Stephen Lendman

At least since the Oslo Accords, Fatah has served Israel more than its own people. On August 25, Haaretz highlighted the latest example, headling "PA arrests dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad militants in West Bank," saying, a PA source confirmed dozens made, including "high ranking officials in (both) organizations."

On September 6, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said hundreds were made in response to the killings of four West Bank settlers, adding, "The decision to carry out the attack was politically motivated and intended to embarrass the Palestinian Authority."

True or not, those affected included teachers, traders, workers, students, professionals, and imams, unrelated to the incident, Fatah's Preventive Security Services and General Intelligence Services doing Israel's dirty work, while President Mahmoud Abbas collaborates during the latest sham peace talks.

Hamas responded harshly, urging supporters resist arrest by confronting PA police with force, accusing President Mahmoud Abbas of betraying his own people by "collaborating with the Occupation." Its sources also said 750 West Bank Hamas members and leaders were arrested, many tortured, and prevented from seeing their families.

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Maidhc Ó Cathail
My Catbird Seat

Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.” It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars.

For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.”

But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?” Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool.

In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.”

“Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States … American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”

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Les Visible
Smoking Mirrors

“Number 9, Number 9” to quote one of The Beatles. It’s the 9th anniversary of Israel’s attack on the United States and things are finally moving at a pretty good clip toward exposure of the truth. People are collecting money to put ads on television. Individuals around the world are doing what they can (Time Advert) to bring reality out of the darkness of suffocating materialism and cheap glamour. You can feel it. Critical mass has been reached in respect of 9/11. There’s no way to hide it any longer. This is somewhat troubling at the same time because it means that those who did 9/11= Israel, portions of the American intelligence community, M1-6 and certain strategic fellow travelers abroad; such as Michael Ledeen, are at it again, racing against an invisible clock, to distract the world from their being dragged into the light of day.

If you’ve been asleep for the last nine years; drunk on Sterno under a bridge abutment, or formerly brainwashed but getting suspicious, then I’m going to recommend two sites, where you can get all you are going to need to know to convince yourself beyond all possibility of doubt that 9/11 was not done by Bin Laden and a small cabal of Stone Age Arabs.

Drum roll please; those sites would be, “Israel did 9/11 – All the Proof in the World” and “It wasn’t Muslims”. I’m recommending that everyone who reads here send this posting to at least one friend or associate who is still wearing their jock strap on their heads or still in deep denial about what these pages conclusively prove and ask them to go to these links and then spin it as they can. I heard where someone said, “Even if it were true, I wouldn’t believe it” the other day. Now that is denial. Some more info from the redoubtable Michael Rivero can be found here, here, here and here.

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Les Visible
Smoking Mirrors

[Article originally published on August 6, 2007]

What is the most outrageous piece of news that isn’t being discussed? I would venture to say it is the strange tale of Dov Zakheim and the missing trillions. I hear all kinds of numbers. I hear 2.3 trillion from Rumsfield and I hear about one trillion that Zakheim can’t explain. Still, you’ll need to check the dates of Zakheim’s days in the saddle as Pentagon Comptroller and then you can wonder to your hearts content. There’s no doubt the money is gone and there’s no doubt about who should know where it went but…what do I know? I know one trillion dollars is a lot of money. Isn’t one trillion dollars a million million? Zounds!!!

Has the cost of the entire Iraqi incursion come to a trillion dollars yet? It certainly isn’t anywhere near 2.3 trillion. Why isn’t this under discussion? Is it just too big a thing, too enormous to comprehend, that our minds go blank when we think about it? Hmmm…

There are a number of researched sources for all of the details you need to get a grasp of the situation. I’m not going to go into that kind of detail here. It’s been done better than I can manage at places like here and here. This last link gives you many further links. You might want to read some of this before you continue here. And you should probably read this by the author of the first link.

The man at the center of this sub rosa controversy is Dov Zakheim. Here is what is said about him.

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