Mehdi Hasan
New Statesman

"Israel", the most used word in the american congress

The US Congress is so in thrall to the American Israel lobby AIPAC that it more of a hindrance to the peace process than the Knesset itself.

"I had 700 days of 'no' in Northern Ireland, and one 'yes'," remarked George Mitchell in May 2010. A year on, and having spent more than 800 days in the Middle East with no sign of a "yes" on the horizon in Ramallah or Tel Aviv, the frustrated former senator announced his resignation as President Obama's peace envoy to the region.

Cue much hand-wringing about the future of the "peace process". But there is nothing new about the Obama administration's failure to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table; peace talks have been on hold since 2008. As the mild-mannered Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, a long-time ally of the US, noted in a recent interview: "It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump."

Obama, however, like George W Bush before him, is a distraction. When it comes to the US's Middle East policy, true power and influence lies elsewhere. Pronouncements from the executive branch of the US government attract much of the attention of foreign governments and the world's media; few outside (or, for that matter, inside) the US pay attention to the behaviour of the country's legislature when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

It is Congress that passes resolution after resolution backing Israel and condemning the Palestinians; it is Congress that approves arms sales to Israel and grants Tel Aviv billions of dollars in aid. Presidents, secretaries of state and special envoys come and go; meanwhile, Congress, whether Republican- or Democrat-controlled, always stands four-square behind Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

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Stephen Lendman

Dr. Aafia at graduation and after having been tortured by the US.

"Stereotypically called culturally inferior, dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy, religiously fanatical, and violent, [Muslims] have been prejudicially called Islamofascists, "terrorists," or a homeland fifth column. Their fate became summary judgment - no due process, judicial fairness, or innocent unless proved guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt by an impartial jury of their peers. Aafia is their poster child, an innocent woman brutalized and condemned to spend the rest of her life in maximum security confinement, meant for America's "worst of the worst" criminals."

On September 23, the FBI headlined, "Aafia Siddiqui Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court to 86 Years for Attempting to Murder US Nationals in Afghanistan and Six Additional Crimes." More on its press release below.

No matter that she's completely innocent, and has been a US political prisoner since her March 30, 2003 abduction, incarceration, torture, prosecution, and conviction on bogus charges. Her case is one of America's most egregious examples of horrific abuse and injustice, climaxed by her virtual life sentence for an alleged crime she never committed.

Yet she was convicted for these claimed felonies:

(1) one count of trying to kill US nationals outside the US;
(2) one count of trying to kill US officers and employees;
(3) one count of armed assault of US officers and employees;
(4) one count of using and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence; and
(5) three counts of assault of US officers and employees.

Earlier articles about her can be accessed through the following links here, here, here and here.

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Mehdi Hasan

Advocates of torture on the left and the right cling to the myth of the ticking bomb.

"You are going to tell me what I want to know - it's just a matter of how much you want it to hurt." So says Jack Bauer, the fictional Counter-Terrorist Unit agent in the award-winning TV show 24. Over the past eight seasons, dead-eyed Bauer has beaten, stabbed, shot, suffocated, drugged, hooded and electrocuted an assortment of dark-skinned, bearded baddies in order to make them "talk" and stop one terrorist attack after another.

I have my own confession to make. I adore Jack Bauer. Like millions of fellow fans, I can't help but be in awe of him. Why? He's a man of action, a hero who will do anything it takes to save lives. In the words of one liberal commentator, "men want to be him, and women want to be there to hand him the electrical cord".

However, in my saner moments, I'm able to distinguish fact from fiction. For example, the "ticking bomb" scenario - of an evil terrorist in our custody who possesses critical knowledge of a time bomb about to explode and kill thousands - has no basis in reality, although it appears on 24 with unnerving frequency. "Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is," acknowledges Kiefer Sutherland, the actor and noted Hollywood liberal, who plays Bauer.

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Mehdi Hasan

[Tony Blair:] "As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

Blair, Bush, Chilcot and the Israelis.

I haven't been able to bring myself to blog on the Iraq inquiry since last Friday, when we were all transfixed by Tony Blair's defiant and unrepentant testimony. Sir John Chilcot and his team of long-winded, deferential establishment worthies did a stunningly inept and incomplete job, allowing our former premier -- as is his nature -- to duck, weave, dodge, distort and evade.

I felt like throwing my remote control at the television.

Here's Bob Marshall-Andrews, Labour MP and Queen's Counsel, writing in the Guardian:

Answer after answer descended into self-serving waffle of total irrelevance. His love of America, his closeness to President Clinton, his admiration for the armed forces, the indescribable nastiness of Saddam, "the calculus of risk" (what?), his experience as a junior barrister, even his silly asides to Fern Britton expanded endlessly to suffocate meaning. No one demanded a straight answer. No one deplored the obvious strategy of delay.

In the morass, essential questions surfaced briefly, were avoided and remained, amazingly, ignored. Question: "Had President Chirac phoned to say that his position was being misrepresented out of context?" Answer: "I remember speaking to Chirac on a number of occasions." Yes? And? What is the answer? We will never know, as the examination drifted gently on to another topic, and obscurity remained.

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Mehdi Hasan

"Obama is a warmonger, no different from Bush"

What is your earliest memory?
I was only four days old when the Russian
puppet regime was installed in Afghanistan [in 1978]. One of my earliest memories is of clinging to my mother's legs while police ransacked our house, looking for my father. They turned it upside down, emptying everything out of drawers, ripping open mattresses and pillows.

Do you still hope to return to the Afghan parliament?
Yes. I have challenged my illegal suspension in court, although in two years there has been no progress. But I still want to return, to raise the voice of my voiceless people and expose the parliament's reactionary nature from within.

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Mehdi Hasan

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, our prime minister insisted that he didn’t want war – yet he rushed headlong into it anyway, based on a hunch. Here, experts he ignored at the time judge him in a way the Chilcot inquiry may fail to do.

On 25 February 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, and in one of his most important speeches as prime minister, Tony Blair stood up before the House of Commons to deliver a statement on Saddam Hussein and the crisis in the Middle East.

“I detest his regime," he said, in a passionate address to sceptical MPs on both sides of the house. "But even now, he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." He added, solemnly: "I do not want war."

It is perhaps on this single Commons statement that the entire case against Blair rests. Is it true that he did "not want war"? Could Saddam have saved his regime? As the Conservative former prime minister John Major - who supported the war - remarked in a BBC radio interview in January: "The suspicion arises that this was more about regime change than it was about weapons of mass destruction."

“Regime change" is a euphemism for the unilateral and often violent overthrow of a ­foreign government. Regime change is illegal under international law - and has become, in recent days and weeks, the chief focus of the Iraq inquiry led by the former Whitehall mandarin John Chilcot.

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08/18/09 Eric Margolis The US Denounces Iran While running fake elections in Afghanistan
08/18/09 Chris Floyd The Gadarene Gambit: Surging Over the Cliff in Afghanistan
08/20/09 Pepe Escobar The Afghan pipe dream
08/28/09 Patrick Martin Washington’s double standard: The elections in Iran and Afghanistan
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10/22/09 Eric S. Margolis Flames From Afghanistan Ignite Pakistan
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11/04/09 Malalai Joya Speech of Malalai Joya: No nation can liberate another
11/05/09 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Why the UN is so disturbed at the Murder of the Western Nationals?
11/05/09 William Bowles The nerve of these guys! Karzai 'wins' anyway
11/06/09 William Bowles Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires or just a graveyard with a pipeline running through it?
11/06/09 Gwynne Dyer Last Exit From Afghanistan
11/12/09 Christopher King The Afghanistan war on Remembrance Sunday
11/17/09 Pepe Escobar UNDER THE AFPAK VOLCANO: Welcome to Pashtunistan
11/23/09 Olivia Ward 'Liberation was just a big lie'
11/24/09 Eric S. Margolis The Pot Calls The Kettle Black
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12/03/09 Stephen Lendman Obamathink on Afghanistan: Escalate to Exit
12/03/09 Justin Raimondo Obama’s War Speech: An Unconvincing Flop
12/11/09 William Blum The Anti-Empire Report -Yeswecanistan
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01/02/10 Peter Dale Scott Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War
01/08/10 What Really Happened Afghan My Lai Massacre
01/20/10 Jeremy Scahill Blackwater Wants to Surge its Armed Force in Afghanistan
01/21/10 Jeffrey Kaye Afghanistan: Women Dying and Torture Run Amuck
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02/28/10 Gwynne Dyer Afghanistan guerrilla war will have a predictable result
02/02/10 Anand Gopal Terror comes at night in Afghanistan
02/03/10 Mehdi Hasan Malalai Joya Intervieved by Mehdi Hasan
02/03/10 Nick Turse Drone surge: Today, tomorrow and 2047
02/15/10 Johann Hari Obama's secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all
02/15/10 Chris Floyd The Last Station: Surging Into the Savage Past in Afghanistan
02/17/10 Chris Floyd All Systems Go: No Disfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise
02/17/10 Chris Floyd Collateral Accumulation: Passing on the Abiding Wisdom of Empire
02/20/10 David Lindorff Battle for Marjah: The US has Already Lost
02/21/10 Christopher King Dutch government falls over Afghanistan
02/24/10 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Marjah Operations are an Exemplary Lesson for the Invaders
02/24/10 Chris Floyd Many Thousand Gone
02/28/10 Gwynne Dyer Afghanistan guerrilla war will have a predictable result
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03/07/10 James Lucas Destroying Afghanistan
03/09/10 Gareth Porter Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War
03/12/10 Chris Floyd Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion
03/16/10 David Lindorff This Time It's Pregnant Women: Another US Atrocity in the Bush-Obama War in Afghanistan
03/20/10 Chris Floyd Night Riders: Afghan Atrocity and American Values
03/27/10 Chris Floyd An Unaccustomed Truth: American Commander Admits Afghan Atrocities
03/30/10 Rethink Afghanistan NATO Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller in Afghanistan After Killing Pregnant Women
03/30/10 Bill Van Auken Obama’s visit underscores US crisis in Afghanistan
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04/01/10 Richard North "We will not prevail in Afghanistan"
04/03/10 Victor Korgun The Afghan dilemma
04/06/10 Stephen Lendman US-Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan
04/06/10 Tom Eley US Special Forces covered up massacre of Afghans
04/06/10 Stephen Lendman US-Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan
04/14/10 Marc W. Herold Obama’s Unspoken Trade-Off: Dead US/NATO Occupation Troops versus Dead Afghan Civilians?
04/16/10 The Anti Press Special Forces Death Squads in Afghanistan
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