Gordon Duff
Veterans Today

We Know They Know But They Don't Care

This week, most members of congress, 100% of the new “Tea Party,” swore allegiance to the State of Israel. To those of us at Veterans Today, we have a problem with this. We have never been all that enthusiastic about Congress in the first place. They are a gutless bunch who feather their own nests, finance their campaigns with laundered drug money and have turned Washington into a modern day Gomorrah, a city of rent boys and call girls.

We have a few issues to pick with Israel.

There is no way any loyal member of the United States military or veteran of its services is likely to “kiss and make up” with Israel until we receive an official apology for the attack on the USS Liberty. Even the “official” veterans organizations, generally a gutless bunch made up of the same spineless sycophants as congress, have spoken up on this one.

Our next issue is 9/11. We know Israel was involved in a major way though there is no way Israel alone could have ordered NORAD to ground its planes. We know members of all key committees in Congress were given a “top secret” briefing on 9/11 and told the following things:

● The World Trade Center was destroyed, not by planes but because of a “national security issue” in order to “save lives.”
● The attack on the Pentagon was not the hijacked aircraft claimed but a different cause that is “classified.”
● The subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were necessary for the US to maintain control of energy resources to prevent economic collapse.
● Israel “assisted” the United States on 9/11 and may “appear” culpable but was not.

These things are childish lies, of course. The perverts, cowards and gullible rubes that make up congress, one of the most corrupt institutions on earth, were beaming with self importance, having been briefed on a great conspiracy. After all, many members of congress went to college, some to law school, and are much more deserving and certainly much more important than “normal people.” We call this condition “malignant narcissism.”

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Jesse Walker
Reason Magazine

Three lessons from the week's disasters

An 8.9 earthquake, a 33-foot tsunami, a series of crises at their battered nuclear plants: The people of Japan have withstood the last week with admirable tenacity. There's no shortage of lessons the rest of the world can learn from what we've been seeing. Here are three of them.

1. People are resilient. Disaster movies and disaster research might as well come from different planets. When Hollywood shows you an earthquake, an eruption, or a towering inferno, you see mass panic, stampeding crowds, maybe a looting spree. When sociologists study real-life disasters, they see calm, resourceful people evacuating buildings, rescuing strangers, and cooperating nonviolently. How cooperative can people be? "At a convenience store in one battered coastal prefecture," The Washington Post reported shortly after the Sendai quake, "a store manager used a private electric generator. When it stopped working and the cash register no longer opened, customers waiting in line returned their items to the shelves."

These patterns shift somewhat from culture to culture, and if a disaster coincides with certain conditions —severe class distinctions, a serious pre-existing crime problem, a police department that's especially corrupt—a post-disaster riot may break out. But that's the exception, not the rule. On Monday, Ed West of the London Telegraph asked with awe, "Why is there no looting in Japan?" A better query would be, "When people do loot, what prompted the plunder?"

So it shouldn't be a surprise to see survivors keeping their heads, sharing food and other resources, and doing all they can to contain the damage. That's what usually happens after an earthquake. It's just that most Americans haven't read about, say, the Kobe quake of 1995, when the disaster researchers Kathleen Tierney and James D. Goltz reported that "Spontaneous volunteering and emergent group activity were very widespread throughout the emergency period; community residents provided a wide range of goods and services to their fellow earthquake victims, and large numbers of people traveled from other parts of the country to offer aid." When westerners imagine Japanese people facing a catastrophe, they're more likely to picture an agitated mob fleeing Godzilla. Then they're taken aback when real life doesn't resemble a flick about a fictional fire-breathing lizard.

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Stephen Lendman

Japan's deepening disaster affects everyone. Atmospheric radiation will spread globally, mostly affecting the northern hemisphere. Everyone to some extent will be affected, those in Japan and nearby the most.

An unprecedented catastrophe is unfolding. You'd hardly know it from most major media reports, including US broadcast and cable channels, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting, BBC, and Al Jazeera, failing to explain a deepening catastrophe placing millions of lives at risk.

On March 16, however, Russia Today said Japan

"may be losing control" at Fukushima after a rise in radiation suggests efforts to contain the disaster aren't working. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson told the Washington Post that evacuating most workers

gn to me that they have given up trying to prevent a disaster and gone into the mode of trying to clean up afterward."

Unit 1 exploded on March 12, Unit 3 on March 14. On March 15, other blasts rocked Units 2 and 4. Fires broke out, the latest at Unit 4. Reports say it's contained. Unexplained is whether thousands of fuel rods are melting.

All six plant reactors broke down. Four so far experienced explosions. Others could happen any time. Four are in serious trouble. All face potential full meltdowns, perhaps ongoing at one or more reactors, but government and media reports won't say.

On March 16, Al Jazeera said Fukushima operations were suspended because of dangerously high radiation levels. Other reports suggested partial resumption. Workers brave enough to do so face death. Hundreds of thousands of Chernobyl "liquidators" experienced major illnesses or died.

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Joseph Dana and Noam Sheizaf
The Nation

As the controversial 443 highway, which connects Tel Aviv with Jerusalem by passing through the West Bank, begins to curve toward Israel’s capital, the eye is inevitably drawn to an imposing gray structure with massive concrete walls, part of the Ofer Military Prison. Commuters are barely aware of what takes place behind those walls, and that’s no accident—the Ofer compound, comprising a military court, detention center and prison, is just one of many black holes that enable Israelis to go on with their daily lives, unaware of the everyday realities of the occupation.

Inside, a man in shackles enters the courtroom. He is wearing a brown prison suit, and his exhausted eyes exchange glances with his wife. The two haven’t met outside the courtroom in more than a year, and for some reason the prison guards are frantically moving the wife so she doesn’t sit too close to her husband, who is officially a “security risk.” Soon the military judge, outfitted in a light green Israel Defense Forces (IDF) uniform and an army beret, enters the room and begins the proceedings.

This trial could be any one of the thousands that have taken place at Ofer. Israeli military justice is swift and unflinching: according to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, the conviction rate at Ofer is an astounding 99.7 percent. Hearings are short, and apart from relatives who use the opportunity to see their loved ones, nobody bothers to attend or report on the proceedings. But today is different. The small courtroom is full, with twenty European diplomats—including the British general consul, Sir Vincent Fean—as well as a handful of Israelis who have become close to the prisoner through years of joint action.

The prisoner, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a 39-year-old schoolteacher and father of three, has already been convicted and has served a sentence for incitement and organizing illegal protests in the West Bank village of Bil’in. But after a prosecutor’s appeal, the judge ordered that he be kept in prison. Abu Rahmah would later receive an additional six months of prison time.

It wasn’t only friendship that brought the Israelis to Ofer. They see the case against Abu Rahmah as part of a new effort to crush unarmed resistance in the West Bank. For them, Abu Rahmah is not just another Palestinian activist. By leading the mostly nonviolent weekly protests in his village against Israel’s separation wall, he has become the face of a new uprising against the occupation and a key player in a kind of activism that has united Jews, Palestinians and people from around the world—one that carries a message of hope, something as unusual and unexpected in this part of the world as the recent uprisings that have toppled Arab tyrannies. It is a hope that can even penetrate the forbidding walls of the Ofer military compound.

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