and meet
twice a year to discuss issues connected to the Jewish people."

Beilin was one of the first Israelis to propose such a world
assembly of Jewish communities, recommending in the mid-1990s the
formation of a body he tentatively called Bet Yisrael or "the House
of Israel." His proposal was never acted on, in part because it was
seen as potentially competing with established bodies such as the
World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency itself. It was not made
clear how the current proposal would avert those potential conflicts.

Bar Yosef, the think tank director, indicated that the complexities
of sovereignty had been discussed at length in preparing the report.
"Jews' loyalty in every place is to the state in which they live,
but the Jewish people have to have an influence on matters of
transcendent importance to the State of Israel," he told the Forward.

"We recommended that Israeli decision-makers take all the Jewish
people into account when they make decisions on matters relating to
anything from the division of Jerusalem through pluralism and 'who
is a Jew' and even to targeted killings in Gaza. They don't have to
be consulted, but they do have to be listened to."

The complexities of structuring such a representative body were
clearly if inadvertently on display at the Monday hearings. Of the
17 invited speakers, few appeared to be under 60 and none was
unaffiliated to a major Jewish or Israeli institution.

More striking, only one woman addressed the committee - Laura Kam
Issacharoff, co-director of the Anti-Defamation League's Israel
office - and her role was limited to reading a prepared statement
authored by ADL director Abraham Foxman.

Avital, the Knesset committee chair, ended the session on a light
note, taking account of the oceanic sense of perplexity sometimes
felt by Jews from different parts of the world. "At a time of great
immigration," she said, "two ships cross at sea, one carrying Jews
to the Land of Israel, and one away. Each looks at the other across
the waves and asks, 'Have you lost your mind?'

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Scott Ritter: The risks of the al-Zarqawi myth:

A single Jordanian male is suddenly running an organisation that
operates in
sophisticated cells throughout Iraq. No one man could logically
accomplish this.
But there is an organisation that can - the Mukhabarat
(intelligence) of Saddam
Hussein.

http://207.44.245.159/article7476.htm

An interesting phenomenon is taking place today in the Iraqi city of
Falluja.

by Scott Ritter

12/14/04 "Aljazeera" -- For months now, the Bush administration had
been building up the image of a massive network of foreign
terrorists using Falluja as a base for their terror attacks against
targets associated with the interim government of Iyad Allawi and
the US military which backs him.

One name appeared in western media accounts, over and over again:
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a wanted Jordanian turned alleged "terror"
mastermind. Almost overnight, Zarqawi's terrorist group, al-Qaida
Holy War for Iraq, expanded its operations across the width and
breadth of Iraq.

Al-Zarqawi was everywhere, his bombers striking in Mosul, Baghdad,
Samarra, Najaf, Baquba, Ramadi and Falluja. Islamist websites
published accounts of al-Zarqawi's actions, and the western media,
together with western intelligence services, ran with these stories,
giving them credibility. The al-Zarqawi legend, if one can call it
that, was born.

The problem is, there is simply no substance to this legend, as US
marines are now finding out. Rather than extremist foreign fighters
battling to the death, the marines are mostly finding local men from
Falluja who are fighting to defend their city from what they view as
an illegitimate occupier. The motivations of these fighters may well
be anti-American, but they are Iraqi, not foreign, in origin.

There is, indeed, evidence of a foreign presence. But they were not
the ones running the show in Falluja, or elsewhere for that matter.
As a result, the US-led assault on Falluja may go down in history as
the tipping point for the defeat of the US occupation of Iraq. The
January 2005 elections are now very much in doubt, and anti-
coalition violence has erupted throughout Iraq (including from
sources claiming to be aligned with - no surprise - Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi).

Reflecting back, one cannot help but wonder if al-Zarqawi was used
as a lure to trap the Americans into taking this action. On the
surface, the al-Zarqawi organisation seems too good to be true. A
single Jordanian male is suddenly running an organisation that
operates in sophisticated cells throughout Iraq. No one man could
logically accomplish this. But there is an organisation that can -
the Mukhabarat (intelligence) of Saddam Hussein.

According to former Iraqi intelligence personnel I have communicated
with recently, the Mukhabarat, under instructions from Saddam
Hussein, had been preparing for some time before the invasion of
Iraq on how to survive, resist and defeat any US-led occupation of
Iraq. A critical element of this resistance was to generate chaos
and anarchy that would destabilise any US-appointed Iraqi
government.

Another factor was to shift the attention of the US military away
from the true heart of the resistance - Saddam's Baathist loyalists -
  and on to a fictional target that could be manipulated in an effort
to control the pace, timing and nature of the US military response.

According to these sources, the selection of al-Zarqawi as a front
for these actions was almost too easy. The Bush administration's
singling out of al-Zarqawi prior to the war, highlighted by Colin
Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, made
the Jordanian an ideal candidate to head the Mukhabarat's
disinformation effort.

The Mukhabarat was desperate for a way to divert attention from the
fact that it was behind the attacks against Iraqi civilians. Iraqis
killing Iraqis would turn the public against the resistance. It
needed a foreign face, and al-Zarqawi provided it. A few planted CD
disks later, and the al-Zarqawi myth was born.

In its attempts to use the al-Zarqawi myth to distract and defeat
the US military and the interim government of Iyad Allawi, the
Mukhabarat is engaged in a dangerous game. In embracing the al-
Zarqawi myth, the Mukhabarat has engaged the forces of Islamist
activism to a degree never before seen in modern-day Iraq.

According to my contacts, the goal in creating a foreign Islamist
face for the violence taking place in Iraq is to get the Iraqi
populace to turn away from Iyad Allawi and the US military as a
source of stability, and endorse the return of the Baathists (under
a new guise, to be sure), who would then deal with the Islamists by
shutting down an operation the Mukhabarat thinks they control.

But engaging these activists may not be without cost. Having created
a fiction, there is a potential danger of it becoming a reality. Al-
Zarqawi may not be the real force behind the anti-US resistance in
Iraq, but many now, in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, believe
him to be.

Having created this giant the Mukhabarat may not be able to control
it. The real danger in Iraq is not the inevitable defeat of the
United States and the interim government of Iyad Allawi, but the
fact that the longer it takes for the United States to realise that
victory cannot be achieved, the more emboldened the Islamists
become.

Right now, the Mukhabarat controllers of the al-Zarqawi network
think themselves clever as they watch the US military play into
their hands through the destruction of Falluja, and the futile
search for a phantom menace.

But the tragedy that is the war in Iraq is far from over, and it may
very well be that it is al-Zarqawi and his followers, and not the
Baathist Mukhabarat, who will have the last laugh. And, as always,
it will be the people of Iraq who will pay the price.

Scott Ritter was a senior UN arms inspector in Iraq between 1991 and
1998. He is now an independent consultant.

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Can a woman in a hijab still get a taxi? asks Yvonne Ridley

'It's only a piece of cloth'
Sunday December 12, 2004
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1371871,00.html


Wearing a headscarf is no big deal... unless you happen to be a
Muslim, in which case this simple piece of cloth arouses opinions,
hostile glances and worse.
When I converted to Islam I knew I would have to embrace the Muslim
head-dress. As for many converts, it was a huge stumbling block and
I found all sorts of excuses not to wear the hijab - basically a
symbol of modesty and a very public statement. When I finally did,
the repercussions were enormous. All I did was put on a headscarf,
but from that moment I became a second-class citizen.

The reaction from some people was unbelievable. I knew I would
become a target for abuse from the odd Islamaphobic oik, but I
didn't expect so much open hostility from complete strangers.

I can no longer be sure of getting a black cab in London...
something I had taken for granted for many years. Let me give you
some examples from the past two weeks:

Edgware Road in London, an area with a substantial Arab population:
three black cabs, orange 'for hire' lights glowing, drive past one
after another. It's about 11.30pm and I'm freezing and desperate to
get home. A fourth taxi stops to discharge a white passenger. I
reach the vehicle and tap the window, beaming from ear-to-ear at my
saviour. The driver turns and stares hard, his face contorted into
hatred and rage, and drives off.

Last month, pre-hijab, he would have returned the smile; now, in his
eyes, I have been transformed into a terrorist.

Next day, horrified by the events of the previous evening, I tell my
story to a non-Muslim friend who is not sympathetic. 'Well if you go
around looking like a Chechen Black Widow what do you expect?' she
says. But black is my favourite colour. It's just that my little
black dress has become a big black dress.

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  That afternoon, I change my black hijab in favour of a paler silk
turban-look which still covers my head. Very Vivienne Westwood, I
think. I get my black cab without hassle, just a mere wave of the
arm and I am taken to the West End for lunch with a very close
friend who happens to be Jewish.

It was the first time she had seen me in a hijab but she just laughs
and makes some nice compliments. In her eyes I am the same person
she became friends with five years ago. No change. What a relief.

Later that day I meet some Muslim friends who also have not seen me
for some time. They are excited to see me wearing a hijab, but tell
me I look like a cross between a cancer victim and an Israeli
settler. I report the unsavoury incident in the Edgware Road which
had reduced me to tears.

'Welcome to the real world. This is what we have to put up with
24/7,' one tells me. There is more laughter at my apparent naivety,
but I am puzzled and peeved at their acceptance that this is the way
of things in Britain today.

A couple of days later I attend Yasser Arafat's memorial at London's
Friends' Meeting House and dress appropriately in black with
matching hijab showing a small sliver of Palestinian kaffiyeh across
the forehead.

I may as well be sporting a Hamas-green 'jihad' tattoo across my
temple from the openly hostile glares I receive from some passengers
on London's Underground. Feeling uncomfortable and intimidated I get
off at Baker Street and go to a taxi bay for the shortish journey
down Euston Road. 'It's just across the road, why don't you walk?'
barks the cabbie before returning to his newspaper.

There have been other incidents including one taxi driver's, 'Don't
leave a bomb in the back seat,' or, 'Where's bin Laden hiding?'
There are also amusing moments such as being congratulated in
Regent's Park mosque for my excellent grasp of English.

But, in the eyes of many, I no longer am a real person. Waiters talk
loudly and slowly if I am on my own, and if I am with a non-hijabi
female, she is asked what I would like to eat.

So, when I see a woman wearing a hijab, regardless of whether I know
her, I smile and say in Arabic, 'As-Salaam-Alaikum,' which
means, 'Peace unto you'. I know that the rest of her encounters that
day may well be hostile.

· Yvonne Ridley's current affairs show The Agenda will launch on the
Islam Channel later this month.

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Thousands of Iraqis Have No Votes:

Most Fallujah evacuees could not get their December supplies or
their voting cards.
By Samir Haddad, IOL Correspondent
http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2004-12/15/article01.shtml

BAGHDAD, December 15 (IslamOnline.net) – Tens, and may be hundreds
of thousands, of Iraqi voters will most likely be unable to cast
their ballots in the general elections slated for January 30, 2005,
either for being homeless or detained by the US-led forces.

Over 300.000 Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, have been forced to leave their
homes in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, due to the continuous shelling
that climaxed in a blistering air and ground sweep by US and Iraqi
forces in November.

Some 10,000 US marines and army forces, alongside some 2,000 Iraqi
national guard soldiers unleashed a long expected onslaught on the
resistance hub Monday, November 8, capping long nights of massive US
raids.

There are also tens of thousands of detainees, majority of which are
also Sunnis, who are not subject to the Independent Election
Commission in Iraq (IECI).

In statements to IslamOnline.net Tuesday December 14, the electoral
committee chief Sa'ad Abdel Wahab of the Iraqi Islamic Party (a
Sunni who has recently decided to take part in the elections)
criticized holding elections in Iraq as one constituency.

He explained that such a system might be acceptable in case of a
stable situation, citing the fact that political parties and powers
would then be able to rally the public everywhere.

"Under such unstable conditions and the evacuation of whole
communities as it is the case in Fallujah, some 100.000 Sunni voters
are not in a position to cast their ballots, even if election
boycotters change their minds," he resumed.

The Fallujah evacuees have been dispersed among different Iraqi
towns including Baghdad. They failed to get their December supply
rations, with which they supposed to receive election cards, without
which no one could vote.

"This means that supporters of a certain party in disturbed
governorates may not cast their votes," Abdel Wahab added.

He further added the multi-constituency system was debated by the
IECI; yet, the commission adopted the one-constituency system
despite its points of weakness.

Association of Muslim Scholars' spokesman Muthanna Harith Al-Dari,
in a special meeting with IOL, explained the reason behind many
Iraqi powers boycott of elections, citing technical considerations
that do not guarantee the transparency of the Iraqi election system.

Among such considerations is the fact that the IECI has considered
Iraq, despite its huge area, into one constituency and assigned to
it 25 UN supervisors; of whom only seven have arrived.

35.000 Detainees

Within the same context, Abdel Wahab wondered about the votes of
thousands of Iraqi detainees – mostly Sunnis – who are imprisoned in
occupation jails.

The official of the Iraqi Islamic Party elaborated that "those
detainees, amounting to 35.000, are not included under the IECI
voter lists".

Abdel Wahab further cited the daily incursions perpetrated by the
occupation troops and the Iraqi National Guardsmen as dangerous
hurdles affecting the very meaning of elections, pointing out that
such incursions have resulted in many people losing their official
documents.

Regarding out-of-country voting for Iraqi expatriates, Abdel Wahab
said that the process of selecting the 14 states, wherein the
elections will be held, is not accurate.

He said that the reason is that the IECI "does not have maps on the
Iraqi communities abroad and Iraq does not have embassies in most of
those states so far."

UN International Organization for Migration, in charge of Iraqi
expatriates' out-of-country voting, has declared Sunday December 12
that Amman, Jordan, would host the polling center headquarters of
out-of-country voting.

IECI


Hundreds of thousands have been forced to leave their homes and
towns.

The IECI represents the highest executive and legislative power that
manages the electoral process mechanism. It consists of seven
independent members selected by the UN out of 1000 candidates.

The IECI supervises voter registration, determines eligibility
criteria, approves political entities and eligible candidates.

In the elections, Iraqis will choose a 275-member assembly that will
write a permanent constitution.

If adopted in a referendum next year, the constitution would form
the legal basis for another general election to be held by December,
2005.

But representatives of several Iraqi parties and leading political
figures have been stepping up their campaign for delaying the
general elections over the increasing deteriorating security
conditions in the war-torn country.

Meeting Sunday, December 5, under the banner "Flawed Elections:
Disputed Results", more than 200 Iraqi politicians and party
officials warned that if the polls went ahead in the current climate
of violence the results could be contested

UN Iraqi envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned that holding the Iraqi
elections would be impossible unless "first and foremost security
improves."

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Germans should understand that making huge memorials to yourself in
the downtown usually means you are declaring yourself dictator. They
would like to convert the entire world to the religion of
meaninglessness. Do we buy it? They would like to convert the entire
world to the religion of meaninglessness. He modeled it after a flat
plain in Midwest America. Other artists might have looked at a
prairie and found something else besides "meaninglessness and
disconsolation." Certainly for the Jews the holocaust is their most
meaningful historical ritual of remembrance. And it at core is
nothing but the realization or awareness of utter meaninglessness.
In other words, KFR. Rejectors and  liars.

============================
Holocaust memorial nears completion in Berlin
December 24, 2004
http://www.germany-
info.org/relaunch/info/publications/week/2004/041223/misc1.html

The last grey concrete slabs of Germany’s “Memorial to
Europe’s Murdered Jews� were erected last week at a site in
central Berlin just south of the Brandenburg Gate. Construction of
the memorial began on August 16, 2003, following a more than decade-
long debate on how best to memorialize the more than six million
Jews killed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.

The "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," with a view of the
Reichstag building behind it. bpa photo
The memorial consists of over 2,751 concrete slabs of various
heights and laid out on an irregularly-shaped field in the heart of
the city. It will be flanked by a “Place of Information� and
documentation center, a compromise with the architect, who had
wanted the memorial to be more a site of contemplation than
information.

Like every memorial of import, the memorial in Berlin, often simply
called the “Holocaust Memorial,� has brought with it its share
of controversies. In what some have seen as an affront to the many
groups of people victimized by the Nazis, the memorial’s name
recognizes only those of the Jewish faith and not the millions of
political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies and others who were
murdered. A further controversy erupted when it was discovered that
a German firm industrial firm that had been favored by Hitler’s
regime would deliver products used in the construction. But the
primary bone of contention for many in the city and elsewhere was
the design itself, starkly modern and unequivocally non-grandiose.

The completion of the memorial seems to have stilled the controversy
surrounding it, as journalists begin to see the finished work as the
most important part of a greater series of commemorations to take
place in 2005. “The memorial is not a ’national’ monument â€"
it is dedicated to the ‘murdered Jews of Europe.’ …The year
2005 will call into consciousness that the break in civilization was
horrific for all of Europe,� wrote the Berliner Tagespiegel.

Other critics across Germany have also begun to praise the concept,
which American architect Peter Eisenmann, who designed the memorial,
has likened to undulating a field in his native Iowa. "The
meaninglessness and disconsolation of the Holocaust cannot be
expressed in a classical architecture," he had said at a ceremony
that marked the beginning of construction.

While some critics have argued that the memorial’s massive size
takes up too much of the government’s city center, other say that
it is its very location, south of the Reichstag and north of the
“Topography of Terror,� that is the country’s solemn gesture
to the importance of remembering. “Everything [in that area of the
city] has history, has a purpose, has importance,� wrote the
Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

The official opening for the memorial will be on May 10, 2005, to
commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

==================
Holocaust fund investigated for 'unusual' money transfers
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=597158


01 January 2005The World Jewish Congress, which has wrung billions
of dollars in Holocaust restitution from European governments and
companies, is being investigated by the authorities in New York
following a series of unusual money transfers of hundreds of
thousands of dollars.

The influential international group, which was founded in the
Thirties to counter growing anti-Semitism, has attracted the
attention of Elliot Spitzer, the New York state attorney general,
who is making informal inquiries into the transfers ordered by Rabbi
Israel Singer, the president of the WJC since 1985. It is possible
his office could order a full-scale inquiry.

The inquiries follow a series of allegations about the
organisation's accounting practices by its most outspoken internal
critic, Isi Liebler, the WJC's senior vice-president. Mr Liebler,
who has declined to comment in public, has demanded a full
independent audit of the group's finances.

The WJC was established in 1936 to try to counter growing anti-
Semitism and mobilise the world against the Nazi onslaught. In
recent years the group, which has its international headquarters in
New York, has been responsible for obtaining compensation and
restitution for survivors of the Holocaust and has secured millions
of dollars in payments from Swiss banks.

The investigation by Mr Spitzer's office is reportedly focussing on
payments ordered by Rabbi Singer between October 2002 to February
last year. In that five-month period he ordered the transfer of
$1.2m (£630,000) of the WJC's funds to a numbered bank account in a
bank in Geneva. The staff in its Geneva office said they were not
aware of such an account.

In an effort to overhaul the group's accounting practices, as well
as improve its public image, its chief patron, the billionaire Egar
Bronfman, has ordered an internal review. That is being carried out
by Stephen Herberts. Mr Herberts has reportedly met with Mr Liebler
in Israel to discuss his demands for a full audit.

Mr Herberts told The New York Times: "You can't turn around an
organisation overnight but I would say that 70 or 80 per cent of the
changes have been initiated." He said that Mr Spitzer's office had
not contacted him but that he was willing to co-operate. "I'm more
than happy to give them anything and everything they may want to
see," he added.

It was reported by the Jewish Week, a publication for New York's
Jewish community, that Rabbi Singer and Mr Bronfman have worked
together for more than two decades. Earlier this year they accused
Mr Liebler of trying to destroy the WJC and discredit Mr Bronfman by
raising questions about its finances.

Mr Bronfman tried to oust Mr Liebler from his position, calling his
questions "assaults on my tenure, my integrity and my person".

Rabbi Singer has not commented on the investigation of the money
transfers. Earlier this year he said he would fight any such
move. "There is no scandal, and I'm not going to be threatened," he
said.

Mr Liebler's critics claim that he has been motivated by political
differences with Mr Bronfman, charges he has denied. The WJC has
been a vocal actor in obtaining payments for survivors of the
Holocaust and has worked closely with the International Commission
on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims.

The organisation, which was set up in 1998, has collected more than
$500m for victims.

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The latest version of the Statue of Lenin - Germans should
understand that making huge memorials to yourself in the downtown
usually means you are declaring yourself dictator. In this case, the
ideology is not communism, nor nazism but meaninglessness? They
would like to convert the entire world to the religion of
meaninglessness. Do we buy it?


============================
Holocaust memorial nears completion in Berlin
December 24, 2004
http://www.germany-
info.org/relaunch/info/publications/week/2004/041223/misc1.html

The last grey concrete slabs of Germany’s “Memorial to
Europe’s Murdered Jews� were erected last week at a site in
central Berlin just south of the Brandenburg Gate. Construction of
the memorial began on August 16, 2003, following a more than decade-
long debate on how best to memorialize the more than six million
Jews killed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.

The "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," with a view of the
Reichstag building behind it. bpa photo
The memorial consists of over 2,751 concrete slabs of various
heights and laid out on an irregularly-shaped field in the heart of
the city. It will be flanked by a “Place of Information� and
documentation center, a compromise with the architect, who had
wanted the memorial to be more a site of contemplation than
information.

Like every memorial of import, the memorial in Berlin, often simply
called the “Holocaust Memorial,� has brought with it its share
of controversies. In what some have seen as an affront to the many
groups of people victimized by the Nazis, the memorial’s name
recognizes only those of the Jewish faith and not the millions of
political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies and others who were
murdered. A further controversy erupted when it was discovered that
a German firm industrial firm that had been favored by Hitler’s
regime would deliver products used in the construction. But the
primary bone of contention for many in the city and elsewhere was
the design itself, starkly modern and unequivocally non-grandiose.

The completion of the memorial seems to have stilled the controversy
surrounding it, as journalists begin to see the finished work as the
most important part of a greater series of commemorations to take
place in 2005. “The memorial is not a ’national’ monument â€"
it is dedicated to the ‘murdered Jews of Europe.’ …The year
2005 will call into consciousness that the break in civilization was
horrific for all of Europe,� wrote the Berliner Tagespiegel.

Other critics across Germany have also begun to praise the concept,
which American architect Peter Eisenmann, who designed the memorial,
has likened to undulating a field in his native Iowa. "The
meaninglessness and disconsolation of the Holocaust cannot be
expressed in a classical architecture," he had said at a ceremony
that marked the beginning of construction.

While some critics have argued that the memorial’s massive size
takes up too much of the government’s city center, other say that
it is its very location, south of the Reichstag and north of the
“Topography of Terror,� that is the country’s solemn gesture
to the importance of remembering. “Everything [in that area of the
city] has history, has a purpose, has importance,� wrote the
Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

The official opening for the memorial will be on May 10, 2005, to
commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

==================
Holocaust fund investigated for 'unusual' money transfers
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=597158


01 January 2005The World Jewish Congress, which has wrung billions
of dollars in Holocaust restitution from European governments and
companies, is being investigated by the authorities in New York
following a series of unusual money transfers of hundreds of
thousands of dollars.

The influential international group, which was founded in the
Thirties to counter growing anti-Semitism, has attracted the
attention of Elliot Spitzer, the New York state attorney general,
who is making informal inquiries into the transfers ordered by Rabbi
Israel Singer, the president of the WJC since 1985. It is possible
his office could order a full-scale inquiry.

The inquiries follow a series of allegations about the
organisation's accounting practices by its most outspoken internal
critic, Isi Liebler, the WJC's senior vice-president. Mr Liebler,
who has declined to comment in public, has demanded a full
independent audit of the group's finances.

The WJC was established in 1936 to try to counter growing anti-
Semitism and mobilise the world against the Nazi onslaught. In
recent years the group, which has its international headquarters in
New York, has been responsible for obtaining compensation and
restitution for survivors of the Holocaust and has secured millions
of dollars in payments from Swiss banks.

The investigation by Mr Spitzer's office is reportedly focussing on
payments ordered by Rabbi Singer between October 2002 to February
last year. In that five-month period he ordered the transfer of
$1.2m (£630,000) of the WJC's funds to a numbered bank account in a
bank in Geneva. The staff in its Geneva office said they were not
aware of such an account.

In an effort to overhaul the group's accounting practices, as well
as improve its public image, its chief patron, the billionaire Egar
Bronfman, has ordered an internal review. That is being carried out
by Stephen Herberts. Mr Herberts has reportedly met with Mr Liebler
in Israel to discuss his demands for a full audit.

Mr Herberts told The New York Times: "You can't turn around an
organisation overnight but I would say that 70 or 80 per cent of the
changes have been initiated." He said that Mr Spitzer's office had
not contacted him but that he was willing to co-operate. "I'm more
than happy to give them anything and everything they may want to
see," he added.

It was reported by the Jewish Week, a publication for New York's
Jewish community, that Rabbi Singer and Mr Bronfman have worked
together for more than two decades. Earlier this year they accused
Mr Liebler of trying to destroy the WJC and discredit Mr Bronfman by
raising questions about its finances.

Mr Bronfman tried to oust Mr Liebler from his position, calling his
questions "assaults on my tenure, my integrity and my person".

Rabbi Singer has not commented on the investigation of the money
transfers. Earlier this year he said he would fight any such
move. "There is no scandal, and I'm not going to be threatened," he
said.

Mr Liebler's critics claim that he has been motivated by political
differences with Mr Bronfman, charges he has denied. The WJC has
been a vocal actor in obtaining payments for survivors of the
Holocaust and has worked closely with the International Commission
on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims.

The organisation, which was set up in 1998, has collected more than
$500m for victims.

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Bin Laden targets oil to bleed US:
http://207.44.245.159/article7517.htm
12/20/04

BERLIN: Osama bin Laden claims to have bled the Soviet Union into
bankruptcy as an Islamic guerrilla fighter in Afghanistan in the
1980s. Could he do the same to another hated superpower — the US?

The Al Qaeda leader's latest purported communication highlighted
that question by calling on militants to stop the flow of oil to the
West — crucial to keeping the economy moving — and praising a
December 6 attack on the US Consulate in Saudi Arabia, the world's
top oil producer.

In an audiotape posted on an Islamic website on Thursday, a man who
US officials believe is bin Laden accuses Westerners of subjugating
the Middle East to plunder its oil. "Go on and try to prevent them
from getting oil," the speaker said. "Concentrate your operations on
that, especially in Iraq and the Gulf."

It was believed to be the first time a purported bin Laden tape in
effect called for attacks on the oil industry.

But he has flaunted the economic theme before, recalling in his most
recent video how Afghan mujahideen "bled Russia for 10 years, until
it went bankrupt" and taunting the US government over the size of
its budget deficit — which peaked at $413bn last year.

Security and terrorism experts suggest bin Laden's claims to be
undermining the US economically are largely propaganda, noting the
flexible, market-driven US economy is a far cry from the creaky,
bureaucratic Soviet giant that disintegrated in 1991.

Still, the economic argument gives bin Laden a tool he can use to
rally his supporters and inflate his aura of success by claiming
damage caused by other factors as his own handiwork.

Spurred by the new tape, Muslim radicals using chat rooms on Islamic
websites debated Friday what weapons could be used to attack an oil
tanker in the strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.

Bin Laden "sees us as poised on this precipice, and he's going to
push us into the abyss," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at
Rand Corporation.

As bin Laden put it in his video remarks aimed at Americans just
days before the November 2 presidential election: "The real loser is
you. It is the American people and their economy."

The Al Qaeda leader cites the experience of Afghan mujahideen
fighters "in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to
fight tyrannical superpowers" — meaning the Soviets.

Bin Laden was among the US-supported Islamic fighters in
Afghanistan, backed with money and weapons in hopes of weakening the
US' opponent in the Cold War.

The Soviet comparison was aimed as much at bin Laden supporters as
at Americans, said Rand analyst Hoffman. While the Soviets'
underlying economic weakness is now commonly accepted, "don't forget
that 15 years ago, very few people thought that", he said.

"That's how he motivates and animates people and addresses morale —
telling them, `No one thought we could achieve that feat, and by the
same token no one thinks we can achieve this feat of defeating the
US, but we will'," Hoffman said.

Retired general. William Odom, a scholar at the Hudson Institute and
an expert on the Soviet collapse, said bin Laden's analogy is off
base since the Soviet Union collapsed for reasons other than
Afghanistan, including the weakness of its state-run economy.

As far as spending on Iraq, Odom said damage to the US economy is
not attributable to bin Laden, but to the Bush Administration for
embarking on the costly war, he said.

In the fall of '03, Congress approved $87.5bn (euro66bn) for the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and $25bn (euro18.8bn) more last
spring, and Bush is expected to request another $75bn (euro56.5bn)
to $100bn (euro75.4bn) early in '05.

"If we're stupid enough to go off and do something like that, bin
Laden can justly crow about it," Odom said. "But I don't think he
can take credit for having caused it."

Unless the US plays into his hands, however, Odom said no al-Qaida
strategy can topple US dominance. "In an operational sense, US-made
policies, not bin Laden's actions, have risked putting the US in a
very serious situation," he said.

Terrorists "have never brought down a liberal democracy," Odom
said. "Terrorists like bin Laden can cause trouble but they're not a
strategic problem, they're a tactical nuisance."

Reinforcing that point from an economist's perspective, Princeton
University economist Alan Krueger said, "The US economy is too large
and diverse to be sunk by terrorism.

"The US government budget is overflowing with red ink because of the
Bush tax cuts and the ageing of the baby boom generation, not
because of Osama bin Laden," Krueger said in an e-mail.

On the video, bin Laden asserted al-Qaida is the cause of US losses
in battle: "All we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the
furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is
written `al-Qaida', in order to make the generals race there to
cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Hoffman noted that bin Laden also tried to take credit for US
economic difficulties after the September 11 terror attacks,
including the sharp drop of the Nasdaq stock market and corporate
scandals such as Enron.

Bin Laden has "an excellent understanding" of economic targeting,
said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of
Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrew's University in
Scotland. But he would need a bigger strike to hurt the US — one
aimed at a critical part of the economy, Ranstorp said.

"Unless they strike at the stock exchange, unless they strike at the
exact critical nodes in our infrastructure, I think the economy can
certainly absorb that," he said.

Last summer, federal authorities raised the terror alert for
financial institutions after uncovering an alleged al-Qaida plot to
attack the New York Stock Exchange and the Citicorp building, also
in Manhattan; the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
buildings in Washington; and Prudential Financial headquarters in
Newark, New Jersey.

Intelligence indicated al-Qaida had conducted surveillance of the
buildings, authorities said. Although the information dated back
several years, counter-terrorism officials noted that al-Qaida has a
record of extensive planning and plotting.

Copyright: AP

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The Guantanamo Gulag
By MIKE WHITNEY
Counterpunch
January 3, 2005
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney01032005.html

-
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison
without formulating any charge known to the law, and
particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is
in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of
all totalitarian government whether Nazi or
Communist."
Winston Churchill
-

-
"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a
state of war or a threat or war, internal political
instability or any other public emergency, may be
invoked as a justification of torture."
U.N. Convention Against Torture; Article 2, Section 2
-

The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay is the brightest
star in the Bush firmament. It towers over the
political landscape like a monument to human cruelty.
That's why the administration chose to slap it up in
full view of the world. It's their way of announcing
that the fundamental rules of the game have changed.

There's no need for Guantanamo. The United States has
plenty of experience concealing political prisoners
from the public. The CIA has been transporting enemy
suspects to hidden locations since its inception.
Certainly, an increase of 600 prisoners or so wouldn't
have caused much of a stir if they were tucked away in
some remote corner of the earth. But, that's not the
purpose of Guantanamo. Guantanamo is intended to send
a message that the internationally accepted norms of
justice have been rescinded. From now on, all law
proceeds from Washington.

The world seems oddly bewildered by this development.
Individuals have protested the particularly heinous
aspects of the new system, like the use of torture, or
detention without charges. But, these are just the
trimmings and don't get to the heart of the matter.
Guantanamo is a deliberate effort to overturn every
legal protection that safeguards the individual from
the arbitrary actions of the state. Simply put, it is
the end of the law.

What is it that we fail to grasp about Guantanamo? Are
we so blinded by the assuring narrative of democracy
and personal freedom that we don't recognize the
symbols of tyranny when we see them? The reality of
Guantanamo is quite stark; a dull-gray world of
cinder-block and wire situated beyond the reach of any
law or regulation. Is their some doubt about what this
really means?

Just yesterday the Washington Post reported that the
"Bush administration is preparing plans for possible
lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including
hundreds whom the government does not have enough
evidence to charge in courts." Isn't this conspicuous
power grab by the president enough to awaken even the
most blasé observer? Remember, these prisoners have
never been charged with a crime and, yet, the
administration is paving the way for permanent
incarceration.

The Washington Post report comes on the heels of last
week's article by the ACLU which confirmed that
"President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing
the use of inhumane interrogation methods against
detainees in Iraq."

So, now there's a paper trail connecting the President
directly to the torture that was "systematically"
conducted at Guantanamo.

Torture? Permanent imprisonment without charges? These
are the most fundamental violations of the law. How
can we continue to ignore the gravity of this
situation?

Guantanamo embodies the ethos of the Bush
administration; an aggressive and inflexible dogma
that regards force as the organizing principle of
society. In this respect, Guantanamo is less notable
as a jail than it is as a summary of a particular
world view. In fact, the facility is a realization of
the new world order; a chilling vision of oppression
in brick-and-mortar.

Guantanamo wasn't created to address the nebulous
threat of global terrorism. As Neil Lewis confirms in
a Jan 1, New York Times article, "very few of the
prisoners had much value." (This has been corroborated
by many other sources who acknowledge that the more
dangerous Al Qaida suspects have been spirited away to
other locations for interrogation) Rather, it was
built to broadcast the launching of a global police
state, administered by the United States and in brazen
defiance of universally accepted standards of justice.
This explains the administration's growing hostility
towards the UN. Beyond the inflammatory rhetoric, the
Bush team is battling the world body to be accepted as
the final authority on international affairs.
Guantanamo ensures that a change in world leadership
is not forthcoming. (As the Iraq war proved, 70% of
Americans still support the UN as the legitimate
authority on issues like military intervention)

Guantanamo is the collaborative vision of American
plutocrats who are close to the administration and who
affect policy decisions through their respective think
tanks and lobbyists. If that wasn't true, we would
have heard squeals of protest echoing from every
corner of the nation. Instead, (apart from a
scattering of human rights groups and the ACLU)
there's been hardly a peep from the country's elites.
For the most part, "the privileged few" have no
problem with a system that categorically denies its
victims even minimal human rights. The disparity in
wealth sadly disposes many of these plutocrats to more
autocratic government.

The UN has failed miserably in providing moral
leadership on the issue of Guantanamo. None of the
member states have stood up and openly condemned the
US or suggested that it be penalized for its despotic
conduct. The question of sanctions has never even been
seriously considered. How can we expect change in the
face of such abject cowardice?

Removing Guantanamo won't be easy. Bush has assumed
absolute power over the detention of prisoners, and he
won't surrender that without a fight. His supporters
see the enhanced power of the executive as a critical
to their long-range plans. It allows them to sidestep
Congress to achieve their goals. They want a president
who is free to operate unilaterally and according to
his own inclinations. This means that rolling back
these exaggerated presidential powers will be a
daunting task.

Guantanamo is symptomatic of a much graver disease.
Time and again, the administration has taken aim at
the laws that protect the individual. The Homeland
Security Bill, the Patriot Act and the new
Intelligence Reform Bill all seriously undermine basic
constitutional rights. Guantanamo follows this
tendency to its logical conclusion. It offers us a
glimpse of the void; a vision of the world stripped of
justice. Guantanamo is not anomaly, but the
full-flowering of the Bush ideology. The "shining
house on the hill" is actually a ghoulish shrine to
cruelty and oppression. No public relations scheme can
obscure its real meaning. Guantanamo is a distress
signal from a sinking republic; an early warning sign
that personal liberty is under siege.

Guantanamo is the logical extension of the corporate
system. It focuses on dispatching potential enemies
with maximum efficiency. The prison's main architect,
Secretary Rumsfeld, has tried to meet the requirements
of global commerce by producing a precision model of
detention; applying his Germanic sensibility for
organization with a "top-down" business strategy that
sidesteps all the burdensome laws of due process. He
has, in fact, created the modern-day terror-camp, free
from any legal encumbrances and operating with
complete impunity. However horrible the crime, no one
is ever held accountable at Rummy's private
Buchenwald.

The Gulag at Guantanamo casts a pall over American
political life. It illustrates a seismic shift in our
fundamental values as Americans and a wholesale
betrayal of our commitment to human rights.
Concentration camps are anathema to democracy and
Guantanamo is asphyxiating the promise of American
justice. Institutions that once were counted on to
protect the individual have been casually discarded by
the perpetrators of the most despicable crimes against
humanity. The Bush administration has assumed the role
of Grand Inquisitor; dispensing "cruel and inhuman"
punishment without remorse or hesitation. They've
elevated injustice to a level of state policy.
Guantanamo is a fitting testimonial to their tragic
lack of compassion.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be
reached at: fergiewhitney @ msn.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney01032005.html

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'Civilization' vs. 'Barbarism': An Interview with Noam Chomsky
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, December 30 2004 @ 03:36 AM EST
By M. Junaid Alam

On December 17th I met with Professor Noam Chomsky at his MIT office
to get his thoughts on the ideological justifications and historical
realities behind America's "war on terror." Professor Chomsky spent
a half-hour taking apart the framework of "civilization"
versus "barbarism," pointing to Western and particularly US state-
sponsored atrocities, laying out the grave nature of war crimes
committed in Iraq, attacking the intellectual culture which
sanctions massive suffering, and explaining the elite's knowledge of
the roots of terrorism. The transcript follows below.

Transcribed by the interviewer and slightly edited for clarification
by Professor Chomsky

(double-hyphen "-"indicates a couple words not picked up)

Alam: Professor Chomsky, thank you for doing this interview with
Left Hook.

In the time we have, I wanted to discuss with you the consequences
and implications of America's current war stance, how some of its
programs or objectives might be interrelated.

The first thing I wanted to bring up is, it seems that the general
ideological picture painted for us by the administration and
conservative outlets is that the overall so-called war on terror is
about the "civilized" world combating "barbarism," a position
Business Week recently voiced. In what ways do you think is ­ in what
ways do you think this is historically or politically inaccurate, in
terms of the scale and intensity of the crimes committed by
ourselves versus the "barbarians," presumably Islamists and
nationalists in Iraq and Palestine?

Chomsky: Well, it doesn't even come close. I mean, the level of
destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful
states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by
groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

I mean just take, say, Iraq. The best current estimate of deaths
after the invasion is 100,000 maybe more, maybe less. Take a long
time for Islamic terrorists to kill 100,000 people. Take say, the
most extensive terrorist act attributed to Islamic terrorists, 9-11.
About 3,000 people killed, which is a pretty horrible atrocity. But
as atrocities go, it doesn't rank very high.

Take for example, what south of the Rio Grande is often called the
other 9-11. September 11th, 1973, in which the United States was
very heavily involved -- that's the bombing of the presidential
palace, the military coup, the death of the president, the
destruction of the leading democracy, the oldest democracy, in Latin
America. The official death toll for that 9-11 is ­ the official
death toll is over 3,000, but that's just the bodies they can
actually count. The estimated toll is probably twice that. If you
give that number in comparative terms, comparative population terms,
that'd be the equivalent of about 50 to 100,000 people killed in the
United States. We've just learned recently the detailed numbers of
people tortured -- it's 30,000, that's 700,000 in the United States,
thousands of cases of rapes and other abuse, and many people just
lost, disappeared, who knows what happened to them.

It also set up international terrorist operations, under the rubric
of what was called Operation Condor, which brought together similar
state terrorist organizations in
neighboring countries which the US also had a major role in
establishing...The US intelligence compared DINA, the Chilean state
terror organization, compared them to the Gestapo and KGB. They
didn't fool around, and that's the way they were viewed by the
United States while the US was supporting them, and Britain was
supporting them enthusiastically, and so on. In fact their
international terror activities only stopped when they went one step
too far. They murdered a well-known diplomat in Washington DC, and
that's not allowed, so they were sort of called off and stayed
pretty brutal, but not that bad.

Well that's one event ­ September 11th, 1973. Happens to be one in
which the US was only indirectly involved. If we take those which
the US carried out itself, then the scale isuncountable. I mean,
take the one case where the US was indeed condemned for
international terrorism and ordered to terminate the crime, namely
the attack on Nicaragua, which went to the World Court. The World
Court had to take a very narrow case, because the US had excluded
itself from all international treaties. So the US cannot be brought
to the World Court for major crimes, for example the supreme
international crime, invasion, or violation of the UN Charter, or
violation of the Genocide Convention, these are things the US is
exempt from, because they exempted themselves from being subjected
to international treaties in World Court proceedings.

So the World Court had to deal with Nicaragua case on extremely
narrow grounds, just bilateral Nicaragua-US treaties, and customary
international law. Nevertheless the Court condemned the US for what
it called unlawful use of force, gave a pretty broad judgment, well
beyond the actual terms of the case, ordered the US to terminate the
crimes, pay substantial reparations. The US ignored the ruling,
vetoed two Security Council resolutions affirming it, and went on
with the war.

The end result was, again in per capita terms, about the equivalent
of 2.5 million people being killed in the United States. More than
the number of deaths in all wars including the Civil War in US
history, destroyed the country, it's now the second poorest country
in the hemisphere. After the US took it over again in 1990, it went
downhill further -- by now, it's estimated that over half the
children under 2 are suffering from severe malnutrition, I mean,
probable brain damage.

In the early 80's, when the US started the war, Nicaragua was being
praised by international organizations, even international banks,
for its substantial progress, won prizes for improvement, UNICEF
prizes for ­ awards for improvement in child health and development.
Now it's quite the opposite.

I mean this is a single incident, so it totally outweighs all
terrorist activities you can attribute to anyone else, but it's not
even worth discussing.

And that's only one, I'm not even talking about the major wars like
say, Vietnam, which was straight aggression, can't call it terror,
with, who knows, four million people or so killed, and people still
dying from the effects of massive chemical warfare started by
Kennedy. And that's just the United States. Take a look at other
states, they're not as powerful as the US, but their violence is
extraordinary­ France in Africa, the British in Kenya and elsewhere,
just far beyond the scale of any terrorist activity.

Alam: So, so much for the framework of "civilization"
versus "barbarism."

Chomsky: No, it's absurd, I mean look, let's just take what's the
worst atrocity since the Mongol invasions? You know, it's what
happened in Germanyin the late 30's - 40's primarily. Germany was
the peak of Western civilization. It was the most advanced society
in the Western world, in the sciences, in the arts, in literature,
the stellar example of Western civilization. In fact up until the
first World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been
described by American political scientists as the model of
democracy. That's the peak of Western civilization ­ yeah, it's the
worst barbarism since the Mongol invasion. What kind of correlations
can one make?

Alam: It's interesting to note that­ you mentioned a little bit the
100,000 casualties ­ it's interesting to note that while much media
attention here is focused on the sensationalistic and gruesome
beheadings of perhaps a few dozen foreigners in Iraq, the same media
is more or less silent about the Lancet report ­ Lancet being the
British medical journal ­that said about 100,000 Iraqi civilians were
killed, mostly by US bombing, and also missing in the media is talk
about the Iraqi children's malnutrition rates which have apparently
doubled.

Chomsky: They're worse than - at the level of Burundi­ they're worse
than
Uganda and Haiti and that's since the war.

Alam: That actually reminded me of-

Chomsky: In fact the way the media treated this Lancet report is
kind of interesting. I mean it was mentioned it's not that you
couldn't find it. But it was either ignored or downplayed. The
standard reaction to it was well, that it was just a sample.

Alam: Exactly

Chomsky: How do you know it was accurate, and maybe the number was
smaller ­ and they [Lancet] actually did give a spread, which was
8,000 to 200,000, which is ­

Alam: Excluding Fallujah, too.

Chomsky: Well, let's look at how they did it. The highest
probability estimate was around 100,000. The immediate reaction has
been well, maybe it's much lower. Yeah, maybe it's much lower ­ maybe
it's much higher. In fact they did it very conservatively. They
excluded Fallujah because that would have raised the estimate, the
extrapolated estimate, they included the Kurdish areas, no fighting
there, which would reduce the extrapolated estimate, and in general
they did a careful and rather conservative analysis.

But it's either been ignored or the silly claim has been made that,
well it's only an estimate, so maybe it's too high true, it's only
an estimate, so maybe it's too low. In fact that's the way every
study is done of estimated casualties or health studies and so on.
But whatever it is, whether it's 50,000 or 150,000, or whatever the
number might be, it's obviously a major atrocity.

And in fact, it's not exactly correct that the media haven't
reported the war crimes. They often report them and celebrate them.
So take for example the invasion of Fallujah, which is one of the ­
it's a major war crime, it's very similar to the Russian destruction
of Grozny 10 years earlier, a city of approximately the same size,
bombed to rubble, people driven out.

Alam: They herded all the males, I think, they didn't let them
escape the corridor.

Chomsky: Which incidentally is very much like Srebrenica ­ which is
universally condemned as genocide -- Srebrenica was an enclave,
lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for
attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there's going to
be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They
trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside,
and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of
people slaughtered.

Well, with Fallujah, the US didn't truck out the women and children,
it bombed them out. There was about a month of bombing, bombed out
of the city, if they could get out somehow, a couple hundred
thousand people fled, or somehow got out, and as you say men were
kept in and we don't know what happened after that, we don't
estimate [the casualties for which we are responsible].

But what was dramatic about Fallujah was that it was not kept
secret. So you could see on the front page of the New York Times, a
big picture of the first majorstep in the offensive, namely the
capture of the Fallujah general hospital. And there's a picture of
people lying on the ground, soldier guarding them, and then there's
a story that tells that patients and doctors were taken from ­
patients were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were
forced to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the
picture described it.

-- The president of the United States is subject to death penalty
under US law for that crime - alone. I mean that's a grave breach of
the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions say explicitly and
unambiguously that hospitals must be protected, hospitals and
medical staff and patients must be protected by all combatants in
any conflict. You couldn't have a more grave breach of the Geneva
Conventions than that.

There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican
Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva
Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean
the soldier that committed them, that means the commanders. They
weren't thinking about the United States of course, but take it
literally, that's what it means.

And then they went onto explain why they carried out this war crime
in the general hospital. New York Times explained calmly that it was
done because the US command described the Fallujah general hospital
as a propaganda outlet for the guerrillas because they were
reporting casualties. I -- don't know if the Nazis produced things
like that. Of course the Times said it was "inflated" casualties -
how do we know it was inflated?

Alam: We don't even count'em.

Chomsky: Well our Dear Leader said it was inflated, so that means
that since we're like North Korea, it has to be inflated. But
suppose it was. I mean the idea of carrying out a major war crime,
explicit, because the hospital was a propaganda weapon by
distributing casualty figures, I mean you really have to work to
find an analog to that.

And then it went on, destroying the whole city. Finally they end up
saying well the Marines are going to face a serious challenge of
regaining the confidence of the people of Fallujah after having
destroyed their city. Yeah, it's going to be a pretty serious
challenge. It's also described how they're going to do it ­ by
instituting a police state.

Alam: Right.

Chomsky: Nobody will be allowed into Fallujah until they undergo
retinal scans and fingerprinting and they're going to be marked and
identified, do everything except put chips in them, maybe they'll
get to that next time, organize them into work gangs, in which
they'll be compelled under the order to rebuild what the US has
destroyed. Try and find a counterpart to that. And that's just one
war crime, one part of the general atrocities.

In fact, you could argue that it's insignificant. By the principles
of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which the US initiated and carried out,
it concluded that the supreme international crime is invasion,
aggression, and that supreme crime includes within it all the evil
that follows. So therefore the doubling of malnutrition rates, the
maybe 100,000 casualties, the grave war crimes in Fallujah, they're
all footnotes, they're footnotes to the supreme international crime.

And that crime is taken pretty seriously. In Nuremberg they did not
try soldiers, and they didn't try company commanders, they tried
the ­ the people who were on trial and hanged - were the top command.
Like the German Foreign Minister was hanged. Because of
participation in the supreme international crime which encompasses
all the evil that follows. Do we hear anything about that?

Alam: Right.

Chomsky: But you can't say it's concealed. What I've just talked
about is all quoted from the front pages. Which is even more
astonishing. Actually, you know, that, however awful it is, it's a
big improvement over the past. I mean much worse than this was
happening in Vietnam and there wasn't even any concern. It's hard to
say the words, but there's been a lot of progress since then. I mean
now at least many people find it appalling. It went on in Vietnam at
a much higher level for years, literally years, and there was no
protest at all. I mean the war in Vietnam started in 1962, was
really a war against South Vietnam. Kennedy launched it in 1962, was
very brutal from the start. Bombing, chemical warfare, to destroy
crops and cover to undercut support for indigenous guerrillas --
driving millions of people into what amounted to concentration
camps, or urban slums.

By the time protests developed, 1966 or 67, South Vietnam had
virtually been destroyed. I mean the leading and most respected
rather hawkish military analyst on Vietnam,
[the Indochina] specialist Bernard Fall, by 1966 and 67, was writing
he wondered whether Vietnam as a historic and cultural entity would
escape extinction, under the heaviest attack that had ever been
suffered by an area that size. Well, [for] years there was almost no
protest. Bad now, but a lot of improvement in the last 33 years.

Alam: This brings to mind actually, for me anyway, a quote, from
Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, maybe you could find something in
it to comment on, he wrote ­ of the French Revolution I think he was
speaking of:

"There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would remember it and
consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless
cold bloodour shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor
Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the
horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from
hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could
contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all
been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all
France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and
real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of
us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

Do you think one of the functions of the mainstream media in either
not really allowing the­ allowing for the vastness or the pity of the
crimes that are deserved to be seen or really experienced­ is that
simply reflecting the prejudices and racism of American society, or
is it actually creating the prejudices of American society?

Chomsky: The media are, in this respect, just part of the general
intellectual culture, which includes all of us, including you and
me. I mean, we don't see, we prefer not to see the horrible crimes
that are going on all the time, which we could do something about
easily. So take say, we just passed the 10th anniversary of the
Rwanda massacres, which were pretty horrible, maybe 8,000 people
killed a day for a 100 days. Pretty awful massacre. And there's a
lot of wringing of hands and lamentations about how we didn't do
anything about it, we didn't intervene, we didn't send military
forces, and so on, wasn't that terrible. Well yeah, it was pretty
terrible, but let's take a look at today.

Right now, about the same number of people, about 8,000 people,
about 8,000 children in fact, are dying in southern Africa every day
from easily treatable diseases. We add hunger, it's going to go way
up, let's keep to easily treatable diseases. That's Rwanda-level
killing among children only, in southern Africa, not for 100 days,
but every day. There's a very easy way to deal with it, namely bribe
pharmaceutical corporations to provide them with drugs and the
limited infrastructure that's required. [But almost no one is]
talking about it. I mean that's far worse than Rwanda.

Furthermore if we go a step further and ask ourselves ­ speaking of
barbarism ­ what kind of society do we live in where the only way we
can think of preventing Rwanda-level killing among children everyday
is by bribing private tyrannies to do something about it. I mean
that itself is beyond barbarism.

But we accept that, we don't think about it, we prefer not to think
about it. It's not that we worry about small crimes rather than big
ones, it's that attention is focused on anything that's done against
us. What we do to others just doesn't matter. And it's not specific
to the United States, it's quite general. It's an unfortunate part
of dominant cultures and powerful societies.

Alam: With all the grandiose rhetoric about "barbarism," it's also
interesting to note that the Pentagon's own Defense Science Board,
composed of top military commanders and intelligence figures, issued
a report about two months ago declaring that resentment in the
Islamic world is mainly due to US support for Israel and US support
for Arab dictatorships, and not about an inner hatred or hatred of
Western values themselves. But if the top people in the Pentagon and
the military understand this, then why is there such a large
disconnect in what they themselves concede and what they say ­I mean
what are the strategic imperatives that are so great that they are
willing to incur the wrath?

Chomsky: That was an interesting report [interruption, door is
opened, background noise continues from here on] ­ this Pentagon
report which was sort of interesting, is virtually a repetition,
almost a verbatim repetition of a report by the NSC in 1958 when
President Eisenhower raised the question with his staff, why there
is a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world, and not among
governments but from the people. That's Eisenhower, 1958, why is
there a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. An answer
was given in an analysis by the National Security Council in 1958:
it's because there's a perception in the Arab that the United States
supports brutal and repressive regimes and blocks democracy and
development, and we do it because we want to get control of oil and
resources ­ their oil. That's 1958. And they went on to say, yes the
perception's accurate, and we're going to continue doing it. That's
been perfectly well known for years that that was the case.

It's exacerbated further by specific policies. Right after 9-11, as
far as I know one newspaper in the United States had the integrity
to investigate opinion in the Muslim world, the Wall Street Journal.
They kept to the people they cared about, what they called moneyed
Muslims, managers of multinational corporations, international
lawyers, you know ­ their type of people ­ so there's no concern about
globalization or anything else, they're part of the US-run system.
But they had the same results they had as in 1958, as the Pentagon
just reported. They hate and fear bin Laden, who's trying to destroy
them, but nevertheless they express understanding for the position
that he articulates, and they hate US policy, because it supports
brutal and oppressive regimes, blocks democracy and development,
because of the support for Israeli aggression and atrocities at that
time, because of the Iraq sanctions, which were killing hundreds of
thousands of people, devastating society, and caused enormous anger.

The Pentagon report is just repeating what anybody knew who had
their eyes open. The fact that it was regarded as a surprise in the
United States just shows how much intellectuals prefer to keep their
eyes closed. What they said is correct, furthermore you can read it -
  it's articulated almost the same way in 1958, it's found in every
study since. Furthermore you can find it any book on terrorism ­ any
serious book on terrorism, not just anyone ranting and screaming ­
but someone taking it seriously, say, Jason Burke's study of al-
Qaeda, which is the best one around, or just about anyone you pick.

They don't hate our freedom, you know, what they hate is US
policies, and for good reason, because those policies have been
crushing them for years. So yeah, they hate the policies. Pentagon
just discovered ­ re-discovered ­ what everybody with eyes open
already knew, and these 1958 reports have been declassified for
about 15 years, I was writing about them in 1990. Just better not
to ­ it's easier to just stand on a pedestal and scream about Islamic
fascism and how it's trying to destroy us. It doesn't require
thinking about the policies and doing something about them.

Furthermore that's true of what's called terrorism in general ­ I
mean, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Take say the IRA ­ which the US
was pretty much supporting, it was being funded ­ IRA terrorism,
which was pretty serious ­ was being funded from the United States
including church collections, FBI knew about it, wouldn't do
anything about it. It was pretty awful, but it was not without
reasons, it did draw on a reservoir of sympathy among the
population, who understood the grievances that they were talking
about were real...In fact when the British finally responded not by
greater violence, but by paying some attention to the grievances, it
led to significant improvements. In fact, big improvements. Of
course, Belfast is not heaven, but it's enormously improved over
what it was ten years ago.

And that's generally the case. And furthermore every serious
specialist on terrorism knows it. You take a look at say, Israeli
intelligence, I mean the former heads of this Shin Bet have spoken
about this - the current ones can't but the former ones have - the
former heads of military intelligence, and they all said the same
thing: until you treat the Palestinians with respect, until you
grant them their elementary rights, you're never going to stop
terrorism. That's the way to do it ­ they have grievances, the
grievances are real, we're treating them with contempt and
humiliation and destruction, we're stealing their land and
resources. [There's something like a] near-universal consensus on
this, among people who care about the topic.

[Interruption, another interview beckons]

Alam: Thank you very much Professor, thank you for your time.

-M. Junaid Alam is co-editor of the radical youth journal Left Hook,
where this interview originally appeared. He can be reached at
alam @ lefthook.org

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Indiana Jones Leads Hollywood's 'Battle For Falluja'

By Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
  The Guardian - UK
  12-17-4


Hollywood has joined the war. Universal Pictures announced
yesterday that it is to make The Battle for Falluja. To prove it is
serious,  it has enlisted Indiana Jones himself, actor Harrison
Ford, to help defeat the insurgency.

  The film - Hollywood's first foray into the second Iraq  conflict -
is due to go into production next year and will be based on  a
yet-to-be-finished book, No True Glory: The Battle for Falluja by
Bing  West, a former marine, politician and now war correspondent.

  The movie and book take as their starting point the killing  of four
civilian contractors in Falluja and the ensuing decision to order  an
assault on the city by US marines. That first assault, which was
abruptly stopped by the White House, was led by General Jim Mattis,
who will be played by Ford.

  Six months later, shortly after the US presidential election,  the
marines attacked Falluja for a second time, successfully occupying
the city. Almost 80 US marines were killed in the two assaults,
while some  sources have estimated that 800 Iraqis and insurgents
died in the April  assault on the city and a further 1,000 in
November.

  The film promises to depict the story from the point  of view of US
soldiers and politicians; it seems unlikely that the plight  of the
Iraqis will figure too prominently in Hollywood's take on the
subject.

  Writing last week for the online journal Slate.com, West  said: "If
America needs a hard job done, the marines will do it, and  they
won't lose their humanity in the process or any sleep over pulling
the trigger. Yes, they are 'the world's most lethal killing
machine.' That's what America needs in battle."

  Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited  2004

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1375730,00.html

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A Cult Is Trying to Hijack Our Iran Policy:

By all appearances, the march seemed like a protest by concerned
Iranians who supported regime change in Iran. In reality, it was a
meticulously orchestrated political rally in support of a violent,
pseudo-Marxist Iranian religious cult — the People's Mujahedin of
Iran, also known as the Mujahedin Khalq (MEK) — an organization that
has been on U.S. and European Union terrorist watch lists for
years.

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes439.htm

These fanatics seek to replace Tehran's religious tyranny with their
own.
By Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan is the author of the forthcoming book, "No God but God:
The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam," to be published by
Random House.
December 10, 2004

About 15,000 people, most of them Iranian Americans or exiles,
recently flocked to Washington to denounce the fundamentalist
Islamic government of Iran. The crowd shouted slogans against Iran's
reviled clerical regime and hoisted placards encouraging President
Bush to take whatever action necessary — including preemptive
military strikes — to ensure that Iran did not develop nuclear
weapons.

By all appearances, the march seemed like a protest by concerned
Iranians who supported regime change in Iran. In reality, it was a
meticulously orchestrated political rally in support of a violent,
pseudo-Marxist Iranian religious cult — the People's Mujahedin of
Iran, also known as the Mujahedin Khalq (MEK) — an organization that
has been on U.S. and European Union terrorist watch lists for years.

Ever since the invasion of Iraq, the MEK (and its Paris-based
political front, the National Council of Resistance in Iran) has
tried to establish itself as the Iranian equivalent of Ahmad
Chalabi's "government in exile," the Iraqi National Congress — and
not without success. Like the INC before the war, the MEK has
advocates in the highest levels of government. And like the INC, the
MEK has been inundating the U.S. intelligence community with
uncorroborated and, according to some intelligence officials, highly
suspect information meant to encourage the White House to carry out
the same policy of regime change in Iran that it did in Iraq. But
the United States will probably discover that the MEK — just like
the INC — can't be trusted.

The MEK, formed in the 1960s as one of several anti-imperialist
organizations struggling to overthrow the oppressive and corrupt
regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, gained widespread fame by
killing dozens of the shah's political cronies, as well as several
U.S. soldiers and civilian contractors who were working in Iran at
the time. But after the shah's expulsion in 1979, the MEK found
itself left behind in the ensuing power struggle over who would
control the new Iran. Neither the secular democrats who formed the
provisional government nor the religious factions who followed
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wanted anything to do with the MEK's
Marxist agenda.

With the establishment of clerical control, the MEK was eventually
outlawed and forced to flee to Iraq, where in exchange for
assistance and intelligence during the Iran-Iraq war it was provided
with protection and arms by Saddam Hussein. It was the MEK's support
for Hussein during that war that has made it the most reviled group
in Iran. In fact, the MEK — now perhaps 10,000 strong, half of them
fighters — may be the only group the Iranian population detests more
than the ruling clerical establishment.

The cease-fire between Iran and Iraq in 1988 put the MEK in a
vulnerable position. Isolated in remote camps along the border
between Iraq and Iran, the group gradually transformed from a
revolutionary Marxist guerrilla organization into a fanatical cult
of personality centered on absolute devotion to its husband-and-wife
leaders, Maryam and Massoud Rajavi.

As with most cults, it is incredibly difficult to break through the
veil of secrecy that shrouds the MEK. However, based on the research
of Baruch College history professor Ervand Abrahamian, who has
written extensively on the group, and the testimony of former
members, a horrifying history of terrorist activity, mass murder and
human rights abuses has emerged.

From their headquarters in Paris, the Rajavis rule the MEK with
draconian, god-like authority. Every morning, MEK members living in
the Iraqi camps — many who joined the group as orphaned children —
line up and salute pictures of Maryam and Massoud. Indeed, when
French authorities arrested Maryam Rajavi in 2002 for her
involvement in terrorist activities, nine of her followers immolated
themselves in protest.

According to Human Rights Watch, members who have criticized the
Rajavis or their organization have been detained against their will;
some committed suicide. As the public face of the MEK, the National
Council of Resistance in Iran presents itself as a democratic and
egalitarian organization, often flaunting the number of women in its
political and military hierarchy. But this is not so much a sign of
progressivism as it is a result of the group's control mechanisms.
The Rajavis have outlawed all contact between their male and female
followers. Celibacy is strictly enforced, and all members must
undergo weekly ideological cleansings in which they publicly confess
their sexual desires. Married couples live apart, save, of course,
for Maryam and Massoud.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, members of the MEK were rounded
up and detained by the U.S. military. The Iranians, eager to get
their hands on them, entered into negotiations with U.S. officials
for a prisoner exchange, offering Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters they
had captured in return for members of the MEK. The Iraqis, who
wanted to see the group brought to justice for its role in the
massacre of the Shiites and Kurds after the Persian Gulf War,
supported the negotiations. However, before talks could conclude,
the MEK was inexplicably granted protected status under the Geneva
Convention. It seems that some members of the U.S. Congress and Bush
administration now deem the MEK to be the most viable alternative to
Iran's clerical regime. Thus, during last weekend's rally, Rep. Bob
Filner (D-San Diego) referred to the group as "our best bet to
counter the [Iranian] regime."

The MEK is nothing of the sort. This is a fanatical cult that,
despite its rhetoric, has no interest in replacing Iran's clerical
regime with a democratic alternative. On the contrary, its leaders
want to replace the clerics with themselves. They want to substitute
one kind of religious totalitarianism with another.

Tantalizing promises aside, we must not be fooled.

===

In case you missed it:

Attack Iran the day Iraq war ends, demands Israel:

ISRAEL'S Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called on the international
community to target Iran as soon as the imminent conflict with Iraq
is complete.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-469972,00.html

===

US unilateral military move concerning Iran will break NATO in
pieces:

For the Europeans, one thing is certain: any US unilateral military
action against Iran will trigger a major world crisis compare to
which the Iraq crisis would be looking like a drill.

http://www.newropeans-magazine.org/edito/2004/141204.php

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Fourteen Russian troops killed
From correspondents in Grozny
Agence France-Presse
January 6, 2005
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11865011%
255E1702,00.html

A TOTAL of 14 Russian soldiers, plus at least three
local Chechen troops, were killed and 19 injured in a
series of incidents over two days in the breakaway
southern republic of Chechnya, a spokesman for the
local pro-Russian government said today.

The spokesman, who asked not to be named, also said
that six people had been reported kidnapped in
Chechnya in the same period, two of them students.

Three Russian soldiers were killed and four injured in
an overnight attack early on Monday, and another
soldier was killed and five hurt the following night,
the spokesman said.

Three soldiers were also killed in an attack on their
vehicle in the capital Grozny. Another attack on a
vehicle left one soldier dead and six injured in the
Vedeno region in the southwest.

The spokesman also said that three Russian soldiers
died and three were hurt when their truck hit a
landmine near Novye Atagui, south of the capital.

In other incidents, two mine removal specialists died
when a mine they were working on exploded, and a
Russian soldier was killed during the arrest of an
alleged rebel.

In the same period two Chechen police officers were
killed when their patrol came under fire in Grozny,
and a security guard protecting the local pro-Russian
president was shot dead south of the capital, the
spokesman said.

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11865011%
255E1702,00.html

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Iraq: A War For Israel?
http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/iraqwar.shtml

By Mark Weber
Dec. 2004

The United States Invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003, and the
occupation of the country since then, has cost more than a thousand
American lives and many tens of billions of dollars, and has brought
death to many thousands of Iraqis.

Why did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was
it launched?

In the months leading up to the attack, President Bush and other
high-ranking US officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to
the US and world by the Baghdad regime was so grave and imminent
that the United States had to act quickly to bomb, invade and occupy
Iraq.

On September 28, 2002, for example, he said: "The danger to our
country is grave and it is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses
biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to
make more and, according to the British government, could launch a
biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the
order is given... This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and
with fissile material could build one within a year."

On March 6, 2003, President Bush declared: "Saddam Hussein and his
weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to
all free people... I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the
American people. I believe he's a threat to the neighborhood in
which he lives. And I've got good evidence to believe that. He has
weapons of mass destruction... The American people know that
Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."

These claims were untrue. As the world now knows, Iraq had no
dangerous "weapons of mass destruction," and posed no threat to the
US. Moreover, alarmist suggestions that the Baghdad regime was
working with the al-Qaeda terror network likewise proved to be
without foundation.

So if the official reasons given for the war were untrue, why did
the United States attack?

Whatever the secondary reasons for the Iraq war, the crucial factor
in President Bush's decision to attack was to help Israel. With
support from Israel and America's Jewish-Zionist lobby, and prodded
by Jewish "neo-conservatives" holding high-level positions in his
administration, President Bush - who was already fervently committed
to Israel - resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel's chief
regional enemies.

This is so widely understood in Washington that US Senator Ernest
Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the US invaded
Iraq "to secure Israel," and "everybody" knows it. He also
identified three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in Washington
who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard
Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul
Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer,
columnist and author. [1]

Hollings referred to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional
colleagues to acknowledge this truth openly, saying that "nobody is
willing to stand up and say what is going on." Due to "the pressures
we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically
support Israel and its policies.

Some months before the invasion, retired four-star US Army General
and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark said in an
interview:

"Those who favor this attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell
you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam
Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at
some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it
against Israel." [2]

Fervently Pro-Israel

President Bush's fervent support for Israel and its hardline premier
is well known. He reaffirmed it, for example, in June 2002 in a
major speech on the Middle East. In the view of "leading Israeli
commentators," the London Times reported, the address was "so pro-
Israel that it might have been written by Ariel Sharon." [3]

Condoleeza Rice, Bush's National Security Advisor, echoed the
President's outlook in a May 2003 interview, saying that
the "security of Israel is the key to security of the world." [4]

In an address to pro-Israel activists at the 2004 convention of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Bush said: "The
United States is strongly committed, and I am strongly committed, to
the security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state." He also told the
gathering: "By defending the freedom and prosperity and security of
Israel, you're also serving the cause of America." [5]

Long Range Plans

Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for
years.

In mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the
Middle East. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing
the Realm," it was written under the auspices of an Israeli think
tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
Specifically, it called for an "effort [that] can focus on removing
Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic
objective in its own right..." [6]

The authors of "A Clean Break" included Richard Perle, Douglas
Feith, and David Wurmser, three influential Jews who later held high-
level positions in the Bush administration, 2001-2004: Perle as
chair of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as Undersecretary of
Defense, and Wurmser as special assistant to the Undersecretary of
State for Arms Control.

The role played by Bush administration officials who are associated
with two major pro-Zionist "neoconservative" research centers has
come under scrutiny from The Nation, the influential public affairs
weekly. [7]

The author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for
Security Policy (CSP), detailing the ties between these groups and
various politicians, arms merchants, military men, wealthy pro-
Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential administrations.

JINSA and CSP members, notes Vest, "have ascended to powerful
government posts, where... they've managed to weave a number of
issues - support for national missile defense, opposition to arms
control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid
to Turkey and American unilateralism in general - into a hard line,
with support for the Israeli right at its core... On no issue is the
JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign
for war - not just with Iraq, but 'total war,' as Michael Ledeen,
one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it... For
this crew, 'regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran,
Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent
imperative."

Samuel Francis, author, editor and columnist, has also looked into
the "neo-conservative" role in fomenting war. [8]

"My own answer," he wrote, "is that the lie [that a massively-armed
Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by
neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to
Israel and its interests and who wanted the United States to smash
Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to Israel in the
region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq since
at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it
until after Sept. 11, 2001...

"What has been happening inside the Bush administration is no less a
nest of treason than the Soviet spy rings of the New Deal era, and
if political reality doesn't demand its exposure, simple loyalty to
the United States does."

In the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently
pro-Zionist "neo-conservatives" in the Bush administration - who for
years had sought a Middle East war to bolster Israel's security in
the region - exploited the tragedy to press their agenda. In this
they were backed by the Israeli government, which also pressured the
White House to strike Iraq.

The Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, the respected British
daily, reported in August 2002: "Israel signalled its decision
yesterday to put public pressure on President George Bush to go
ahead with a military attack on Iraq, even though it believes Saddam
Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel." [9]

Three months before the US invasion, the well-informed Washington
journalist Robert Novak reported that Israeli prime minister Sharon
was telling American political leaders that "the greatest US
assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi
regime." Moreover, added Novak, "that view is widely shared inside
the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today
are assembling for war." [10]

Israel's spy agencies were a "full partner" with the US and Britain
in producing greatly exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq's
ability to wage war, a former senior Israeli military intelligence
official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a brigadier general in the
Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a major Israeli
think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a
significant role in supporting the US and British case for making
war. Israeli intelligence agencies, he said, "badly overestimated
the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British
belief that the weapons [of mass destruction] existed." [11]

For some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort
to install Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman
Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of
Israel, has been for years editor of Commentary, the influential
Zionist monthly. In the Sept. 2002 issue he wrote: "The regimes that
richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the
three singled-out members of the axis of evil [Iraq, Iran, North
Korea]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon
and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal
family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian
Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen."

Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known writer and commentator, and
former White House Communications director, has been blunt in
identifying those who pushed for war: [12]

"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to
ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's
interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those
wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately
damaging US relations with every state in the Arab world that defies
Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of
their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all
over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris,
and bellicosity...

"Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that
holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell
us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between
the West and Islam?

"Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."

Uri Avnery - an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a
three-time member of Israel's parliament - sees the Iraq war as an
expression of immense Jewish influence and power. In an essay
written some weeks after the US invasion, he wrote: [13]

"Who are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-
conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are
Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as
well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in
formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential
newspapers... The immense influence of this largely Jewish group
stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian
fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican
party. ...Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls
the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such
an immense influence on the center of world power."

In Britain, a veteran member of Britain's House of Commons bluntly
declared in May 2003 that Jews had taken control of America's
foreign policy, and had succeeded in pushing the US into war. "A
Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and
formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians," said Tam
Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House
member. "There is far too much Jewish influence in the United
States," he added. [14]

Summary

For many years now, American presidents of both parties have been
staunchly committed to Israel and its security. This entrenched
policy is an expression of the Jewish-Zionist grip on America’s
political and cultural life. It was fervent support for Israel -
shared by President Bush, high-ranking administration officials and
nearly the entire US Congress - that proved crucial in the
decision to invade and subdue one of Israel's greatest regional
enemies.

While the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq may have helped Israel,
just as those who wanted and planned for the war had hoped, it has
been a calamity for America and the world. It has cost tens of
thousands of lives and many tens of billions of dollars. Around the
world, it has generated unmatched distrust and hostility toward the
US. In Arab and Muslim countries, it has fueled intense
hatred of the United States, and has brought many new recruits to
the ranks of anti-American terrorists.

Americans have already paid a high price for their nation's
commitment to Israel. We will pay an ever higher price - not just in
dollars or international prestige, but in the lives of young men
squandered for the interests of a foreign state - until the Jewish-
Zionist hold on US political life is finally broken.

Notes

1.  Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May 20, 2004. Congressional
Record - Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925.
2.  The Guardian (London), August 20, 2002.
3.  R. Dunn, "Sharon Could Have Written Speech," The Times (London),
June 26, 2002.
4.  A. S. Lewin, "Israel's Security is Key to Security of Rest of
World," Jewish Press (Brooklyn, NY), May 14, 2003. Rice's interview
with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharnonot is quoted.
5.  Bush address to AIPAC convention, Washington, DC, May 18, 2004.
6.  Text posted at: www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm See also: B.
Whitaker, "Playing Skittles with Saddam," The Guardian (London),
Sept. 3, 2002.
7.  J. Vest, "The Men From JINSA and CSP," The Nation, Sept. 2,
2002.
8.  S. Francis, "Weapons of Mass Deception: Somebody Lied," column
of Feb. 6, 2004.
9.  Jonathan Steele, "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq,"
The Guardian (London), August 17, 2002.
10. Robert Novak, "Sharon's War?," column of Dec. 26, 2002.
11. L. King, "Ex-General Says Israel Inflated Iraqi Threat," Los
Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 2003.
12. P. J. Buchanan, "Whose War?," The American Conservative, March
24, 2003.
13. Uri Avnery, "The Night After," CounterPunch, April 10, 2003.
14. F. Nelson, "Anger Over Dalyell's 'Jewish Cabal' Slur," The
Scotsman (Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, "Dalyell Steps Up
Attack On Levy," The Guardian (London), May 6, 2003. #2018 12/04

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Poland hunts Jew, 86, over 'revenge' killing of Nazis
BY Inigo Gilmore in Jerusalem and Michael Leidig
(Filed: 02/01/2005)
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2005/01/02/wpole02.xml

NOTE: There is no reason to believe that the Germans murdered by
Morel were Nazis or were involved in the killings of Jews during WW2.


Poland is demanding the extradition from Israel of an elderly Jewish
man accused of the deaths of hundreds of Germans in a post-war
detention camp.

Solomon Morel, 86, faces charges of "crimes against humanity" in
relation to more than 1,500 inmates at a camp in southern Poland,
many of whom perished in "barbaric" circumstances.

The investigation is the first in Poland into a Jew accused of
retaliating against the Germans, and poses potentially awkward
questions for Israel about its attitude towards those allegedly
involved in revenge killings. Israeli officials turned down a
previous extradition request six years ago when there were
suspicions that the case was politically motivated.

Mr Morel, who fled to Israel from Poland in 1994 and lives in hiding
in Tel Aviv, was held in Auschwitz as a young man. More than 30
members of his family were wiped out by the Nazis.

In November 1945, after the Soviet occupation of Poland began, he
was one of many Jews appointed by Stalin to supervise the brutal "de-
Nazification" camps, where up to 80,000 ethnic Germans are believed
to have died as a result of torture, starvation and typhus.

Stalin deliberately picked Jews as camp commandants in the knowledge
that they would show little mercy to the inmates.

According to John Sack, the late author of An Eye for An Eye: The
Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Morel made
his desire for revenge clear from the first day the camp at
Swietochlowice opened.

In a television interview before his death earlier this year, Mr
Sack said: "On the first night at Swietochlowice, when the first
contingent of Germans arrived, at about 10 o'clock at night he
walked into one of the barracks and he said to the Germans, 'My name
is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family, I think
they're all dead, and I swore that if I got out alive, I was going
to get back at you Nazis. And now you're going to pay for what you
did.' "

In his book, Mr Sack, himself a Jew, describes in detail the alleged
atrocities committed at the camp: "The guards put the Germans into a
doghouse, beating them if they didn't say `bow-wow'. They got the
Germans to beat each other; to jump on each other's spines and to
punch each other's noses, and hit the Germans so hard that they once
knocked a German's glass eye out."

Guards also raped German women and trained dogs to bite off German
men's genitals on command, he said.

Mr Morel is thought to have changed his name, although his
whereabouts are understood to be known to the Israeli authorities.

A request for his extradition by Poland in 1998 was rejected by
Israel on the grounds that the statute of limitations on the charges
had run out.

Prosecutors claim to have built up a stronger case, based on fresh
testimony from survivors in Poland and Germany, and have upgraded
the charges to crimes against humanity, on which there is no time
limit.

The Polish public prosecutor leading the case, Eva Kok, insisted
that even though Mr Morel was a frail, elderly man, the claims could
not be "swept under the carpet". She added: "The Israelis are
extremely efficient in pursuing people they have accused of such
crimes - and they must accept that other nations want to do the
same."

Ms Kok insisted that suggestions that the case was politically
motivated were an insult. "The prosecutors are not motivated by
politics and operate in the interests of the law regardless of who
is in power," she said.

The Israeli Justice Ministry said it was "in the process of
examining" the extradition request.

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LOOK AT THE PHOTO ON THE WEBSITE!

=====
One mosque in Sigli was made only of wood but still survived
unscathed despite all the other buildings around it being destroyed.


`God's invisible hand' saved Indonesia's mosques

VIEW INCREDIBLE PHOTO
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=12318

Indonesia's indestructible mosques defy colossal forces of tsunami
under `God's invisible hand'.
By Victor Tjahjadi - BANDA ACEH, Indonesia
2005-01-03

In Indonesia's tsunami wastelands on the northern tip of Sumatra
island, little remains of whole towns lost to the colossal forces
that came thundering in from the ocean.

But across these battered shores, dozens of mosques still stand,
their minarets glinting defiantly in the sun - a phenomenon
survivors in the deeply Islamic region credit as much to divine
intervention as robust architecture.

"God's invisible hands prevents the mosque's destruction," said
Mukhlis Khaeran, who saw the sea sweep away his home village of Baet
outside the north Sumatran city of Banda Aceh, but leave the
neighbourhood mosque relatively intact.

"He punishes us for our greed and arrogance but He will protect his
house," Khaeran said, his arms covered with injuries sustained in
the disaster that killed at least 100,000 people around the north
Sumatran province of Aceh.

Mosques are an everyday sight in most of Indonesia, but especially
in Aceh, credited with the being one of Islam's main gateways into
the archipelago of islands which now forms the world's largest
Muslim-populated country.

Despite a long-lasting independence struggle, Aceh, parts of which
are under traditional Islamic sharia law, has remained a Muslim
heartland for Indonesia, which mostly practices a very relaxed
interpretation of the faith.

Spiritual beliefs in Aceh and around the Indian Ocean were tested to
the limit on December 26 when an epic earthquake sent towers of
water crashing ashore, obliterating virtually everything in their
path.

But while some spoke of "God's wrath", hundreds turned to their
mosques, in panic for shelter from the advancing tides and later for
spiritual comfort in a time of desperate need.

In the village of Kaju, also outside Banda Aceh, hundreds of homes
were annihilated while the local mosque suffered only a few cracks
in the walls.

"There is a saying among Acehnese that a mosque is God's house and
no one can destroy it but God Himself," said Ismail Ishak, 42, who
was digging rubble from his crumbled house while searching for seven
of his relatives.

In Pasi Lhok, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of the north Aceh
town of Sigli, 100 frightened people sheltering inside their mosque
were spared while almost every house in the surrounding five
villages was pulverised, according to chief cleric Teungku Kaoy Ali.

In Meubolah, a town on Aceh's western coast less than 150 kilometres
(95 miles) from the quake epicentre which bore the full force of the
tsunami, leaving at least 10,000 dead, mosques stand sentinel over a
vanished town centre.

Banda Aceh resident Achyar said when he saw the waves pounding in
from the sea, his first instinct was to turn and run for the nearest
mosque.

"I climbed the mosque tower and hung on to an electric wire until
water receded," he said. "Many of my friends, many of them ethnic
Chinese, died because they climbed to the second floor of their
shops and were trapped there," he said.

Another, less divine, explanation for the survival of the mosques is
that many are built much more sturdily than most of the other
structures in the towns and cities of Aceh.

However one mosque in Sigli was made only of wood but still survived
unscathed despite all the other buildings around it being destroyed.

Banda Aceh's grand Baiturrahman mosque suffered partial damage from
the quake and tsunami, but proved invaluable to the city's survivors
in the minutes, hours and days that followed the cataclysm.

For many it became a rallying place to search for missing friends or
relatives, a makeshift hospital to treat the injured and a morgue to
collect the dead.

With much of Banda Aceh likely to remain in ruins for months,
residents were quick to repay their debt to their cherished
religious buildings, working swiftly to ensure the Baiturrahman
mosque was one of the first places restored.

On Sunday, some 300 survivors gathered for their first prayers since
their five-times daily ritual was halted - a major step on the long
road back to normality in Aceh.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=12318

=============
Traumatised Acehnese flock to pray, mourn the dead
By Dean Yates
Reuters
Fri Dec 31, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7213538

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Bewildered Acehnese flocked to
mosques on Friday for prayers, mourning the horrendous
loss of life from last weekend's killer tsunami and
asking God why the disaster had struck them.

Across the ravaged coastline of this staunchly Islamic
province of Indonesia, men and boys put on their
sarongs and black Muslim caps to attend midday prayers
at those mosques that escaped the wave's destruction.

At the silver-domed Al Fa-aizien Mosque in the
provincial capital, Banda Aceh, worshippers stared
numbly at the floor. The imam, speaking in the local
dialect, kept reaching for the black and white scarf
around his neck to wipe tears from his eyes.

T. M. Nasir, 40, a driver, sitting outside as the
cleric spoke, broke into tears.

"We are praying so that a disaster like this never
happens again. We are already so traumatised," he
said, covering his mouth with an unsteady hand.

Five days after a massive tsunami swept coastal
regions of Aceh on the northern tip of Indonesia's
Sumatra island, the health ministry said the death
toll may have exceeded 100,000.

Officials fear a second wave of death from disease if
badly needed aid did not reach isolated communities
soon.

Dozens of countries are contributing to a relief
effort billed as the biggest in history after Sunday's
tsunami triggered by an earthquake off Aceh swept the
Indian Ocean, killing thousands of people in countries
across the region. Several hundred refugees huddled in
the courtyard of the Fa-aizien Mosque as babies cried
among the makeshift plastic tents. Rice bubbled in
large black urns over open fires.

"Maybe this is a test from God. Is there hope here? We
cannot answer that," said Cut Andip, 75, wearing a
yellow and purple checked sarong and holding white
Arabic-inscribed prayer beads as he spoke.

Bahrun, 29, a labourer out working when the quake
struck, said he had lost everything.

"My family is gone. I am now alone. I don't even have
a mat to pray on," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7213538

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IRAQI NOVELIST WINS THE 11TH NAGIYB MAHFUWZ LITERARY AWARD
By Rania al-Malky in Cairo
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 12:43 AM
The Egyptian Chronicles <The_Egyptian_Chronicles@...>


Alia Mamdouh was born in 1944

An Iraqi novelist has won the 11th Naguib Mahfouz medal for
literature.


Awarded by the American University in Cairo, Egypt, the prize went
to Alia Mamdouh for her fifth novel, Al-Mahbubat (The Loved Ones),
first published by al-Saqi Books in 2003.

The audience at the award ceremony on Saturday, which marked Nobel
laureate Mahfouz's 93rd birthday, was visibly moved when Mamdouh
spoke of the plight of the Iraqi people.

"This special award is for a whole Iraqi generation, broken beyond
the imagination of those who set out to break it," she said.

"It is an award for all Iraqi women writers, alone and disillusioned
by dictatorship in the past and occupation and extremism in the
present.

"Today, Iraqi cities are being annihilated as if there is no ethical
contradiction between submission to silence and coercion into
sullied speech."

The winning tale tells of Suhaila, a comatose middle-aged Iraqi
exile who comes to life through the memories of her son, Nadir, and
her friends who have come from all over the world to be by her side.

Fragments of conversation, diaries and letters portray Suhaila's joi
de vivre, and love of poetry despite suffering an abusive husband,
exile and separation from her son.

Writing career

Born in Iraq, Mamdouh studied psychology at the University of
Mustansiriya in Iraq before entering journalism and publishing.

After working as the editor-in-chief for Al-Rashid magazine and
spending two years as editor of Al-Fikr Al-Muasir magazine, she left
her homeland in 1982 living first in Beirut, then Palestine, London
and, finally, Paris.


Naguib Mahfouz won international
fame with The Cairo Trilogy

Her previous publications include two collections of short stories
(Iftitahiya lil Dahik, Prelude to Laughter, 1971, and Hawamish al
Sayyida Ba, Notes to Mrs B, 1973), and four novels Layla wa Al-Dhib
(Laila and the Wolf, 1981), Habbat Al-Naftalin (Mothballs, 1986), Al-
Walah (Passion, 1993) and Al-Ghulama (The Maiden, 2000).

Established in 1996, the Mahfouz prize aims to promote contemporary
Arab literature and its translation. Previous winners include the
Moroccan novelist Bensalem Himmich and Edward El-Kharrat.

A translation of Al-Mahbubat is due to be published in 2005 in
Cairo, New York and London.

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Arab Americans Alarmed at Gonzales' Nomination
By Adam Wild Aba, IOL Correspondent
Islam Online
January 8, 2005
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/08/article03.shtml


---
photos:

Gonzales gives a testimony before the Senate Judiciary
Committee. (Reuters)
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/08/images/pic03.jpg

Protesters stand in hearing room as Gonzales addresses
the Senate committee. (Reuters)
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/08/images/pic03A.jpg
---


WASHINGTON, January 8 (IslamOnline.net) - With a
record blemished by his stances on torture and civil
rights, Arab Americans are concerned that the
nomination of Alberto Gonzales as the new US attorney
general would usher in a new era of racial profiling
and religious discrimination.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)
urged the Senate to review Gonzales's record and put
it under close scrutiny.

He is infamous for laying the legal groundwork that
led to the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Iraq,
Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

At his confirmation hearing on Thursday, January 6,
Gonzales faced blistering criticism for specifically
two memos [
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2004-06/08/article02.shtml
] pertaining to his role in "legally" Okaying the
torture of detainees.

One, he drafted in January 2002, argues that the
so-called war on terror renders the Geneva
Convention's strict prohibitions against torture
"obsolete" and "quaint."

The other is an August 2002 Justice Department memo
sought by Gonzales, which outlined how to avoid
violating US and international terror statutes while
interrogating prisoners.

"Those abuses serve as recruiting posters for the
terrorists," Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said at the
hearing.

"America's troops and citizens are at greater risk
because of those actions," said Leahy, the Judiciary
Committee's top Democrat.

The ADC further asked Gonzales to clarify his position
on the rights of the Muslim and Arab communities in
view of the controversial Patriot Act and the measures
adopted by outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"We believe that every candidate for such an important
office must be carefully evaluated on the basis of his
or her entire record, including whether he or she has
demonstrated a strong commitment to the protection of
civil rights and civil liberties," the ADC said in a
letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a copy of
which was obtained by IslamOnline.net.

According to a Senate report released May last year,
the US Muslim community has taken the brunt of the
Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Anti-Gonzales Ad

Similar worries were vocalized by dozens of US rights
activists as well as human rights watchdogs, reacting
with alarm to Gonzales's nomination.

Amnesty International and other groups blasted his
record in an ad in The New York Times, which coincided
with his one-day confirmation hearing.

"You may not know Alberto Gonzales," say the ad. "But
we're sure you'll recognize the results of his work."

The ad features the widely disseminated photograph [
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-04/30/article04.shtml
] of a hooded Iraqi prisoner connected to electric
wires at the US-run Abu Gharib prison.

"Of all the questions you'll face today, Judge
Gonzales, this is the simplest: Will you sign our
declaration to stop torture?" Ask the rights groups.

The ad was also paid for by the advocacy groups
MoveOn.org, True Majority and Win Without War.

Hispanic-American

Despite a stormy Senate session, Gonzales seems to
have enough votes to be confirmed as the first
Hispanic-American to serve as the nation's top lawman.

Republicans hope to have him confirmed before Bush is
inaugurated for a second term in office on January 20.

Gonzales was commissioned as Counsel to President
George W. Bush in January of 2001, according the White
House Web site.

Prior to serving in the White House, he served as a
Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas.

He served as Texas' 100th Secretary of State from
December 2, 1997 to January 10, 1999.

Gonzales was a senior advisor to then Governor Bush,
chief elections officer and the Governor's lead
liaison on Mexico and border issues.

He was raised in Houston as the second of eight
children born to Pablo and Maria Gonzales.

Both parents were children of migrants from Mexico
with less than a high-school education themselves,
according to the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Pundits warned in November that the administration of
reelected George W. Bush was drifting toward the
neo-conservative
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2004-11/24/article03.shtml
camp as the wartime leader opted for confidantes at
the expense of the qualified and seasoned politicians.


http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/08/article03.shtml

================
MR. GONZALES'S TESTIMONY
Washington Post, 1/7/05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54854-2005Jan6.html

ALBERTO R. GONZALES missed an important opportunity yesterday to
rectify his position, and that of President Bush, on the
imprisonment and interrogation of foreign detainees. At the Senate
Judiciary Committee's hearing on his nomination to be attorney
general, Mr. Gonzales repeatedly was offered the chance to repudiate
a legal judgment that the president is empowered to order torture in
violation of U.S. law and immunize torturers from punishment. He
declined to do so. He was invited to reject a 2002 ruling made under
his direction that the infliction of pain short of serious physical
injury, organ failure or death did not constitute torture. He
answered: "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then
reached." Nor did he condemn torture techniques, such as simulated
drowning, that were discussed and approved during meetings in his
office. "It is not my job," he said, to decide if they were proper.
He was prompted to reflect on whether departing from the Geneva
Conventions had been a mistake, in light of the shocking human
rights abuses that have since been reported in Iraq, Afghanistan and
the Guantanamo Bay prison and that continue even now. Mr. Gonzales
demurred. The error, he answered, was not of administration policy
but of "a failure of training and oversight."

The message Mr. Gonzales left with senators was unmistakable: As
attorney general, he will seek no change in practices that have led
to the torture and killing of scores of detainees and to the
blackening of U.S. moral authority around the world…

===================
MR. GONZALES SPEAKS
New York Times, 1/7/05
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/opinion/07fri1.html

Blaming a faulty memory, Mr. Gonzales would not provide anything
close to a clear account of his role in the formulation of the
policy on the treatment of prisoners. At one point, he said the 2002
memo was just the opinion of the Justice Department's Office of
Legal Counsel. Then he called it the "binding interpretation" of
anti-torture statutes and treaties. Later, Mr. Gonzales called
it "an arguable interpretation of the law."

Even his vows of allegiance to the rule of law were rather peculiar.
He said that as White House counsel, he had represented "only the
White House," while as attorney general, he "would have a far
broader responsibility: to pursue justice for all the people of our
great nation, to see that the laws are enforced in a fair and
impartial manner for all Americans." We thought that was also the
obligation of the president and his staff.

Mr. Gonzales is said to face a sure confirmation. But thanks to the
members of the committee, including some Republicans, who met their
duty to question Mr. Gonzales aggressively, the hearing served to
confirm that Mr. Bush had made the wrong choice when he rewarded Mr.
Gonzales for his loyalty. The nation deserves an attorney general
who is not the public face for inhumane, illegal and clearly un-
American policies.

==================
US attorney general nominee rejects torture in war on
terror
AFP
Friday January 7, 2005
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050107/1/3ppdo.html


---
photo:
US attorney general nominee rejects torture in war on
terror
AFP Photo
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050107/1/3ppdoi.html
---


Alberto Gonzales, President George W. Bush's pick to
lead the US Justice Department, rejected categorically
abuse of terror suspects, as he was grilled by
lawmakers at his confirmation hearing.

Gonzales said he was "outraged" and "sickened" by the
torture of detainees in Iraq and the US base in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and vowed to dedicate himself to
"the rule of law" if confirmed US attorney general,
the country's top law enforcement officer.

Gonzales, who has been the White House legal counsel,
affirmed that Bush "does not believe in torture,
condone torture or order torture."

Nevertheless, he faced intense questions from
Democrats who fault him for crafting controversial
White House legal guidance on the torture of terror
suspects.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate
Judiciary Committee and one of the most outspoken
critics of the nomination, said the hearing would be
vitally important to determine "this nominee's role in
developing interpretation of the law to justify harsh
treatment of prisoners -- harsh treatment that's
tantamount to torture."

"America's troops and citizens are at greater risk
because of those actions, with terrible repercussions
throughout so much of the world," said Leahy.

"The searing photographs from Abu Ghraib have made it
harder to create and maintain the alliances we need to
prevail against the vicious terrorists who threaten
us."

Gonzales, 49, faced particularly tough questioning
over so-called "torture memos" he wrote in 2002,
advising Bush that foreign fighters captured in
Afghanistan and elsewhere should not have prisoner of
war status under the Geneva Conventions.

The memo maintained that the urgent nature of the war
on terror renders the conventions "obsolete."

Critics have said his opinions may have paved the way
for the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in
Cuba, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere,
including widely quoted comments that he believed the
Geneva Conventions to be "obsolete" and "quaint."

He repudiated those remarks Thursday however, although
adding that members of Al-Qaeda terror network
represent a special case.

"After the attacks of 9/11, our government had
fundamental decisions to make concerning how to apply
treaties and US law to an enemy that does not wear a
uniform, owes no allegiance to any country, is not a
party to any treaties and, most importantly, does not
fight according to the laws of war," he said.

Gonzales added: "In many ways, this war on terrorism
is a war about information. If we have information, we
can defeat the enemy.

"We had captured some really bad people who we were
concerned had information that might prevent the loss
of American lives in the future. It was important to
receive that information," he said.

Still Gonzales stressed that the United States would
not go as far as torture to achieve its military or
intelligence ends.

"The president has made clear that he is prepared to
protect and defend the United States and its citizens
... but always in a manner consistent with our
nation's values and applicable law, including our
treaty obligations," Gonzales said.

"The photos from Abu Ghraib sickened and outraged me,
and left a stain on our nation's reputation. And the
president has made clear that he condemns this conduct
and that these activities are inconsistent with his
policies."

In addition to concern over the terror memos, Leahy
said he was worried that Gonzales was too closely
allied with the president to be an independent
advocate for the American people, appearing at times
to be a "facilitator" for White House policies.

"The job of attorney general is not about crafting
rationalizations for ill-conceived ideas," said Leahy.

"The attorney general is about being a forceful,
independent voice in our continuing quest for justice
and defense of the constitutional rights of every
single American," the Vermont Democrat said.

Gonzales testified however, that he fully understood
that as attorney general, his job description would
radically change.

"With the consent of the Senate, I will no longer
represent only the White House; I will represent the
United States of America and its people," he told
lawmakers.

"I understand the differences between the two roles,"
Gonzales said.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050107/1/3ppdo.html


====================
Gonzales and the Torture Cult
His nomination represents the triumph
of red-state fascism
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
January 7, 2005
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4286

Ms. Anne Applebaum is shocked – shocked! – at
conservatives' blasé attitude toward torture. Don't
they know that attorney general-designate Alberto
Gonzales wrote memos seeking ways to legally immunize
U.S. government officials from prosecution under the
War Crimes Act? Perhaps, she suggests, they don't
remember Abu Ghraib?

But of course they remember it all too well: and, with
the notable and honorable exception of the editors of
The American Conservative, they downplayed and even
excused it at the time, and continue to do so.

In his extensive remarks on the Abu Ghraib abuses,
David Frum, former presidential speechwriter and noted
enforcer of neoconservative orthodoxy, nowhere
mentioned the necessity of investigating how high up
these disgusting practices were sanctioned – although
he does believe that "nothing says 'sorry' quite like
a thick brick of cash." Pay them off, shut them up,
and "I wouldn't worry overmuch whether those who were
abused were 'innocent' or 'guilty.'"

Conservatives of Frum's ilk believe that such arcane
constructions as "guilt" and "innocence" invariably
invite ironic quote marks.

"You may have missed this in the Abu Ghraib
commotion," Frum wrote on May 12, "but the preliminary
job report for May shows employment up by 288,000."

Forget all that gloom-and-doom stuff – happy days are
here again!

Listen to National Review writer and contributing
editor John Derbyshire, responding to Senator Carl
Levin's contention that the administration knew about
and approved abuse of prisoners:

"Define 'abusing.' Some of these prisoners are
ruthless terrorists with the blood of Americans – and,
of course, many Iraqis – on their hands. Most of them
have done something or other to end up in custody. If
U.S. interrogators yell at them, is that 'abuse'? If
they threaten or intimidate them, is that 'abuse'? If
they prevent them going to the bathroom for a couple
of hours, is that 'abuse'? If they smack them upside
the head, is that 'abuse'?"

When the members of Congress were shown videos and
still pictures that constituted solid evidence of
abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison facility – images that
the rest of us are still not allowed to see – they
came out of that room visibly shaken. Derbyshire, no
doubt, is made of sterner stuff. Although I suspect
some of those images would surely get to him:
Derbyshire hates us queers, as he spends an inordinate
amount of time telling us, and even he might get a
little green around the gills if he'd been allowed to
listen to the videotaped cries of a young Iraqi
detainee being violated by an Iraqi translator while
American GIs look on giggling. Aha! Another argument
against gays in the military!

National Review, the fountainhead of conservative
orthodoxy in America, is teeming with writers who
would no doubt relish the opportunity to give vent to
their inner Torquemada. Clever little Jonah Goldberg,
online editor of National Review, has made a special
point of "proving" that torture isn't such a bad idea
after all:

"Today, we're getting shovelfuls of platitudes about
how, if we become torturers, we will be no better than
those we are fighting. It's a nice flowery argument,
and one with more than a kernel of truth to it. But at
the same time, if we pulled out the fingernails of
every single member of al-Qaeda, we wouldn't magically
become a society where women have to wear burkas,
homosexuals are crushed to death, and statues are
blown up. In other words, the certainty we're now
hearing from enlightened liberals that torture is
manifestly wrong stems not so much from critical
thinking or empirical evidence (France did not become
an evil regime at home because it tortured Algerians
abroad, for example), but from good old-fashioned
dogmatism. A man who says torture is wrong in a
'ticking time bomb' case isn't a man bereft of
dogmatic certainty, but one weighed down by it."

Yeah, we're getting shovelfuls all right, but it isn't
platitudes that Goldberg is shoveling.

Opposition to torture is "flowery" – presumably only
flower children and the gender-confused are the
primary objectors to what, after all, is unlikely to
turn us into the Taliban. Which is too bad, in a way:
Goldberg wouldn't look too bad in a burka – at least
not as bad as he does now – and it might even muffle
his voice so we wouldn't have to hear his obnoxious
smart-boy rationalizations for practices normal people
regard as monstrous crimes.

That "ticking time bomb" Goldberg hears is a
widespread auditory hallucination, experienced by many
neocons, including some liberals like Alan Dershowitz:
but the key thing to remember is that it isn't real.
In the unlikely event that we were in a position to
torture the truth out of someone who had specific
knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack, the
unreliability of information extracted by such means
would defeat us. New York City would go up in a puff
of nuclear smoke anyway, because there is nothing to
prevent the subject of torture from lying just to stop
the pain.

I could go on listing the many defenders of torture on
the Right, but for the definitive explication of this
innovation in conservative theory let's look at how
Rush Limbaugh, the man who invented right-wing talk
radio, shrugs off Abu Ghraib as just some of the boys
letting off "a little steam":

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull
and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's
lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military
effort, and then we are going to really hammer them
because they had a good time. You know, these people
are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people
having a good time, these people, you ever heard of
emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow
some steam off?"

Limbaugh isn't being facetious: he's expressing the
real soul of today's "conservative" movement. His loud
braying over the airwaves is the voice of what Lew
Rockwell rightly calls "red-state fascism." How is it
that Ms. Applebaum has failed to hear it?

The torture issue did not arise out of the ether,
although the abstractness of the Goldberg-Dershowitz
"ticking time bomb" argument lends itself to this
illusion. It was the inability of the American
occupiers to get any useful intelligence on the
burgeoning Iraqi insurgency that set the whole torture
machine into motion: the war is what motivated the
writing of the Gonzales memo, and the Bybee memo,
which gave the Justice Department imprimatur to the
legal rationale for discarding the Geneva conventions.
Nor was all this memo writing just an idle
literary-legal exercise. Seymour Hersh, writing in The
New Yorker in the middle of last year, reported the
existence of a secret Pentagon elite force drawn from
various branches of the military and intelligence
agencies, and a clandestine international network of
prisons. The operating principle of Rumsfeld's secret
army, as one former intelligence official told Hersh,
is,

"Grab whom you must, do what you want."

The task set for this army of budding nihilists was,
at first, narrowly focused on al-Qaeda and the Afghan
war, but as the administration's attention began to
turn toward Iraq, this shadowy force was unleashed on
Iraq. Code-named Operation "Copper Green," it was a
program of systematic abuse instituted as a supposedly
necessary tactic in the "war on terrorism." This is
what was being defended by Gonzales in his memo: this
is the meaning of the obscene debate over the exact
meaning of the term "torture" – does it mean only
debilitating and potentially deadly bodily harm, or
does sticking lit cigarettes in someone's ear also
qualify?

Ms. Applebaum is surprised by the lack of conservative
conscience when it comes to the issue of torture. Yet
no one is shocked when the same people suggest we
ought to invade most of the countries in the Middle
East and engulf them – their cities, their homes,
their children – in a flaming sea of "creative
destruction." In the Gonzales nomination, reality is
finally catching up with neoconservative rhetoric. The
secret torture chambers presided over by this
administration are now being embraced and even
sanctified by red-state fascists as shrines to wartime
necessity.

Gonzales is one of the high priests of this torture
cult, as is made clear by the legal briefs drawn up by
him and his compadres in the Justice Department. In
the militarized version of conservatism that now
dominates the Right, the civilian aspect of the
president is subordinated to his role as
commander-in-chief, which – according to our Justice
Department legal theorists – gives him the power in
wartime to override all legal and moral
considerations, immunizing himself and his
subordinates from prosecution for war crimes. This is
what the president and his men believe. The perverted
"constitutional" principle that Gonzales and his
Justice Department will uphold is the fascist Leader
principle dressed up in "patriotic" drag.

The red-state fascists who run the "conservative"
movement today could care less about torture as a
moral issue: after all, Israel officially condones
torture. What else do we need to know?

They also are secretly pleased that Gonzales was
instrumental in getting the Justice Department on
record defending biological diversity as a criteria
for college admissions. While opposition to race-based
affirmative action is supposed to be a core
conservative principle, the neocons are willing to
make an exception in this case just as long as the GOP
can pander to Gonzales' Hispanic constituency. Forget
immigration reform: just let us torture whatever
terrorist suspects manage to get over our open
borders. Bush can explain to them in Spanish why
torture is necessary – you know, just like it is in
Mexico.

Excuse me for being culturally insensitive, but
America is fast becoming a banana republic. Our
arrogant caudillo swaggers across the national stage
wearing a variety of outlandish military uniforms,
while adoring crowds of red-state fascists roar their
approval. And every known principle of American
political culture – the rule of law and the
Constitution, the balance of powers, the right of due
process, and the inviolability of our homes – is
thrown overboard in the name of fighting a war without
end.

War is torture inflicted on large numbers of people.
The war-worshipping blood lust that is the central
organizing principle of present-day "conservatism" not
only excuses but encourages such barbaric practices as
electroshock, beatings, and the unleashing of dogs on
helpless prisoners, as well as sexual humiliation and
other forms of degradation. It's the Black Mass of the
War Party: a ritual evocation of the spirit in the new
secular religion of power.

– Justin Raimondo

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4286

==============
THE GONZALES RECORD
Washington Post, 1/6/05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51885-2005Jan5.html

THE SENATE JUDICIARY Committee begins confirmation hearings today
for Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush's choice to head the Justice
Department. Mr. Gonzales is in some respects an attractive nominee:
His life story is compelling, his views on some issues are
comparatively moderate and his calm demeanor would be a reassuring
change from that of his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft. Yet senators
must scrutinize Mr. Gonzales's record. The man who has served as
White House counsel these past four years must not become attorney
general without clarifying his role in decisions that helped lead to
the prisoner abuse scandal and to restrictions of civil liberties.
More broadly, the Senate should ask whether Mr. Gonzales is capable
of giving Mr. Bush dispassionate legal advice, rather than -- as he
seems to have done so often in the past -- telling the president
what he wants to hear.

The concerns about Mr. Gonzales begin with his having urged Mr. Bush
to deny that the Geneva Conventions apply in Afghanistan. The "new
paradigm" of the war on terrorism, reads a January 2002 draft
memorandum written in his name, "renders obsolete Geneva's strict
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." Mr. Gonzales's
aggressive advice was directly counter to that of both the State
Department and the military brass. And while Mr. Bush eventually
declared that the conventions did apply, he followed Mr. Gonzales's
advice not to fully comply with them. Rather, he took the
unnecessary step of declaring all detainees "unlawful combatants,"
and therefore beyond the conventions' protection, without complying
with the process international law contemplates for that judgment.
This move proved fateful when the headquarters of Lt. Gen. Ricardo
S. Sanchez, citing the president's position on "unlawful
combatants," approved such interrogation techniques in Iraq as
hooding, forcing prisoners into "stress positions" and menacing
detainees with dogs.

Mr. Gonzales commissioned the now-infamous torture memorandum from
the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The memo followed
a meeting in his office regarding the interrogation of a key al
Qaeda detainee, in which participants discussed such methods
as "waterboarding," mock burial and slapping…

================
DOES THE RIGHT REMEMBER ABU GHRAIB?
Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, 1/5/05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48618-2005Jan4.html

During the past eight months there have been many news cycles, many
front-page stories, many events. There have been elections. There
have been hurricanes and tidal waves. Nevertheless, in the grand
scheme of things, eight months is not a very long time. In most of
the world, something that happened eight months ago is
considered "recent." In Washington, however, it seems that eight
months ago is considered "ancient." How else to explain the
nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the post of attorney general of
the United States?

Or, more to the point: How else to explain the widespread assumption
that Gonzales -- who commissioned the "torture memo" of August 2002,
following a meeting in his office -- will be decisively confirmed?
After all, eight months ago, much of the country -- and much of the
Republican Party -- was gripped by horror and embarrassment after
the publication of photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those
photographs haven't gone away: As I write this, I need only click on
my computer's Internet Explorer icon and there is Lynndie England,
grinning and giving a thumbs-up behind a pile of naked men.

If the pictures haven't gone away, the value system that led to Abu
Ghraib hasn't gone away either. Last month -- really recently --
lawsuits filed by American human rights groups forced the government
to release thousands of pages of documents showing that the abuse of
prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base long preceded the Abu Ghraib
photographs, and that abuse has continued since then too. U.S.
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have, according to the
administration's own records and my colleagues' reporting, used
beatings, suffocation, sleep deprivation, electric shocks and dogs
during interrogations. They probably still do.

Although many people bear some responsibility for these abuses,
Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is
among those who bear the most responsibility. It was Gonzales who
led the administration's internal discussion of what qualified as
torture. It was Gonzales who advised the president that the Geneva
Conventions did not apply to people captured in Afghanistan. It was
Gonzales who helped craft some of the administration's worst
domestic decisions, including the indefinite detention, without
access to lawyers, of U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam
Hamdi…

---

IRAQ ABUSE "WENT ON UNTIL JULY"
Reuters, 1/5/04
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5447628

LOS ANGELES - Sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners continued
at least three months after the Abu Ghraib scandal was revealed,
according to accounts by alleged victims published in the latest
issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Vanity Fair writer Donovan Webster, in a report on 60 hours of
interviews he conducted with 10 former detainees including a 15-year-
old boy, quoted several accounts of mistreatment that included Iraqi
prisoners being sexually assaulted by American soldiers or being
hooded, beaten, subjected to electric shock and kept in cages or
crates.

One man said he was hung naked from handcuffs in a frigid room while
soldiers threw buckets of ice water on him.

Webster added that several of the people he interviewed said their
mistreatment took place in July, three months after the Abu Ghraib
prisoner abuse scandal broke in late April.

The article published on Tuesday said the former detainees
interviewed by Webster are suing two American companies that
provided translators and interrogators to forces in Iraq and that
their firsthand accounts comprise "hundreds, if not thousands, of
separate Geneva Convention violations."

Vanity Fair said that the accounts of abuses were impossible to
independently verify. The magazine quoted a U.S. military spokesman
for detainee operations in Iraq as dismissing the assertions that
prisoners were held illegally, kept in wooden boxes, handcuffed and
blindfolded and subjected to sexual threats, abuse and assault.

In one example cited in the article, a 15-year-old Iraqi identified
only as N said he was pulled from a wooden crate he'd been forced to
crouch inside, wearing handcuffs and blacked-out ski goggles, for 11
days and taken to the bathroom against his will where he was
sexually assaulted.

He said he was again sexually assaulted two days later in the prison
north of Baghdad but let go later in the day when a soldier
apologized to him for being illegally detained and gave him $50 (27
pounds). N had been held with several members of his family who also
said they were mistreated.

---

U.S. INVESTIGATES GUANTANAMO ABUSE ALLEGATIONS
Jane Sutton, Reuters, 1/5/05

MIAMI, Jan 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. military's regional command in
Miami launched an investigation on Wednesday into FBI agents'
allegations that interrogators tortured prisoners at the Guantanamo
Bay Naval Base.

The military's Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the
U.S. base in eastern Cuba, ordered two officers to investigate the
abuse allegations contained in FBI e-mails made public last month.

The FBI e-mails described Guantanamo prisoners being shackled hand
and foot in a fetal position on the floor for 18 to 24 hours, and
left to urinate and defecate on themselves.

One FBI agent reported seeing a barely conscious prisoner who had
torn out his hair after being left overnight in a sweltering room.
Another told of an interrogation in which a prisoner was wrapped in
an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music and strobe lights.

SouthCom officials said an Army general and a Navy captain would
travel to Guantanamo this week to begin investigating the
allegations…

*********************************************************************

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Inspector General Had Reported Mismanagement, Security Flaws

Official Who Criticized Homeland Security Is Out of a Job:
By BRIAN ROSS AND RHONDA SCHWARTZ
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=316582&page=1


The man who has issued many critical reports about the mismanagement
and security flaws at the Department of Homeland Security was told
Wednesday night that he was out of a job.

Clark Ervin made himself very unpopular by issuing a series of
stinging reports on security programs that he said had failed,
officials he called inept, and fraud that he suspected. His year-end
report, out today, alleges that millions of dollars have been wasted
or are unaccounted for by the department.

"There isn't a concern about the importance of spending every single
dollar to the maximum effect of the core mission of the department,"
Ervin told ABC News.

The White House appointed Ervin as inspector general for the
Homeland Security Department only for the term of Congress. He
wanted to stay on, but was informed Wednesday night that he would be
replaced. "His term expired and that's that," said a White House
spokesperson.

"I think this was a voice that was a little too critical and made
the administration a little too uncomfortable," said Danielle Brian,
executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a
nonprofit government watchdog group.

Among the investigations being conducted by Ervin was what he called
an illegal contract with the Boeing company for the installation of
explosive detection machines at airports. "At least $49 million,
almost $50 million, in excessive profit was paid to Boeing,"
according to Ervin.


Ervin also investigated the half-million-dollar awards reception
held at a Washington hotel for airport screeners from the
Transportation Security Administration. "It was rather lavish, no
question," said Ervin.


But what bothered Ervin even more was that the executives at the TSA
also rewarded themselves — in cash. "About 88 senior executives were
given cash awards," said Ervin. "That's about 76 percent of the
senior executives there."


Using undercover tests, Ervin investigated airport security
checkpoints and found severe lapses. And just this year he
discovered the problem of huge gaps in screening for nuclear
materials at U.S. ports continues.

"We don't have the luxury of spending the funds that the department
has been awarded in a willy-nilly fashion," Ervin said. "They have
to be spent on the priorities of the department, and clearly the
priority of the department should be the counterterrorism issue."

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America has lost its world leadership

During the past four years, leading political analysts in Europe
viewed the foreign policy of the United States being conducted by a
small clique of neo-conservative ideologues. They now see the power
of this group just having been reinforced by two other ominous
groups: a corporate oligarchy and mobilized religious
fundamentalists.

http://207.44.245.159/article7464.htm

America has lost its world leadership in a dizzyingly short time

By Special To Citizen-Times

12/11/04 -- The collective groan heard around the world when
President Bush was re-elected was audible to everyone but the White
House. Bush's pronouncements on the U.S. role in the world have cast
him as a Lone Star iconoclast. In a recent survey conducted by the
Pew Global Attitudes Project, distrust and dislike of the United
States have doubled and tripled during the past year in every region
of the globe.

Until this last election the international community looked upon the
Bush administration as an aberration in American politics. Overseas
its legitimacy was questioned by its having initially assumed power
through manipulation of votes cast in a manner more characteristic
of Zimbabwe than of a Western democracy. Reinforcing that impression
was the Bush administration's scrapping most of the diplomatic
accomplishments of previous Republican and Democratic
administrations since World War II. During its first two years it
abrogated, undermined and ignored more international agreements than
the rest of the world put together during the previous 30 years.

Among others, these included refusal to ratify the Comprehensive
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty; undermining the Convention on Chemical and Biological
Weapons; rejection of the Convention against Torture; scuttling the
Convention on Limiting International Traffic in Small Arms;
rejection of the Kyoto Protocol; refusal to ratify the Convention to
Eliminate all Forms of Discrimination against Women; and refusal to
ratify the Convention Against Use of Child Soldiers.

The post-Nov. 2 worldview of America is the Bush administration's
retaining power through a triumvirate coalition that makes U.S.
participation in world affairs again open to question at best.
During the past four years, leading political analysts in Europe
viewed the foreign policy of the United States being conducted by a
small clique of neo-conservative ideologues. They now see the power
of this group just having been reinforced by two other ominous
groups: a corporate oligarchy and mobilized religious
fundamentalists. Historically the influence the latter group exerts
on this administration resembles the role of the Third Estate in pre-
revolutionary France, a position then enjoyed by the Catholic
Church. Cardinal Richelieu, the political adviser of the Third
Estate to French kings, now has a very capable modern American
equivalent, Karl Rove, Bush's political guru.

The "political capital" which Bush claims that he has gained by
virtue of this election ends at our shores. Overseas he is bankrupt.
The Bush presidency was viewed as the most powerful catalyst in
bringing the 25 nations of the "old" and "new" Europe together in
approving their new constitution for the European Union (EU) in Rome
last month. The driving force in its ratification is the hope of
creating a major collective economic and political entity on the
world scene which could challenge American hegemony in world affairs.

How could this animosity toward the U.S. have happened in so short a
time? In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, the United States had
global support. There was full backing by the United Nations and
NATO for military action in Afghanistan, where the majority of
troops deployed was and still is from NATO countries, including
several thousand from France and Germany. At U.N.-sponsored donor
conferences European and Asian countries are contributing to the
reconstruction of Afghanistan. Recent elections there were held
under U.N. oversight.

All this cooperation and collaboration were lost with the
publication of the new National Security Strategy of the United
States on Sept. 19, 2002. For the first time the United States
claimed the self-validating right to unilaterally wage preventive
pre-emptive wars of choice with overwhelming unparalleled military
might against any presumed potential enemy. Both the global
aspirations of this document and its absence of any sense of limits
give the perception of an American Empire in the making. In the
words of Vice President Cheney, "The United States must discourage
the advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or
even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Translation: we
don't want allies, we want satellites.

The obsession with invading Iraq, predetermined by the neo-
conservatives long before Sept. 11, was to serve as the test case
for this new policy. Unlike Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Iraq
in March 2003 is viewed as "Bush's War," which is why we bear all
the costs and almost all of the casualties.

Tragically this administration's unprecedented arrogance in its
dealings with former allies and its manipulation of faulty
intelligence and outright deceptions to muster support for invading
Iraq have cost us good-will and credibility worldwide, critical
assets in mustering world opinion and cooperation. It is small
wonder that the rest of the world now views with bafflement or
hostility the country they not so long ago admired. We may have
massive military might, but it is impossible to wage a successful
global campaign against terrorism without the trust and
participation of other nations.

Petrequin is a former faculty member, Department of National
Security Policy Studies, The National War College. As a Coast Guard
officer he served in the Korean Theater and in Vietnam during those
conflicts. He lives in Black Mountain.

© 2004 Asheville Citizen-Times

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Army base in Israel attacked
------------------------------------------------------------------
GAZA, Jan 5: Palestinian militants hit an army base in Israel with
rocket fire on Wednesday, wounding 12 soldiers, as they defied
calls for a halt to attacks from Mahmoud Abbas, the frontrunner to
succeed Yasser Arafat in Sunday's elections.

Violence has surged in Gaza before the Palestinian vote, likely to
be won by ex-Arafat deputy Abbas, who has called for a cease fire
in the four-year-old uprising to allow talks on a state in
Israeli-occupied lands to resume.....(Reuters)

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top10.htm&date=20050106

==============
A FAMILY REELS AFTER LOSING 7 BOYS TO ISRAELI FIRE
Steven Erlanger, New York Times, 1/9/05
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/international/middleeast/09gaza.htm
l

EIT LAHIYA, Gaza - The neighbors had heard that Muhammad Ghaben, 18,
had died in the hospital during the night, but no one wanted to tell
his mother.

"How can we tell her?" asked Im Yehya Fadoos, walking along a muddy
path between the poor houses and the strawberry fields of northern
Gaza. "She was kissing him last night in the hospital. She's lost so
much."

Three sons of Mariam Ghaben, 50, died Tuesday, all at once. They
were blown apart by a single Israeli tank shell that was aimed at
militants firing mortars toward Israel. In all, seven boys from the
extended Ghaben family, ages 11 to 17, died in the explosion.

Mrs. Fadoos did not tell Ms. Ghaben that Muhammad had died, and as it
turned out, he is still alive. But his legs and a hand were blown
off and he lost an eye, and doctors say he is in critical condition,
along with three others of the six Palestinians wounded in the same
explosion.

On Friday, Ms. Ghaben was already in shock, sitting with her
daughter-in-law, whose own son, Rajeh, 12, died in the explosion, and
another relative, Halima al-Kaseh, who lost her son, Jibril, 17,
while her two other children, 12 and 15, are badly wounded.

=====================
Protein for Palestine


Hi Everyone


Please pass this along to our friends. Even if you don't celebrate
Eid ul Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice which will be on January 21/22,
2005), this is the best time of year to send much-needed food
protein to the Palestinians, many of whom have not had any meat all
year. For $220 you can sponsor the slaughter of one sheep to feed
the hungry in the Holy Land. This also helps the local shepherds.

You can donate online at http://www.lifeusa.org/
Click on Palestine under "Udhiyah (Qurbani) Program for 2005"

All the best

================
Pakistan lauds Abbas' victory
By QA

ISLAMABAD, Jan 10: Pakistan welcomed on Monday the victory of PLO
Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as the new President of the Palestinian
National Authority, and called on the international community to
play its due role in backing his efforts to resolve the conflict.

"The election of Mr Mahmoud Abbas is a demonstration of the
Palestinian people's trust and confidence in his leadership, and
in his lifelong struggle towards the Palestinian cause," said
Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan at the outset of his weekly
briefing here.....

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top11.htm&date=20050111

======================
ADC Congratulates Mahmoud Abbas

Washington DC, Jan. 10—The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee (ADC) congratulates Mahmoud Abbas on his victory in the
Palestinian Authority Presidential elections held this past Sunday.
Abbas, age 69, received 62.32% of the votes with the main challenger
Mustafa Barghouti receiving 19.80% of the votes. ADC noted that
number of Palestinians who voted in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and
East Jerusalem totaled approximately 775,146.

Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, had been serving as temporary leader
of the Palestinian Authority following the death of Yasser Arafat on
Nov.11. Previously, Abbas served as Prime Minister for five months
in 2003. He was born in the village of Safed, located in Galilee.
His family moved to Syria in 1948, along with thousands of other
Palestinian refugees, when Israel was established. He has a BA in
Law from Damascus University and a PhD in history from Moscow's
Oriental College.  In the 1960s he joined in the founding of the
National Liberation Movement.  He continued to work for the PLO and
at age 53, he was instrumental in the 1993 Oslo peace accords with
Israel.

ADC President Mary Rose Oakar said, "Despite overwhelming challenges
of the ongoing occupation, Palestinians were able to hold democratic
elections. Now that the Palestinian people have spoken, it is up to
the Israeli government to re-engage in negotiations aimed at ending
the occupation and establishing a just and lasting peace."

www.adc.org

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CHAPLAIN ACCUSED OF SPYING TO LEAVE U.S. MILITARY
Reuters, 1/7/05

WASHINGTON, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Capt. James Yee, the Muslim Guantanamo
Bay chaplain accused of espionage but later fully exonerated, will
leave the U.S. Army on Friday when his honorable discharge takes
effect, his lawyer said.

"As a West Point graduate, he leaves the Army with great sadness.
The fact that he was imprisoned for a prolonged period for no valid
reason remains indefensible," Eugene Fidell, Yee's lawyer, said in a
statement late on Thursday.

Yee, who ministered to foreign terrorism suspects imprisoned at the
U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested September 2003
in Florida as he returned from the base. He spent 76 days in a Navy
brig.

In March 2004, the Army dropped all criminal charges against Yee,
abandoning a case that once included accusations in court documents
of spying, mutiny, sedition, aiding the enemy and espionage…

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Cleric accused of spying leaves US mly
------------------------------------------------------------------
By Anwar Iqbal
WASHINGTON, Jan 8: Capt James Yee, the Muslim Guantanamo Bay
chaplain accused of espionage but later fully exonerated, left the
US Army, his lawyer said on Saturday.....

http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top10.htm&date=20050109

==============
A WITNESS COMES FORWARD
Seattle Times, 1/10/05
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002147296_yeechapt
er4.html

Capt. Jason Orlich marched into the counterintelligence office with
one of
his most trusted Arabic translators. They had news about Chaplain
James
Yee.

The linguist, a Syrian-born Christian, claimed he had overheard Yee
speaking in Arabic to a detainee at the prison hospital, ridiculing
the
camp's psychological-operations posters.

The posters depicted images such as an Afghanistan landscape at
sunset. A
Pashtu caption beneath it stated: "Find your way home / Truth will
land you
there." Another poster showed boys in a schoolroom, above the
words: "The
time is now for cooperation / Return and join the future of
Afghanistan."

The camp's counterintelligence office was run by Theo Polet, a 40-
year-old
National Guard captain from Florida. He led a small team of agents
responsible for investigating subversive behavior at Guantánamo.

Polet already had received information about Yee from Orlich's
intelligence
section. Most of it was third-hand. But today was different.

This time, they had a witness.

Polet and Orlich saw the alleged incident as a clear attempt to
undermine
interrogations, or at least embolden an enemy combatant. Polet
considered
it a "watershed moment..."

===============

SUSPICION IN THE RANKS
Inside the spy investigation of Capt. James Yee
Ray Rivera, Seattle Times, 1/9/05
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002146253_yeechapt
er3.html

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba
Spring 2003


Capt. Jason Orlich marched into the counterintelligence office with
one of his most trusted Arabic translators. They had news about
Chaplain James Yee.

The linguist, a Syrian-born Christian, claimed he had overheard Yee
speaking in Arabic to a detainee at the prison hospital, ridiculing
the camp's psychological-operations posters.

The posters depicted images such as an Afghanistan landscape at
sunset. A Pashtu caption beneath it stated: "Find your way home /
Truth will land you there." Another poster showed boys in a
schoolroom, above the words: "The time is now for cooperation /
Return and join the future of Afghanistan."

The camp's counterintelligence office was run by Theo Polet, a 40-
year-old National Guard captain from Florida. He led a small team of
agents responsible for investigating subversive behavior at
Guantánamo.

Polet already had received information about Yee from Orlich's
intelligence section. Most of it was third-hand. But today was
different.

This time, they had a witness.

Polet and Orlich saw the alleged incident as a clear attempt to
undermine interrogations, or at least embolden an enemy combatant.
Polet considered it a "watershed moment."


TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE
Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi was a supply clerk at Travis before
volunteering for Guantanamo Bay.


"That was the first real key piece of first-hand information my
office had," Polet recalled. "Now we could see if this stuff with
Chaplain Yee followed some pattern."

Outside the National Guard, Polet had been an academic coordinator
at a private Florida school that taught undercover surveillance to
police officers and security firms. He devoured books on terrorism,
its origins and its masterminds.

The linguist filed a sworn statement. Polet knew Orlich and the
translator had differences with Yee. Personality conflicts were
always the first thing to scrutinize when fielding a report such as
this. He also knew there had been tension between Muslims and non-
Muslims in the camp's linguist section. But Polet trusted Orlich. He
was someone who took his job seriously.

Polet filed a standard "Subversion and Espionage" report with the
470th Military Intelligence Group in Puerto Rico. After a long
delay, the report eventually came back stamped "open-close." Polet
was ordered to note the incident but take no further action.

Still concerned, Polet filed a second report. It was sent to the
Army's Central Control Office in Maryland, which oversees all Army
counterintelligence operations. The new report had the same central
allegation but with added information Polet believed showed the
poster incident was part of a pattern of subversive behavior dating
back to March.

On May 30, Army Central Control ordered Polet to conduct
a "preliminary inquiry."

The investigation into James Yee was officially open.

Polet took the news to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Joint Task Force
Guantánamo commander, who listened stern-faced. "He had taken to
liking Chaplain Yee and spent a lot of time with him, so this was
very difficult for him," Polet recalled.

His personal feelings aside, Miller set the tone for the
investigation, giving Polet's agents wide latitude: "He said, 'We're
here to either exonerate this individual or prove a wrong,' " Polet
said.

Just as that investigation was beginning, a second probe into a
friend of Yee's was shifting into high gear.


GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE
Capt. James Yee is sent to Guantánamo in November 2002 to serve
there as a Muslim chaplain.


The investigation into Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi had
begun earlier that month after a camera belonging to him was
discovered in the translator's work area.

Photography was strictly forbidden inside Camp Delta, but the rule
was occasionally broken by troops snapping "souvenir photos,"
recalled Col. John Perrone, former prison commander. The punishment
was typically light, and the film destroyed.

But because Al Halabi was a member of the "Muslim clique," which was
under suspicion by Orlich, the discovery was seen as the first key
piece of evidence of possible subversion.

The camera, a simple disposable brand available at the commissary on
the main base, contained two photographs: one of a guard tower; the
other of a prison recreation yard. The photos were similar to
pictures available over the Internet and from the camp's public-
affairs office. But Orlich insisted the images were classified.

Just as the camera was discovered, questions arose about Al Halabi's
security clearance.

That alone wasn't unusual. With the urgent need for Arabic speakers,
many linguists working in sensitive areas at the camp were pressed
into service before their security clearances had been issued.

A soldier's security clearance is processed at his or her home base.
In Al Halabi's case, that was Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento,
Calif., where he had served as a supply clerk before volunteering as
a translator. But by May, six months after arriving, his security
clearance still had not arrived.

Army Reserve Spc. Victor Wheeler, a security manager, called Travis
and learned the clearance was being held up because of gaps in Al
Halabi's application. Travis investigators also had questions about
Al Halabi's three-month deployment the year before to Kuwait, where
they believed he had tried to connect his personal laptop into a
secure military network.

"So the folks at Travis are saying, 'Don't give him access,' and
almost simultaneously the camera is discovered, and I'm like, 'Oh my
gosh!' " Orlich recalled.

In June, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations sent a team
of agents to Guantánamo to investigate. The team was led by Lance
Wega, a civilian agent with about two months on the job.

In a secret search, agents combed Al Halabi's work area and his
quarters. They copied his laptop's hard drive. In that and later
searches, they would find nearly 200 detainee letters, a camp
diagram, detainee rosters and military orders from a flight mission
he had taken from Guantánamo to Afghanistan to pick up prisoners.

Other agencies soon joined the investigations into Al Halabi and
Yee, including the FBI-led terrorism task forces in Seattle and
Sacramento.

Agents visited Lt. Col. Orlando Goodwin, Yee's former commander,
back at Fort Lewis in Washington state. They told him allegations —
they wouldn't specify — had been made about Yee in Guantánamo and
asked him who Yee associated with or if he had ever made anti-
American statements.

"I didn't think much of it," Goodwin recalled. "I thought for the
most part he's a Muslim chaplain, and somebody didn't like his
Muslim background and it would all go away."

Though the various agencies, including the FBI, were sharing
information, the investigations into Yee and Al Halabi were kept
separate.

"It was entirely too early to even suggest formally that there might
be a conspiracy happening," Polet recalled. "And if you grouped all
these individuals together, you run the risk of investigating people
that are simply guilty by association."

Neither Al Halabi nor Yee knew of the investigations. It's unclear
if Al Halabi even realized his disposable camera was missing.

With his security clearance at issue, Al Halabi was pulled from his
job translating detainee mail and placed in the library under Yee's
supervision.

As the investigation unfolded, camp guards began turning in loose
documents found in detainees' cells stamped "Cleared by U.S.
Forces."

The documents contained prayers, poems and other writings, some of
which they believed the detainees had written. Security officers
were alarmed. They thought the intelligence office was the only
section that was supposed to have a stamp that could clear documents
for circulation.

"We're like, 'What the heck?' " recalled Wheeler, who worked under
Orlich.

They soon discovered the library had its own "Cleared by U.S.
Forces" stamp. They wondered where it came from. Investigators also
found hundreds of photocopied pieces of paper, including blank
sheets, that were pre-stamped, Orlich said.

Investigators began to wonder what this all meant. Could Yee and
others in the library, including Al Halabi, be using the stamp to
pass radical literature to the prisoners and to help them trade
messages back and forth?

If so, there was no telling the damage such a secret communication
network could have on interrogations.

Investigators immediately confiscated the library's stamp, placed it
in a plastic bag, and sent it for forensic analysis to determine its
origin.

What neither Orlich nor Polet knew was that the stamp had been
approved for use in the library by Camp Delta's previous
intelligence officer, who had purchased it off the Internet.

Even so, by July, just as Al Halabi's tour at Guantánamo came to an
end, Air Force agents believed they had enough to arrest him.

The Army's investigation into Yee was moving more slowly, but
investigators were becoming convinced there was a conspiracy. At the
center, they believed, were the four members of the "Muslim clique":
Capt. Tariq Hashim, Petty Officer Samir Hejab, Al Halabi and Yee.

Ray Rivera: 206-464-2926 or rayrivera @ seattletimes.com

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