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The Greatest Covert Operation Ever: The Politics of Terror as the Business of Terror

08/31/10

The politics of terror are the greatest covert operation ever.

In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing the covert op called “the politics of terror,” words and their management are all important.

How are politics and terror actually defined: how are these meanings manipulated; for what purposes, and by whom?

Terrorism is defined as "violence against civilians intended to obtain a political purpose." This is an ambiguous phrase, which begs the questions: what are politics and violence?

Politics is defined as “the process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” And violence is the use of force to compel a person or group to do or think something against their will. That includes the violence of words – of threatening to hurt - and of social structures, as well as the violence of deeds.

So, by definition, terrorism is political violence – hurting people, or threatening to hurt them, in order to make them govern themselves against their will.

In America , terrorism is always condemned by the government, and, accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always the victims of it. The US war on terror is the ultimate expression of this principle: it is a military response to terrorism; violence in self-defense, not (ostensibly) violence for a political purpose.

That’s the official story – the assumption. But I’m going to show that America does engage in terrorism – violence against civilians for political purposes. This “state” terrorism, however, is covert, in so far as it is equated with national security, and thanks to that built-in ambiguity, it has both stated and unstated purpose.

What are they dying for?

08/31/10

Bill Van Auken
WSWS

Fourteen more US troops killed in Afghanistan: What are they dying for?

During his West Point speech last December announcing his 30,000-troop surge, Obama insisted that “The days of providing a blank check are over. We’ll support Afghan ministries, governors and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people.”

Indeed, the checks are not blank. They bear generous figures and are signed by the CIA. They are going to criminal officials who have sold their loyalty to Washington, but are hated by their own people. These checks are the unmistakable hallmark of a puppet regime installed in the attempt to assert neo-colonial US control in Afghanistan, against the will of the country’s population.

Another 14 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Saturday, with the death toll so far this year already rising to the level reached for all of 2010.

A pair of roadside bombings took the lives of seven soldiers on Monday, five of them dying in a blast that tore apart a Humvee in which they were riding. Bomb blasts took the lives of four others in southern Afghanistan over the weekend, while three were killed in clashes with armed groups resisting the US-led occupation.

These latest deaths bring US fatalities for the month to nearly 50, after the record 65 killed in July.

US, UK Roles in Iran's Mass Executions

08/31/10

Bob Woodward
Frontline

Iranian revolution, supporters of the Shah arrested,
Tehran, Iran, February 1979. Photograph by Olivier
Rebbot.

CIA curried favor with Khomeini, exiles.

[1986] The Reagan administration's secret overtures and arms shipments to Iran are part of a seven-year-long pattern of covert Central Intelligence Agency operations -- some dating back to the Carter administration -- that were designed both to curry favor with the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and support Iranian exiles who seek to overthrow it, according to informed sources.

In 1983, for example, the CIA participated in a secret operation to provide a list of Soviet KGB agents and collaborators operating in Iran to the Khomeini regime, which then executed up to 200 suspects and closed down the communist Tudeh party in Iran, actions that dealt a major blow to KGB operations and Soviet influence there, the sources said. Khomeini also expelled 18 Soviet diplomats, imprisoned the Tudeh party leaders and publicly thanked God for "the miracle" leading to the arrests of the "treasonous leaders."

At the same time, secret presidential intelligence orders, called "findings," authorized the CIA to support Iranian exiles opposed to the Khomeini regime, the sources said. These included providing nearly $6 million to the main Iranian exile movement, financing an anti-Khomeini exile group radio station in Egypt and supplying a miniaturized television transmitter for an 11-minute clandestine broadcast to Iran two months ago by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who vowed, "I will return."

Living in a Car After False DV Charges

08/31/10

Dan Abshear
Informaproject

The Fight Against The Toxic Domestic Violence Industry

"I'm presently losing this battle, but I continue to stand up after I've been slammed to the ground several times already. I'll stand up again."

In August of last year, I received false accusations that began with claims of violent spousal abuse by my former wife of 20 years.

As a result, I have experienced criminal arrest, incarceration, conviction, and loss of freedom. I've also discovered that the color orange of the inmate attire is definitely not a good color for me.

The night my former wife accused me of violent crimes, she commited the act of parental kidnapping. In addition, she left the scene of the crime that she fabricated. These issues were never addressed by the family law system.

I've been denied access to my 11 year old daughter entirely. The pain of this particular injury is indescribable.

I was rapidly removed from my own home. So I'm now homeless, unemployed, and I was not long ago living out of my one remaining asset out of what was thousands of dollars of assets. This would be my 500 dollar car. Fortunately, I learned some tips from those I met in jail who are homeless themselves. There are many of them.

The Secret Killers: Covert Assassins Charged With Hunting Down and Killing Afghans

08/31/10

Pratap Chatterjee
TomDispatch.com

Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373

"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologizing to do. Philips had to explain why a covert U.S. military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name “Carbon,” had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.

The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks’ CIA Red Cell memo: Orwellian mindset exposed

08/30/10

Larry Chin
Online Journal

“not defending our national security. It seeks rather to maintain the status quo . . .”

The CIA Red Cell memorandum released by WikiLeaks speaks volumes about the doublethink, paranoia, deception, and delusion of the CIA itself.

1. In this memo, the CIA is concerned that “American freedoms facilitate terrorism.” The “freedoms” include the Internet and the ability to travel.

Translation: the CIA wants these and other “freedoms” ended. Not even the post-9/11 “homeland security” lockdown made possible by the USAPATRIOT Act has been enough.

2. The memo cites 1) Muslim-American men who traveled to Pakistan to the “join the Taliban in jihad,” 2) David Headley’s membership in the group Lashkar-i-Tabiya, and his involvement in the 2008 Mumbai terror incident, 3) American Jews engaging in “violent acts against perceived enemies of Israel,” and 4) Irish-American support for the IRA.

Translation: the CIA absolves itself of any responsibility for the continuous management of terrorist groups all over the world, in total denial of historical fact. It makes no mention of its own role behind the incidents mentioned, its own involvement behind the Mumbai event, notably the Pakistani ISI’s connection to Lashkar-i-Tabiya and the other groups responsible.

It denies, ignores or purposely does not mention that CIA-Taliban-ISI-Al-Qaeda is a collaborative network, and that maintaining “militant Islam” is a long-term Anglo-American geostrategy. No mention is made of how Washington supports the Taliban, or how “jihad” benefits Washington resource war agendas.

It denies the overt and tacit support for all military-intelligence operations aimed at all perceived enemies of the interests of the US and its allies, when politically expedient to do so. It also denies how the CIA plays all sides of all conflicts.

Israel’s shameless mouthpiece

08/30/10

Hanan Chehata
Middle East Monitor

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, left, and Tony Blair on the right. From
1995, at a cermony commemorating the death of Yitzhak Rabin, who
was assassinated by a Jewish terrorist. (Brian Hendler/AP)

In yet another revealing speech, this time delivered at a symposium at IDC University in Herzliya, Tony Blair has exposed himself for what he truly is; not a "peace envoy" by any stretch of the imagination but a shameless mouthpiece for the State of Israel. Just days before direct negotiations are due to take place in the Middle East, in which he is supposed to be taking a neutral stance representing the Quartet (UN, EU, Russia and the USA), Blair has taken it upon himself to set aside any pretence of impartiality and reaffirm his "passion" for Israel. He has taken on the role of Israel’s defence attorney to plead with the world to try to empathise with Israel and to understand Israel’s point of view when it commits atrocities, human rights abuses and breaches of international law. He acknowledged that Israel is often perceived as "arrogant, overbearing and aggressive" but instead of examining why that might be such a widespread perception he went on to defend Israel’s crimes. Not for one moment, however, did he stop to ask anyone to consider the Palestinians’ point of view.

In this one short speech there were so many blatant attempts by Tony Blair at misdirection and misinformation that it is hard to know which was his most serious breach of professional decorum and where to start pointing out his now publicly-admitted bias; but regardless of where you start pretty much every statement he made was a crude attempt to spin the Israeli narrative. His whole speech was geared towards defending Israel and condemning the critics of Israel. He raised a whole host of issues which he seemed to have on a checklist and went through them one by one, making an attempt, and a very poor one at that, to defend Israel’s illegal actions.

Israel Threatens War with Lebanon

08/30/10

Stephen Lendman

"Besides bordering on Israel, Lebanon's resources make it vulnerable, namely its water and natural gas reserves, one reason for the 2006 war, South Lebanon to the Litani River especially important. Also the Wazzini springs feeding into the Hasbani River tributary of the Jordan River. It flows into Israel two miles downstream from the Wazzini, then into the Sea of Galilee that's Israel's largest fresh water source."

Palestine is belligerently occupied. Threats continue against Iran and Syria as well as Lebanon, specifically Hezbollah, elected partner in the nation's unity government, bogusly designated a US State Department Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), what Israel also calls it, repeating veiled and overt warnings, suggesting violence or an impending attack.

Why not, after so many earlier in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, and 2006. Also numerous incidents besides:

● refusing to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 425 by occupying South Lebanon belligerently and illegally for 18 years until mostly, but not entirely, withdrawing in May 2000 - still holding Sheba Farms, the 14-square mile water-rich land near Syria's Golan, also illegally occupied since 1967; in addition, Ghajar, the Lebanese village bordering Golan;

● during its occupation, using a proxy Christian South Lebanon Army as enforcer, UNIFIL Blue Helmets giving them and the IDF free reign instead of maintaining peace, how UN forces always operate, as paramilitaries against people they're supposed to protect; and

● for over 40 years, repeatedly violating Lebanon's territory, often daily, including 12 Israeli jet overflights on August 19.

Yale University and the problem of anti-Semitism

08/30/10

Lawrence Davidson
Redress

2006 © Carlos Latuff

Lawrence Davidson considers a recent Yale University conference on anti-Semitism which, instead of engaging in an objective discussion of an age old form of racism, ended up tying itself to an ideological view of the world that is itself racist and dedicating itself to the idea that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Between the 23 and 25 August, Yale University in the USA held a conference entitled ‘Global anti-Semitism: a Crisis of Modernity’. It was sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. Therefore, this was a university event and not one brought in from the outside to use Yale facilities.

On the surface there is nothing wrong with this. Anti-Semitism is an age old form of racism and it calls for ongoing academic study. The problem is that this particular conference approached the subject from the ideologically driven position of radical Zionism. In other words, many of the assumptions upon which the conference was built were unfortunately tainted with bias. Indeed, in at least one instance (a panel on the "self-hating" Jew), one might suggest that the event was itself promoting a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism. Very odd indeed.

Floods, Islamophobia, and Apathy

08/30/10

Tariq Ali
Pulse

While Zardari was inspecting his French chateau...

A disaster of biblical scope: the floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains a month ago have affected more than 17.2 million people and killed over 1,500, according to Pakistan’s disaster management body. August is the monsoon season in Pakistan. This year a hard rain keeps falling, which is why the floodwaters are not abating. Nearly two thousand deaths and over 20 million people are homeless. The man-made disasters – war in Afghanistan, its spillage into Pakistan – are bad enough. Now the country faces its worst ever natural disaster. Most governments would find it difficult to cope, but the current regime is virtually paralyzed.

Over the last sixty years, the ruling elite in the country has never been able to construct a social infrastructure for its people. This is a structural defect that goes deep and affects the bulk of the population adversely. Today the country’s rulers eagerly follow the neoliberal dictates of the IMF, to keep the loans flowing. Not helpful at the best of times they are useless when the country is undergoing its worst humanitarian crisis of recent decades.

The response of the West has been less than generous causing panic in Islamabad with pro-US journalists in the country pleading that if help is not forthcoming the terrorists might take over the country. This is nonsense. The Pakistani Army is firmly in control of the flood-relief effort. The religious groups and others too are raising money and helping the homeless. It’s normal.

Since 9/11 a rampant Islamophobia has gripped Europe and parts of North America. A recent opinion-poll in “multicultural Britain” revealed that when asked what their first thought was on hearing the word “Islam” over fifty percent replied “Terrorist”. France and Germany, Holland and Denmark, are no different.

This treatment of Islam as the permanent “other” is not unrelated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the attitude is as wrong as the anti-Semitism that ignited prejudice and genocide during the first half of the 20th century. A million Iraqis dead since the occupation: Who cares? Afghan civilians dying every day: It’s their own fault. Pakistani engulfed in floodwaters. Indifference. That is undoubtedly one reason for the lack of response.

The Nazification of the United States

08/29/10

Paul Craig Roberts
VDare.com

Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce one of the most important articles of our time, "Obama’s US Assassination Program."

It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.

Nothing was done about it. "National security" placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.

Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a "threat." "Threat" was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.

There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs. The problem with this sort of thing is that once it starts, it doesn’t stop.

God To Beck,”Do Not Use My Name In Vain”

08/29/10

Danny Schechter
News Dissector

"God To Beck, Do Not Use My Name In Vain To Bolster Your Career"

Jesus was unavailable when Mediachannel sought out his opinion on Glenn Becks’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial today. Mr Christ, often called JEEEEZ-US by Beck’s faithful, was apparently watching another channel.

We did briefly touch base with his dad, God himself, often referred to as our Lord and Savior, or THE MAN above, who we thought would be pleased by all the adoring rhetoric emanating from the Lincoln Memorial where 47 years earlier a real religious leader held a nation spellbound.

God seemed as if was in a foul mood, as if he felt he was being used by the Fox News host and best selling author, who kept repeating that God was in charge even as he asserted leadership of the Tea Party minions and offered advice that was not found in the Bible or scriptures but on his not yet consecrated website, the one with an ad for LIBERTY SAFES.

Reached on the Royal Telephone, we were told by HIMSELF, “Look, with people in the West turning away from religion in droves, we are always happy to have someone invoke religious principles and spiritual insights. In that sense, Glenn’s Sermon from the Steps was welcome except it was so clear that he is serving a political agenda first.

“How disappointing that the crowd was so uni-cultural wearing T shirts like “I can see November from my House,” and carrying “Don’t tread on me” flags. Why did he have to drag me into it?

Pakistan flood: US rains down death as villagers starve

08/29/10

Yuri Prasad
Uruknet

Pakistani flood survivors block highway, demanding food and shelter
from the government after being displaced in Thatta near Hyderabad,
Pakistan on Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010.

The flooding crisis in Pakistan continues to grow as thousands flee the historic city of Thatta in Sind after the Indus River broke a levee and flooded new areas.

Around 175,000 people, almost three quarters of the city’s population, are thought to have fled their homes overnight, said government official, Manzoor Sheikh.

"The situation is getting worse,’ said disaster official Hadi Baksh Kalhoro. "The water is flowing into a nearby canal endangering Thatta city."

Evidence of the growing crisis, and the completely inadequate response of the Pakistani state and the "international community", can be read in postings on the Pakistan Fisher Folk Forum.

One report comes from towns on the outskirts of Thatta:

"The situation of camps at Makli. This is the only safe place nearby and has attracted a wide number of affected people…[conditions are] miserable, as there was no food for the people, who were staying in the open.

"More than 100,000 people have migrated from different flood affected areas and are still pouring into there. They were crying for rations. The lack of food and shelter has exposed these people to the weather effects.

"In this situation it was obvious that due to the unavailability of food, safe water and health facilities the lives of women and children are under threat."

McCarthyism and Fascism in Israel

08/29/10

Michael Warschawski
Alternative Information Center

When a state awards itself the right to demand from its citizens an expression of loyalty to the state and when it conditions their citizenship on this same loyalty, it no longer possesses any connection to democracy. In a democracy, the state is loyal to its citizens and obligated to protect them unconditionally. Loyalty to the state and a demand from its citizens to serve it are characteristics of fascist regimes.

In the past two years Israel has taken several steps toward becoming a fascist regime. True, Israeli democracy, defined as a “Jewish and democratic state,” is problematic in several aspects: it removes from the democratic norm approximately 3 million residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory who are living under its rule for more than four decades, together with the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel – who do enjoy various civil rights but are not part of the governing landscape as the state of Israel defines itself as “the state of the Jewish people” and not as a state of its citizens and absentee residents.

On the table of the Knesset are various legislative proposals, proposals which are strange from the perspective of accepted democratic norms, and which question even the ethnic democracy existing in Israel to date. Only in fascist regimes, and under Stalinist authoritarianism, the citizenship of one born a citizen (and not those naturalized as a mutual decision between the person and the state) is dependent on the good will of the state: Nazi Germany, for example, annulled the citizenship of Jews, as did Vichy France. The USSR annulled the citizenship of Leon Trotsky.

The state of Israel is marching on the path to becoming a fascist regime, and on the way there are benchmarks. One of them is McCarthyism.

Why is Israel Terrified of a Ship Full of Women?

08/29/10

Rannie Amiri
CounterPunch

“We will not even bring cooking knives.” ~ Samar al-Hajj, coordinator of the all-women Lebanese aid vessel Mariam

The bloody wake left by the Mavi Marmara after the May 31 Israeli commando raid has not deterred 50 female activists from trying to break the four-year-old siege of Gaza. To hear Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak speak of their planned relief effort, one would think the very existence of Israel was at stake.

The women plan to set sail aboard the Saint Mariam, a Bolivian-flagged cargo ship named in honor of the Virgin Mary, a figure sacred to both Christians and Muslims. Although they intend to depart from Tripoli, Lebanon, the crew is not only composed of multi-faith Lebanese but foreign nationals as well, including a group of nuns from the United States. So as not to give Israel pretext to attack, Hezbollah deliberately did not sponsor the mission nor were any members allowed to participate.

Its cargo? Books, toys, medical instruments and supplies, and most importantly, anticancer medication.

The ship cannot sail directly from Tripoli to Gaza since Lebanon and Israel remain technically at war (and Israel controls Gaza’s territorial waters) and thus must pass through a third country first. The Mariam was scheduled to leave for Cyprus last Sunday but authorities in Nicosia, capitulating to Israeli pressure, prohibited use of its ports for vessels departing to Gaza. Without the green light from Cyprus, Lebanon’s Transport and Public Works Minister Ghazi Aridi was forced to cancel the voyage until another country with whom Lebanon enjoys maritime relations could be found. Negotiations with Greece are now under way.

U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq is Fiction

08/29/10

Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report

"The United States is an empire that has never voluntarily withdrawn from any of its bases or 'fortified compounds.'"

Embedded corporate media rose to new heights of non-journalism as, on command, they conjured up an end to (America's) Iraq War based on nothing more than a change of nomenclature. Combat soldiers woke up one morning as "advise and assist" troops whose "bases" were magically transformed into "fortified compounds." Still, the U.S. empire has no intention of leaving Iraq - especially when there are so many available euphemisms for staying.

It was perversely hilarious to observe the corporate media, last week, as they collectively celebrated an event that never happened. "Last combat soldiers leave Baghdad" read the Washington Post headline, with variations on the same fantasy theme in Newsweek, UPI, Reuters...virtually everywhere. One had to turn to the Army Times newspaper for an accurate headline:"Combat Brigades in Iraq Under Different Name." It is a wonderment to watch the blind enthusiasm with which the corporate media embrace name changes as if they are actual facts.

United States exporter of terrorism: Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen

08/28/10

Bill Van Auken

A tell-tale fragment...Amnesty says it is an unexploded cluster
bomblet from a Tomahawk missile. Photo: AP/AI

"A CIA drone war will add to the war crimes already committed by the US military in Yemen on Obama’s command. In the worst of these, at least 41 people, 21 of them children and 14 of them women, were slaughtered last December 17 when their homes in the southern district of Abyan were struck by US cruise missiles carrying cluster bombs—a weapon banned by international treaties."

With the opening of a new front in Yemen for the CIA’s drone “targeted killing” program, the Obama administration is steadily escalating the role played by both the covert agency and secretive US military Special Operations forces as a global Murder Incorporated.

“The White House, in an effort to turn up the heat against Al Qaida’s branch in Yemen, is considering adding the CIA’s armed Predator drones to the fight,” reported the Associated Press on Thursday, citing senior Washington officials.

“The US military’s Special Operation Forces and the CIA have been positioning surveillance equipment, drones and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia” in preparation for the stepped-up killing spree, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The Washington Post quoted intelligence officials as saying that the CIA now views Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a “more urgent” threat than the Qaeda organization in Pakistan.

Yemen, like Afghanistan and Iraq before it, is being targeted not to eradicate terrorism—the killing of civilians with cruise missiles and drone attacks will only produce more recruits for terrorist attacks—but because of its strategic location, bordering Saudi Arabia, the number-one oil exporter, and the vital Bab al-Mandab strait, through which three million barrels of oil pass daily.

“They’re not feeling the same kind of heat—not yet, anyway—as their friends in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” one official told Reuters Wednesday. “Everyone involved on our side understands that has to change.”

Ramsey Muniz - Guilty of Being Latino and Activist in America

08/28/10

Stephen Lendman

An earlier article explained America's longstanding political repression agenda, accessed through THIS link.

Ramiro (Ramsey) Muniz is one of the victims, imprisoned for life without parole on a bogus drug charge. Now age 67, he's been incarcerated nearly 17 years, earlier at Leavenworth, KS federal prison, the country's largest maximum security one, more recently at the US Medical Center, Springfield, MO recovering from life threatening complications from surgery.

In September 2009, he was transferred to the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution, Beaumont, TX.

Friends and supporters can write him there as follows:

Ramiro "Ramsey" Muniz
Prison No. 40288-115
FCI Medium Beaumont
PO Box 26040
Beaumont, TX 77705

For years, he suffered painfully from an untreated herniated disc, knee injuries, and a deteriorated hip, only now beginning to regain his strength, yet burdened by years of injustice.

A League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) described him as follows:

A Corpus Christi, TX native, he "contributed greatly to the Chicano Civil Rights Movement during the 1970s as a leader for justice and equality for all Mexican Americans, Hispanics, and Latinos throughout the United States."

In 1972 and 1974 (at ages 30 and 32), he was Texas gubernatorial candidate for the La Raza Unida Party (RUP), established to help Mexican Americans achieve greater economic, social, and political self-determination, especially in South Texas, where, though a majority in many counties and locales, they held little or no power.

A united Iran against a collapsing Israel

08/28/10

Kourosh Ziabari

As the racist regime of Israel moves toward greater international isolation due to its aggressive, belligerent policies, Iran receives wider support from the world's nations for its uncompromising resistance against the bullying superpowers and annulling their mischievous plots. The world is witness to the growth of Iran's popularity while hatred and disgust against Israel builds up progressively. Iran is reaching out to the hearts and souls around the world while Israel ignites denunciation and deprecation in the four corners of the globe.

Since Israel raided the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on May 31, the flimsy existence of Tel Aviv began to splinter as the world nations collectively and categorically reacted to the atrocious mass killing of 9 peace activists in the international waters by the Israel Defense Forces.

Israel's unlawful, brutal killing of the unarmed civilians aboard the Freedom Flotilla sparked such a remarkable international condemnation that even the most stalwart allies of Tel Aviv in the EU zone recalled their ambassadors from Israel and called for a thorough, detailed investigation of the incident which they described as offensive and violent. The international condemnations were so extensive and intensive that even the most pessimistic Israeli politicians couldn't envisage. Four countries downgraded their diplomatic relations with Israel – in addition to the four countries that had cut their diplomatic ties with Israel during the 22-day Gaza war of 2008-2009, Twelve Latin American countries condemned the Israeli actions, Twenty-one European countries protested against Israel and Twelve non-Arab Asian countries officially disapproved of Tel Aviv.

Burn, Witch, Burn! -America Rages Against Islam

08/28/10

Keith Johnson
Revolt of the Plebs

Islamophobia is sweeping the nation—and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Just when the American people were starting to become distracted with trivial issues like the potential stock market crash, the re-branding of the war in Iraq, and the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf—along comes a crisis of Biblical proportions, that threatens to destroy the moral fiber of America itself, and deliver its Christian population into the diabolical hands of an Islamic dictatorship ruled under the precepts of Sharia law.

Oh, foolish man. What can you not be made to believe? ~ Adam Weishaupt

By now, it should be quite obvious that the hysteria centered on the proposed construction of an Islamic cultural center—a full two blocks from Ground Zero—is nothing more than an engineered distraction, designed to take the focus away from serious geopolitical and domestic issues as we head into the November elections.

Late last year, we watched in horror as the Tea Party movement was infiltrated by certain personalities from the GOP establishment. Glenn Beck, Dick Armey, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, and others of that same ilk—all dressed down to mingle with working class folks— and let them know that the Republican party shares their pain. Before these clowns got involved, the focus of the Tea Party was on big government, compulsory health insurance and Wall Street bailouts. But over a period of time—as these Johnny-Come-Latelies sunk their fingers deeper into the pie—they used their influence to diffuse the ire against Wall Street and redirect those energies to support the GOP war agenda.

Now we are starting to see large swaths of Tea Party factions taking up the war banner at their events—complete with metrosexual cowboys singing war anthems in the background—and stirring up racial tensions the likes of which we have not witnessed since before the civil rights movement of the 1960’s.

America Facing Depression and Bankruptcy

08/27/10

Stephen Lendman

Long-time economic, political and market analyst Bob Chapman publishes the International Forecaster, offering incisive analysis absent through mainstream sources, especially important now given America's deepening economic crisis getting harder to conceal as evidence mounts.

His August 25 issue says the following:

"Twenty countries (including America) are headed into bankruptcy and more will follow. That brings up the subject of state debt in the US. America has been in an inflationary depression for 18 months. States have been cutting back for two years," but still face huge budget gaps required to be closed....2011 will be a terrible year (with) 80% of states expect(ing) deficits of more than $200 billion. 2012 looks even worse." Most worrisome, "there is no recovery and there never has been....the US economy and financial system is comatose." The worst is yet to come and will hit hard on arrival.

On August 24, economist David Rosenberg said, "Now (I'll) tell you why this is a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession," what he's been repeating for months unlike few others, corporate analysts claiming the fall 2007 downturn "ended sometime last year." Not so, it's deepened, growing evidence providing more clarity.

Offering a historical perspective, Rosenberg said the Great Depression wasn't marked by declining GDP each quarter. The 1929 - 33 recession lasted four years, followed by recovery and another "deep downturn" in 1937 - 38.

GROWING OLD ALONE: Cleanup after unnoticed death now a growing industry in Japan

08/27/10

Mizuho Aoki

"In recent years, the number of elderly who live alone buried under a mountain of garbage has surged. Some have dementia and some are physically unable to take out the garbage. It is these people who are the ones most likely to die alone."

Yoshinori Ishimi could hear a high-pitched whine coming from the apartment in Nerima Ward, Tokyo, he was about to enter. When he went inside, he saw black "mini-twister" clouds of flies.

The last tenant had been a 60-year-old divorced man whose body was not found until a month after he had died.

"Every time I encounter such scenes, I hesitate to step inside. But someone has to clean up these flats . . . and be professional about it," said Ishimi of Anshin Net, a cleaning service that is part of R-Cube Co. in Ota Ward, Tokyo.

The Nerima man's case was not unique, and such unnoticed departures are only expected to increase.

According to a report by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the number of single-person households is expected to rise from 14.46 million in 2005 to 18.24 million in 2030, or nearly 40 percent of all households.

With the growing number of single households in this graying nation, businesses specializing in dealing in what has been dubbed "lonely death" have become a fixture.

Why Americans should oppose Zionism

08/27/10

Steven Salaita
Foreign Policy Journal

Eden Abergil displays emotional shallownes and a shocking lack of em-
pathy. This is what we find in sociopaths and people with a narcissistic
personality. Her condition would appear to be prevalent in Israeli society.

Israel has been subject to some bad publicity recently. In 2008-09, it launched a brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed more than 400 Palestinian children. In May 2010, bumbling Israeli commandos murdered nine nonviolence activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla's Mavi Marmara. It only got worse for Israel when it was revealed that soldiers stole and sold personal items such as laptops from the ship. Last week, former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted photos onto Facebook showing her preening in front of blindfolded and despondent Palestinian prisoners, in some instances mocking those prisoners with sexual undertones. The photos were part of an album entitled "IDF [Israeli army] -- the best time of my life."

While Abergil's pictures may not seem as abhorrent as the Gaza and Mavi Marmara brutality -- Abergil, for her part, described her behavior as nonviolent and free of contempt -- all three actions are intimately connected. First of all, we must dispel the notion that Abergil's photos are nonviolent. As with the Abu Ghraib debacle, a sexualized and coercive humiliation is being visited on the bodies of powerless, colonized and incarcerated subjects, which by any reasonable principle is a basal form of violence. There is also the obvious physical violence of Palestinians being bound and blindfolded, presumably in or on their way to prisons nobody will confuse with the Ritz Carlton.

More important, these recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself. What is noteworthy about Israel's three recent escapades is that more and more people are starting to pay attention to its crimes and indignities. In so doing, more and more people are questioning the origin and meaning of Zionism -- that is, the very idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel.

In Ramadan, where is the story of Islam and the Muslims?

08/27/10

Bouthaina Shaaban
Middle East Monitor

Prof. Bouthaina Shaaban

The noise made by the publication of photos on Facebook by Israeli soldier, Abergil Eden, showing off her being a jailer of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian civilians, shows once again that there is a new kind of Western wars against Muslim nations. These wars started when Europe waged its wars to occupy Palestine under the slogan of 'regaining the holy land' and culminated with settler colonialism waged under the slogan of returning to the 'promised land'. In an article about the subject, Dan Murphy writes, "Israeli soldier Facebook photos: Youth culture and rules of war collide" (Christian Science Monitor, 17 August 2010). In a subtitle, the article stresses that the photos violated Israeli army and international rules concerning taking photographs of prisoners.

The soldier did not seem to know what is wrong with posting these photographs; something also done by other Israeli soldiers, while international war circles found that the 'incident' highlights the difficulties faced by western armies – always in the act of aggression – in 'controlling the flow of photos and information in the age of YouTube, Wikileeks and digital cameras. This 'incident' brings to mind the scandal of publishing photos of torturing Iraqi civilians by the soldiers of 'American democracy' in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and tens of other secret prisons in which the murderers of the 'free world' practice all kinds of torture against kidnapped 'suspected' innocent people.

Wikipedia recently published thousands of documents about the acts of genocide committed by NATO forces against unarmed civilians in Afghanistan and the consequences of such acts on decisions taken by the Pentagon, the White House and the Congress. The Guardian published an op-ed entitled "Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups" (18 August 2010) about Two Israeli groups which set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to 'show the other side' over borders and culture. This means that Israel, as usual, wants to control the news about Israeli crimes of torture, assassination and oppression against Palestinian civilians so that the world finds it difficult to know about what Israel is doing in terms of ethnic cleansing, displacement, house demolishing, murder, torture and humiliating the native population. The reason is that the open information space, despite Zionist attempts to control it, has started to expose their crimes in Palestine and also expose the false official western position regarding them.

The Israeli Lobby: Declassified Documents Expose Its Influence

08/26/10

Stephen Lendman

Ted Kennedy and AIPAC Founder Isaiah L. Kenen

James Petras' powerful 2006 book titled, "The Power of Israel in the United States" explained the enormous Jewish Lobby influence on US Middle East policies. Often harming American interests, they're pursued anyway because of its grassroots and high-level control over government, the business community, academia, the clergy and mass media since at least the 1960s.

Intolerant of opposing views, they're suppressed for its own agenda, funded by PR propaganda domestically and overseas, America's top publications paid off to go along, now revealed by a secret document subpoenaed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (FRC) investigation into the American Zionist Council (AZC), AIPAC's parent lobbying arm.

"Between 1962 - 1963, the FRC subpoenaed" AZC's internal documents, examining their activities as "registered agents of foreign principals," learning that over $5 million in tax exempt (and perhaps overseas funds) "had been laundered through the Jewish Agency's American Section into the (AZC)."

The Agency is a quasi-Israeli government branch, funded to review legislation ahead of its submission to the Knesset under its Covenant Agreement - in violation of IRS regulations regarding tax exempt charitable funds and the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.

No matter. Israel got a pass to act illegally for nearly 50 years, doing it today more aggregiously than ever. In 1962, after being ordered to register as a foreign agent, AZC transferred its responsibilities to AIPAC, "which refuses to register as (an Israeli) foreign agent" and gets away with it.

9/11 -The mountains and mountains of irrefutable evidence

08/26/10

“EyesWideOpen”
Redacted News

A reader comment at Veterans Today

It’s refreshing to see there are so many people who “get it”– except maybe Steve. This was a great article and there are some really good comments here. I want to point out something I haven’t seen written about before regarding 9/11 and maybe it will cause some people who still don’t get it or refuse to examine the mountains of evidence pointing to 9/11 being an inside job to rethink their beliefs in the official story coming from our corporate government and their mouthpiece media.

Since there are so many vets here who I assume would understand attack strategies I thought this would be the place to bring this up.

While the events of 9/11 were in progress, remember how we were all waiting for the fighter jets that protect America to show up any second to handle the situation? Remember how we all expected that to happen, how it was just second nature to expect our military jets to come swooping in any second, and then remember that feeling of total incredulity when they never appeared as America was under attack? I know we were all waiting for them to take care of the situation, especially when the Pentagon was hit, the PENTAGON which some alleged hijacked plane had to fly through the most “protected airspace” in the world in order to hit it and we all couldn’t figure out how that could have happened and why there were no fighter jets protecting the nation’s capital.

Why did we, as a nation, expect to see the fighter jets flying up and handling the situation? Because it is standard operating procedure (SOP) to scramble jet fighters whenever a jetliner goes off course or radio contact with it is lost or its transponder is turned off. Between January 2001 and September 2001, interceptors were scrambled 67 times.

In the year 2000 jets were scrambled 129 times. They have never once in history not been scrambled.

Homo erectus and the Kiss of Rothschild

08/26/10

Les Visible
Reflections in a Petri Dish

"[This] elite, in order to generate maximum profit, destroyed manufacturing, jobs, benefits and pensions in order to push the margins. Their ally in all of this is the Homo erectus. This has been their greatest ally and victim. It’s two for one night at Little Caesars’."

Someone wrote me this morning to tell me that there are two types of human beings; Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. Apparently, the former turned into the latter but they have never found the missing link. He argued that maybe there was no missing link because they weren’t linked; being two different creatures and those of us that couldn’t see much of anything were in one and those of us who could see what was going on were in the other.

I saw a listing yesterday that had a selection of events that had taken place recently. As I studied them, I realized that the full impact of these events had not hit me in any real way, even though I knew such things were coming. Details about many of them were not presented to be as dramatic as they actually were. For instance, the Central European flooding was the worst in over 800 years. The heat wave and fires in Russia were the worst in over 1,000 years. The U.N. determined that the flooding in Pakistan was a greater disaster than the 2004 tsunami. Ten million people in Africa are in immediate danger of starving to death because of drought. Temperatures are so low in the Western United States that many fruits and vegetables are being destroyed. The southern and eastern portions of the United States are suffering from a terrible heat wave, which shows no signs of coming to an end. In Japan, 21,000 have been hospitalized for heat stroke. 6 millions fish, thousands of cattle and hundreds of people have been killed in South America. Thousands are dead in China from flooding. There’s a great deal that I haven’t mentioned but which you are familiar with.

Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation

08/26/10

Denis G. Rancourt
Activist Teacher

In the present essay I introduce the general notion of “roundabout” as a mechanism of conflict avoidance used by privileged social justice activists. I then contrast this pseudo-liberation activism with the needed true liberation activism of Malcolm X, which I argue to be consistent with the model of liberation of Freire.

INTRODUCTION

The now familiar concept of “pacifism as pathology” was introduced by Ward Churchill as the central characteristic of First-World middleclass so-called social justice activism. Churchill argued from history that all liberations were leveraged through violence and proposed that pacifism as cowardice was pathology. [1]

Gandhi stated that it was better to practice armed resistance than to use pacifism as an excuse for cowardice [2]. Both men (Churchill and Ghandi) saw acceptance of and self-justification for one’s (legal or circumstantial) slavery as pathology.

Paulo Freire’s work showed that all hierarchies, no matter how cushioned in comfort, are violent and oppressive and argued that we could only fight our own oppression – that “solidarity” meant standing side by side with those fighting our same oppression. Freire advanced that all liberations had to be rooted in and driven by the struggles of the oppressed themselves no matter how underprivileged and that inter-social-class “solidarity” was insignificant and limited to rare individuals who joined in battle on the front lines. [3]

Churchill concentrated on the use of pacifism as an excuse to avoid the needed direct confrontation with the oppressive system. He and others have deconstructed and exposed First World pacifism as avoidance; including mainstream life-style environmentalism, ecological or economic isolationism, love ideologies, and so on, when taken to be activisms in themselves. These authors did not explore the main creative active strategies whereby pacifism can be enacted.

I explore the latter strategies of evasive action (roundabout) used by the most activist-minded sector of concerned citizens.

My goal is to provide a radical self-criticism for dedicated anti-hierarchy (social justice) activists to help ensure that we are as effective as possible and are not simply fooling ourselves. I hope that my analysis will help us to more easily recognize when we are fooling ourselves and wasting our energies and will help us to identify optimally effective outlooks and strategies.

Israel Takes Control of Lebanon

08/25/10

Raja Mujtaba
Opinion Maker

Israeli soldiers holding a Lebanese flag, returning from
Lebanon after a killing spree near the Israeli-Lebanese
border in northern Israel August 14, 2006

WMR has learned from its Lebanese intelligence sources that the Lebanese government is coming to realize that Israeli intelligence penetration of all political groups in the country is worse than originally believed.

Israel’s Mossad, once content on penetrating the Christian and Druze parties in the country, has now thoroughly infiltrated the top echelons of Sunni and Shi’a parties, as well. Recently, Lebanon charged retired General Fayez Karam, a senior member of retired General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, which is allied with Hezbollah, with spying for Mossad.

Among the political parties penetrated by Israeli intelligence is the Future Movement of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the son of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 2005. The UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is expected very soon to charge Lebanon’s Hezbollah with the assassination. However, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah recently announced the group had video evidence from Israeli drones that showed the Israeli Defense Force was tracking Hariri before his assassination.

The STL’s chief prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare of Canada, requested the evidence from Hezbollah. However, WMR has learned that Bellemare is suspected by Lebanese intelligence of having close previous contacts with agents of both the CIA and Mossad. WMR previously reported that Bellemare is suspected to have allowed and introduced into evidence against Hezbollah in the Hariri assassination, doctored cell phone intercepts pointing the “smoking gun” at Hezbollah. It is feared that Bellemare might give Hezbollah’s evidence to Mossad for the Israelis to determine the source of the leak of classified videos.

America's Gulf: Updating the Greatest Ever Environmental Crime

08/25/10

Stephen Lendman

For months, US media reports distorted and lied about its severity, running cover for BP and the Obama administration, now practically avoiding the crisis altogether as it worsens. An August 20 Inter Press Service report is revealing, quoting Biloxi, MS fisherman Danny Ross saying hypoxia (depleted oxygen) is driving horseshoe crabs, stingrays, flounder, dolphins, and other sea life "out of the water" to escape. Another area fisherman, David Wallis said he's "seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day."

Other reports cite strange marine life behavior, sighted near the surface when they normally stay well submerged. Alabama fisherman Stan Fournier said in 40 years of work, he's never seen anything like it. "It looks like all the sea life is trying to get out of the water," unable to breathe in their normal habitat, what US media reports won't touch, instead hyping success, saying BP's well capped and most oil dissolved when, in fact, it won't degrade for decades, remaining a lethal cocktail combined with dispersants, killing wildlife and poisoning anyone eating it, assuring a coming epidemic of cancers and other diseases.

On August 19, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) senior scientist Bill Lehr, in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, retracted his earlier claim about most oil dispersed and dissolved. He now says "I would say most of that is still in the environment," as much as 90%, only 6% burned and 4% skimmed, the rest contaminating a large part of the Gulf, spreading, and devastating wildlife.

In addition, on August 19, the journal Science published a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) study, confirming a giant oil plume floating about 1,200 meters below the surface - 35 km-long (22 miles), two km wide, and 200 meters thick. Persisting "for months without substantial biodegradation," it poses a serious threat to sea life, one of the article's writers, Dr. Chris Reddy, saying, "At this point, we know the plume exists, and we know more about its potential biological activity in the future" and harm it can cause. It'll be years before the full extent of damage is known.

Back to Vichy

08/25/10

Alex Lantier
WSWS

Internment camp in Pithiviers, France. -There were internment camps and con-
centration camps in France before, during and after World War II. (Wikipedia)

"Now the plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center buildings destroyed in the 9/11 attacks has become the occasion for a fascistic campaign against Muslims."

There is a stench of fascism arising from the anti-immigrant, law-and-order measures being implemented by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Policies and methods which people had hoped were forever left behind in the 1930s and 1940s are being revived by the European bourgeoisie in an attempt to deal with the consequences of the global economic crisis.

There is no clearer example than the mass deportations of Roma, a population once targeted for extermination by the Nazis. They and their collaborators killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma. The French collaborationist Vichy authorities raided Roma communities and held their inhabitants in concentration camps such as Jargeau, near Orléans.

While European governments do not yet encourage anti-Semitism, in part due to popular awareness of the Holocaust, they encourage and exploit anti-Roma hatred.

Other measures proposed by Sarkozy also borrow directly from the legal arsenal of fascism. Having moved to ban the burqa, the government aims to strip French citizenship from naturalized citizens who clash with the police. It is also threatening parents of juvenile delinquents with jail time if their children violate restrictions placed upon them by the justice system.

The last time France revoked citizens’ nationality for non-capital crimes was under the Vichy regime, which took away 7,000 Jews’ citizenship. Holding families criminally responsible for actions of their members, the Nazis’ Sippenhaft policy, has been condemned as barbaric since the collapse of the Third Reich.

While Roma and burqa-wearing women are first in the government’s line of fire, its ultimate target is opposition to austerity and war by the entire working class.

Notes from Besieged Gaza

08/25/10

Stephen Lendman

On June 17, Israel's Cabinet issued a six point plan, agreeing to ease access for civilian goods entering Gaza without loosening inflexible security measures to restrict them. So what's changed? Not much. Increased truck traffic has been modest at best. The consumer ban was partially lifted, permitting previously prohibited items like ketchup, chocolate and children's toys.

Yet, banned products still include vitally needed industrial and construction items, unrelated to security concerns Israel claims, bogusly calling them "dual use." As a result, the promised ease is unfulfilled. Strangling Gaza economically continues. Raw materials, spare parts, essential equipment, and numerous other non-military related goods are denied. In addition, no policy change eased people movement into and out of Gaza, those inside effectively imprisoned, exports still banned, and humanitarian flotillas threatened with forcible interdiction, in some cases their cargos and personal possessions stolen to prevent essential goods and cash donations from being delivered.

In an August 22 Common Dreams article, Ann Wright headlined," "Israeli Soldiers Sell Gaza Flotilla Passengers' Computers and Steal Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars in Cash," saying:

"An Israeli newspaper has revealed that four to six computers (among the hundreds seized from Mavi Marmara passengers were) sold by an Israeli First Lieutenant to three junior military personnel. On August 18, a second officer was arrested in connection with the theft."

Labor Party MK Eitan Kabel called the revelation "embarrassing, humiliating and infuriating," but there's more.

"Israeli commandos also took cash and credit cards from passengers," an estimated $1,000 or more from each, or at least $750,000, donations intended for Gazans. Four passengers alone had $68,000 stolen, money needy Gazans didn't get.

Other items were also taken, including cell phones, cameras, and electronic equipment, supposedly kept safe but not returned when passengers were released. No one so far has been held accountable for [this theft] nor for the cold-blooded murder of up to 15 passengers by [the] three commissions investigating them.

Mossad in America

08/25/10

Philip Giraldi
The American Conservative

Israeli intelligence steps up its activity in the U.S. — and gets away with it.

Israeli government claims that it does not spy on the United States are intended for the media and popular consumption. The reality is that Israel’s intelligence agencies target the United States intensively, particularly in pursuit of military and dual-use civilian technology. Among nations considered to be friendly to Washington, Israel leads all others in its active espionage directed against American companies and the Defense Department. It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.

As tensions with Iran increase, sources in the counterintelligence community report that Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics. There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as “U.S. intelligence.” Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a “false flag” operation.

Washington Orders Shahbaz Airbase Saved, Not Pakistan's Flood Victims

08/24/10

Stephen Lendman

With 20 million or more people affected, about 12% of the population, the equivalent of 37 million Americans, Pakistan's devastating floods are truly of biblical proportions, described by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as worse than anything he'd ever seen, saying:

"Thousands of towns and villages have simply been washed away. Roads, buildings, bridges, crops - millions of livelihoods have been lost. People are marooned on tiny islands with the floodwaters all around them (without food, sanitation, medical help, or shelter). They are drinking dirty water. They are living in the mud and ruins of their lives. Many have lost family and friends. Many more are afraid their children and loved ones will not survive in these condition."

One fifth or more of Pakistan is under water, the US equivalent of Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, and Oregon combined, what's unimaginable in America and would never be tolerated without massive emergency aid.

Yet the Pakistani-based News reports that:

"Hundreds of thousands of people including children, women and aged men have been trapped on the rooftops of their houses as floodwaters with 5-feet depth has blanketed entire districts."

They won't survive without help. Deadly disease outbreaks are feared. Already, reports of cholera are surfacing, suggesting perhaps a much wider scale problem than verified.

Unknown numbers have perished, perhaps thousands, likely tens or hundreds of thousands before it's over. Yet aid so far donated has been pathetic, America providing token relief only, hardly enough to matter, Washington's usual response to great need, even emergencies, the way Haitian earthquake victims were treated, still on their own and out of luck eight months after their disaster.

Pakistan's government and world leaders have been disturbingly indifferent to the problem, doing far too little when massive amounts of emergency aid are urgently needed quickly.

Iraq Pullout: Mission Accomplished or Strategic Retreat?

08/24/10

Stephen Lendman

In this picture, U.S. soldiers stand guard after a road side bomb blast
in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, in Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/
Hadi Mizban)

In an August 2 speech to disabled veterans, Obama touted his planned withdrawal, saying:

"As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end....Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy....for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility. And I made it clear that by August 31, 2010, America's combat mission in Iraq would end. And that is exactly what we are doing - as promised, on schedule."

At two or more recent fundraisers, he repeated the "pledge:"

"We are keeping the promise I made when I began my campaign for the presidency: by the end of this month, we will have removed 100,000 troops from Iraq, and our combat mission will be over."

Unmentioned was combat readiness remaining, paramilitary army additions replacing those leaving, shifting Iraq forces to Afghanistan, increasing hostilities against Pakistan, committing daily war crimes throughout the region, planning more conflicts ahead, continuing America's permanent war agenda, glorifying them in the name of peace, destroying generations of US youths by a never-ending cycle of imperial wars, not liberating ones.

No matter. US cable channels hailed the Iraq pullout like VJ day, none more cloyingly one-sided than MSNBC, devoting an entire evening for "embedded" coverage - "in bed with" for Studs Terkel (1912 - 2008), to report propaganda, not truths, regular media fare, round the clock on cable TV, MSNBC reporter Richard Engel exiting with troops in a specially equipped "Bloom-mobile" (named for NBC's late correspondent David Bloom), host Rachael Maddow in Baghdad, and Keith Olbermann anchoring coverage in New York, a trio doing what they do best - deceiving, not informing viewers, defending imperial wars, not condemning them.

The Economy Is Getting Worse and Worse - And No One's Doing a Thing About It

08/24/10

Danny Schechter
Alternet

People wait in line to enter a job fair in New York City. The demand for
jobless benefits in Ohio has nearly exhausted the state's unemployment
funds. (Associated Press)

We know we live in hard times that are on the verge of getting harder, with 500,000 new claims for unemployment last week, a recent record.

The stock market may be over for now as fear and panic drives small investors out. Big corporations hoard stashes of cash rather then hire workers. The D word (depression) is back in play.

Foreclosures are up, and the administration’s programs to stop them are down, well below their stated goals, only helping a sixth of those promised assistance.

And here’s a statistic for you: 300,000. That’s the number of foreclosure filings every month for the past 17 months. This year, 1.9 million homes will be lost, down from 2 million last year. Is that progress? In July alone, 92,858 homes were repossessed.

At the same time, the number of canceled mortgage modifications exceeded the number of successful ones. According to Ml-implode.com, last month, “the number of trial modification cancellations surged to 616,839, greatly outnumbering the 421,804 active permanent modifications."

And don’t think this problem only affects those homeowners about to go homeless. According to the New York Times, Michael Feder, the chief executive of the real estate data firm Radar Logic, says we are all at risk.

Masterminds, mosques and mass insanity

08/24/10

Larry Chin
Online Journal

"Insanity" by Wladyslaw Podkowinski

Exemplified by the furor over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” in New York, and rumors of a new Al-Qaeda “mastermind,” 9/11 “war on terrorism” propaganda has been ramped up to deafening levels by various political factions.

Nearly a decade since Bush/Cheney’s 9/11 false flag deception, a fearful, self-destructive American mass public remains fully brainwashed by “war on terrorism” deception -- ignorant of history, and militantly oblivious to facts.

“Ground Zero mosque”: the art of missing the point

The ludicrous uproar over plans to build a Muslim community center in New York, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” has dominated mainstream corporate news headlines. Political players from all sides, including President Barack Obama have joined the fray, attempting to prove themselves the superior “anti-terrorist,” or the better “commemorator of 9/11, when 3,000 people were killed by Muslim terrorists.” The right wing is going berserk, gleefully.

Heated arguments have exploded around religion, tolerance, democracy, etc. --everything except the only fact that matters: 9/11 was a false flag operation, courtesy of the Bush-Cheney administration, carried out by an elite consensus, in order to justify the “war on terrorism,” and everything that came with it. Mass murder. Unending resource conquest. A police state within US borders. Open criminality.

The perpetual threat posed by a fabricated outside enemy, and a militarized, fearful populace, remain the centerpieces of elite policy, and they have been consistently maintained by both Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations. The demonization of Muslims continues to facilitate pillage.

While violent hatred continues to be directed at Muslims (and all “foreigners”), the criminals who truly massacred 3,000 people in the World Trade Center continue to enjoy power, wealth, and high positions of world “leadership” and remain in control of virtually every aspect of society. Those who perpetuated the cover-up (including the Obama administration) still “run the world,” to mass public enthusiasm.

Wikileaks: The Real Stuff

08/23/10

Israel Shamir

WikiLeaks Афганистаны дайны тухай маш нууц материалуудыг
ил гаргав, by AagiiNxS [A tentative translation from Mongolian:
A spokesman for the Afghan military reported that a suspected
car bomb belonging to insurgents was neutralized.]

After the tremendous coup of Wikileaks, this semi-clandestine site and organisation, which had recently brought to public knowledge so many government crimes through so many hundreds of thousands of documents (with even more of the way), has predictably come under attack. Not only from Pentagon hacks, but also from various bodies we would expect to back them rather than knife them in the back.

Reporters Without Borders accused Wikileaks of being irresponsible, for having published the names of US agents in Afghanistan. This accusation reveals the true nature of these Reporters. They do not care about freedom of the press, they care about protecting American interests and American spies. Whoever is old enough to remember the revelations of Philip Agee will recognise the pattern: All of a sudden these guys, who normally do not mind murdering others, recognise their own mortality and vulnerability. This is very good. Spies and agents should be outed: it will cause them to behave responsibly.

So much for the pro-establishment line. What a pity that some of our friends in the blogosphere joined in the chorus of detractors. Theirs are familiar and respected names of the free web: F. William Engdahl, Gordon Duff, Zahir Ebrahim. Psychologically, one understands them. Could it be that all of a sudden we got such a windfall? Is it not a bit like those emails from Nigeria offering us millions for the simple information about our bank account? A diffident man is likely to get cold feet when a beautiful girl smiles back and proposes having a drink in a pub. The Wikileaks-deniers created an elaborate conspiracy theory: these hundreds of thousands of real documents were fabricated by the CIA and offered to an innocent public.

Political Killings in Colombia

08/23/10

Stephen Lendman

Colombia, America's closest South American ally, is a corrupted narco-state, a repressive death squad faux democracy, threatening regional neighbors, and reigning terror against trade unionists, human rights workers, campesinos, pro-democracy organizations, independent journalists, and legitimate resistance groups like the FARC-EP. Established in 1964, James Petras calls it the "longest standing, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement in the world," persisting valiantly for decades.

Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington's land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.

The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region's most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.

Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the "Uribe Doctrine," now his. It's extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.

As Uribe's Defense Minister, James Petras explained that Santos was an assassin, deploying military forces and paramilitary death squads

"to kill and terrorize entire population centers, (murdering) over 20,000 people....falsely labeled 'guerrillas.' "

When You Say No (or: Poisonous Mushrooms)

08/23/10

Uri Avnery
Uri Avnery's Column

BEFORE THE victory of feminism, there was a popular Israeli song in which the boy asks the girl: “When you say No, what do you mean?”

This question has already been answered. Now I am more and more tempted to ask: “When you say Zionism, what do you mean?”

That is also my answer when asked whether I am a Zionist.

When you say Zionist, what do you mean?

LATELY, ASSOCIATIONS for the defense of Zionism have been springing up like mushrooms after rain. Poisonous mushrooms.

All kinds of American Jewish multi-millionaires – many of them Casino kings, brothel moguls, money launderers and tax evaders - are financing “patriotic” Israeli groups in Israel, to fight the holy war for “Zionism”.

The assault takes place along all the fronts. Jewish organizations aim at cleansing the universities of post-Zionists. They threaten to induce other donors to withhold their donations, they terrorize presidents and rectors and frighten professors and students.

Americans may be reminded of the sinister era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who blighted the life of thousands of intellectuals and artists, pushing many of them into exile or suicide. Europeans might be reminded of the days when “Aryan” professors informed on their treasonous colleagues, and students in brown shirts threw their Jewish colleagues out of the windows.

This is only one sector of the broad offensive. One group has proudly announced that it is teaching hundreds of professional Zionists how to cleanse Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, of post-Zionist items and plant Zionist ones in their stead.

Iraq war dissenter Kelly’s postmortem report remains secret

08/23/10

Christopher King
Redress

British Attorney-General Dominic Grieve’s response to widespread calls for Dr David Kelly’s postmortem files to be released continues to indicate that the government is hiding something of importance, argues Christopher King.

Dr Kelly allegedly committed suicide when identified as the high-profile within-government dissenter from the Blair government’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction immediately prior to the Iraq war. His postmortem files are secret.

Although, when in opposition, Mr Grieve undertook to review the Kelly records, now that he is in government he declines to do so. He insists that Kenneth Clarke, the justice secretary, should make any decision to release them. He is quoted as saying,

● It’s right to say that hunches, theories are not enough – there has to be evidence. And if the evidence is available and people feel that they have the evidence, then if they send it to me it will be considered

● I have no reason to think ... and not a shred of evidence to suggest that there has been a cover up. I know that some people have put some theories forward but if you’re going to put a theory forward like that you need some evidence and as matters stand at the moment I haven’t seen.

Israel, Big Money and Obama

08/22/10

Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Report

Wealthy Americans whose paramount issue is unlimited support for Israel create huge distortions in U.S. politics, bending presidents to their will. Barack Obama’s career has long been nurtured by one such billionaire hyper-Zionist, who hopes to instigate an attack on Iran.

“Barack Obama has established a strong record as a true friend of Israel, a stalwart defender of Israel’s security, and an effective advocate of strengthening the steadfast U.S.-Israel relationship, publicly stating that Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state should never be challenged.” – Lester Crown

Lester Crown is a Chicagoan with a net worth of four billion dollars. He owns a large stake in and is a former president and board chairman of defense contractor General Dynamics. He also has held large holdings in Hilton Hotels, Maytag (now Whirlpool), and the Chicago Bulls and New York Yankees.

Crown was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s candidacy first for the U.S. Senate, and then for president. He is one of the first and one of his most prodigious fundraisers. As the Obama presidential campaign website says, the candidate “… systematically built a sophisticated, and in many ways quite conventional, money machine.” The Crowns were an integral part of that machinery. One of Lester Crown’s children, James Crown, personally bundled $500,000 in campaign contributions for Obama and served as chairman of the Illinois fund raising effort. Lester Crown and his wife Renee hosted a fundraiser for Obama in 2007 at their home. The event invitation made it clear; their support for Obama was due to his support of Israel, its “right to exist“ and his willingness to strike militarily against Iran.

The Charade Announced: Latest Israeli No-Peace/Peace Talks for September

08/22/10

Stephen Lendman

On August 21, Haaretz writer Natasha Mozgovaya headlined, "Israel, Palestinians accept US invitation to direct peace talks," saying:

They'll "restart direct talks on Sept. 2 in a modest step toward forging a peace deal within 12 months to create a Palestinian state and peacefully end one of the world's most intractable conflicts."

Another grand illusion is assured, fudged to look real. Henry Kissinger coined the phrase "constructive ambiguity," meaning to give negotiations an appearance of progress. For others, it's putting lipstick on a pig or how Edward Said described the Oslo Accords and Declaration of Principles, saying:

"the fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people's rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton's performance, like a 20th century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance, (and) the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation."

It was unilateral surrender, a Palestinian Versailles, affirming Israel's colonial agenda, giving the Palestinians nothing but the right to be Israel's enforcer. All major issues were deferred, including an independent Palestinian state, the right of return, the future of settlements, borders, water rights, and status of Jerusalem as sovereign Palestinian territory and future home of its capital.

Seventeen years later, they're still unresolved and won't be this time, another grand illusion planned, the same outcome assured - betrayal by unilateral surrender, or as much of it as Abbas dare give.

An earlier article titled, "Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception," reviewed earlier efforts since the mid-1970s, quoting Netanyahu once calling the peace process "a waste of time," negotiating solely for Israeli dominance, the article accessed through THIS link.

None Dare Call It Tyranny

08/22/10

Sheldon Richman¨
The Future of Freedom Foundation

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults. It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

“Without A Revolution, Americans Are History.”

08/21/10

Paul Craig Roberts
VDARE.com

The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times Column, Welcome to the Recovery.

As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echoes from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David Stockman, who excoriated the Republican Party for becoming big-spending Democrats.

It is encouraging to see a bit of realization that, this time, Washington cannot spend the economy out of recession. The deficits are already too large for the dollar to survive as reserve currency, and deficit spending cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been moved offshore.

However, the solutions offered by those who are beginning to recognize that there is a problem are discouraging. Kotlikoff thinks the solution is massive Social Security and Medicare cuts or massive tax increases or hyperinflation to destroy the massive debts.

Perhaps economists lack imagination, or perhaps they don’t want to be cut off from Wall Street and corporate subsidies, but Social Security and Medicare are insufficient at their present levels, especially considering the erosion of private pensions by the dot com, derivative and real estate bubbles. Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15% of their earnings all their life, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.

Tax increases make even less sense. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of households cannot survive on one job. Both husband and wife work and often one of the partners has two jobs in order to make ends meet. Raising taxes makes it harder to make ends meet—thus more foreclosures, more food stamps, more homelessness. What kind of economist or humane person thinks this is a solution?

Ah, but we will tax the rich. The usual idiocy. The rich have enough money. They will simply stop earning. Let’s get real. Here is what the government is likely to do.

Israeli Academic Freedom at Risk

08/21/10

Stephen Lendman

Dr. Ilan Pappe

Born in Haifa, the son of German-Jewish immigrants who fled during the Nazi period, noted historian Ilan Pappe left Israel in summer 2007, telling London Guardian writer Chris Arnot he began "feeling for a while like public enemy No. 1" for his anti-Zionist views and supporting a boycott against Israeli universities, saying:

"I supported (it) because I believe that without pressure, Israel will not end the occupation....I believe that things would change only if Israel receives a strong message that as long as the occupation continues it would not be a legitimate member of the international community, and that until then its academics, doctors and authors would not be welcome. A similar boycott was imposed on South Africa. It took 21 years, but it eventually led to the end of Apartheid."

Now chairing Britain's Exeter University's history department, he explained by the time he left, the Knesset publicly condemned him and Israel's education minister, Yuli Tamir, wanted him sacked.

In addition, death threats came by mail, email and phone, and his picture once appeared in Israel's "biggest-selling newspaper at the centre of a target," the caption reading: "I'm not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn't be surprised if someone did."

An environment this hostile got him to leave, the same one today afflicting other Israeli academics, opposing policies they don't accept, nor should anyone respecting the rule of law, democratic freedoms, and equal justice, endangered species in Israel for Jews - non-existent for Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arab citizens.

Israel Tries to "Goldstone" International Investigation of Flotilla Attack

08/21/10

Ian Williams
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

In the West Bank village of Bil’in, where nonviolent protests against Israel’s
apartheid wall are held every Friday, a foreign journalist wearing a gas mask
throws an Israeli soldier to the ground near a model of a Gaza Freedom Flotilla
ship, June 4, 2010. (AFP photo/Abbas Momani)

THE FIRST week in May saw a media storm in Israel when the Hebrew tabloid Yediot Ahronot broke the news that, while he was an appeals court judge in apartheid South Africa, Richard Goldstone was in some way linked to rejecting the appeals of 28 death sentences.

As one of Napoleon's generals said of the emperor's kidnapping and execution of a member of the royal family, "It's worse than a crime—it's a blunder." Even more than the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead, Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a self-inflicted diplomatic disaster, which it seems to be determined to exacerbate. One of the problems for the Israeli worldview is that it tends to use Capitol Hill as a mirror: if the suckers there will swallow the big lies, the reasoning goes, so will everyone else.

And it is true, the suckers did some impressive swallowing. To see so-called progressives like New York City Reps. Charles Rangel and Jerry Nadler standing in Times Square calling upon the State Department to deny entry to witnesses of the attack on the flotilla was almost as nauseating as the cold-blooded murder of the nine crew members. As Patrick Buchanan teasingly pointed out (see p. 14), it is as if they supported the gunning down of the Freedom Marchers in the South, or the summary execution of Rosa Parks for sitting in the wrong part of the bus.

Millions of Pakistani flood victims face continuing crisis

08/21/10

Vilani Peiris
WSWS

After a two-day session of the UN General Assembly ended yesterday, the amount of international aid pledged for Pakistani flood victims still fell well short of the $US460 million in emergency aid that the UN has appealed for. For all of the cynical displays of concern for the fate of the Pakistani people at the UN meeting, the issue of aid was dominated by the narrow self-interest of the major powers.

Addressing the UN on Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US would contribute an additional $60 million in aid to Pakistan, bringing its total to more than $150 million, of which about $92 million would go to the UN. In calling for other countries to do more, she declared: “I realise that many countries, including my own, are facing tough economic conditions and very tight budgets … But we must answer the Pakistani request for help.”

Washington’s aid effort, however, is not motivated by concern for the estimated 20 million Pakistanis impacted by the floods. Rather the Obama administration is driven by the need to prop up the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari, on which the US relies to wage a proxy war on Islamist insurgents in areas bordering Afghanistan. US officials have warned that organisations sympathetic to the Islamist fighters might gain in influence as a result of government and international inaction on the floods.

As for “very tight budgets”, the Obama administration’s offer of aid is a pittance compared to the trillions of dollars spent to fund the bailouts of US banks, financial institutions and corporations during 2008-09. In fact, the White House is implementing austerity measures against working people in the US and provides limited aid to Pakistani flood victims precisely because it has taken massive corporate bad debts onto the government’s books. At the same time, Obama can find tens of billions of dollars to escalate the US-led war in Afghanistan.

Why Wikileaks Must Be Protected

08/20/10

John Pilger
johnpilger.com

On 26 July, Wikileaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. Wikileaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times are a fraction.

There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “hunted down” and “rendered”. In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defence Department official and asked, “Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?” He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything”. He referred me to the “ongoing criminal investigation” of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to “fatally marginalise” Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.

The Secrets in Israel’s Archives

08/20/10

Jonathan Cook
Antiwar

"[The] documents suggested that heavily armed Jewish forces had expelled and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine [...] One document in particular, Plan Dalet, demonstrated the army’s intention to expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence explains the ethnic cleansing of more than 80 percent of Palestinians in the war, followed by a military campaign to destroy hundreds of villages to ensure the refugees never returned."

History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.

That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.

The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.

The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel’s "adherence to international law," while the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations."

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