Palestinian Pundit

Western Arms Merchants Emptying The Pockets Of Gulf Arabs After Scaring Them About The "Iranian Threat"
Will The Arabs Ever Learn?

By Kurt Nimmo

".....“In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward quotes General Tommy Franks—appalled at the quality of intelligence about Iraq—railing that Feith, then the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was ‘the f—king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.’”

Either Franks is being disingenuous or he is the “the f—king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” As a former Pentagon bureaucrat, Franks should know about Feith’s shady, traitorous past. Douglas Feith, after all, was deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three position at the Pentagon, from July 2001 to August 2005. Feith was fingered by the FBI as an Israel First traitor, as he apparently passed confidential Pentagon documents to AIPAC, an act that would get Feith lined up against the nearest brick wall and shot by an impromptu firing squad in some countries. Here, he is rewarded with a posh academic position at Georgetown University, thus demonstrating that crime indeed pays.

Franks seems to think Feith was acting out of stupidity when he released all kinds of “cooked intelligence,” i.e., lies, over at the Office of Special Plans, an outfit created the day after the September 11, 2001, attacks by the Grand Wizard neocon, Paul Wolfowitz, an Israel Firster and PNAC insider subsequently rewarded with a position over at the World Bank, the world-class loan sharking operation responsible for untold suffering and misery in the third world.

Feith was not stupid. He is a conniving Zionist agent, tasked with creating scary and entirely implausible camp fire stories designed to push the United States into invasions and wars not in its interest, although certainly in the interest of Israel......"

Ladies And Gentlemen, Please Welcome The FAMAS "Government"
Let The Celebrations Begin!
(I still prefer Barney)

Merkel warns Iran on nuclear issue

"Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said world leaders had resolved to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

In a speech to the Munich conference on security policy, Chancellor Merkel said: "We are all determined to prevent the threat of an Iran with a military nuclear programme."

She said the Islamic republic must conform with international demands to stop enriching uranium "without ifs and buts and without tricks".

"What we are talking about here is a very, very sensitive technology and so we need a high degree of transparency, which Iran has failed to provide, and if Iran does not do this it risks falling deeper into isolation."......"

A Very Good Piece
By Kurt Nimmo

"Recall, back in May of 2004, a superficially contrite New York Times editorial staff admitting it published “questionable” information about claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, information that ultimately paved the way for the slaughter of 650,000 Iraqis......

“We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight,” the newspaper concluded.

Of course, the New York Times didn’t really mean it, as “unfinished business” would necessitate sweeping out the rogues and neocon agents ensconced deeply within its editorial offices. One such rogue is Michael R. Gordon, “the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion,” notes Greg Mitchell, writing for Editor and Publisher......

Gordon is at it again. “The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad,” the seasoned propagandist is allowed to write.

As expected, the race is on to sell us another murderous pretext, thus demonstrating we are indeed a nation of chumps.....

“U.S. military commanders in Iraq have shown members of Congress explosive devices that bear Iranian markings as evidence Tehran is supplying Iraqi militants with bombs, a senior U.S. government official said Saturday,” reports Forbes.....

In normal, non-Bushzarro times, with a semi-cognizant public in attendance, the fact this “evidence” is vetted by Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a congressional cheerleader for Israeli and American war crimes nonpareil, would be highly suspect, to say the least. “One of the lawmakers, independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, said he has seen some of the evidence, though he would not be specific. ‘I’m convinced from what I’ve seen that the Iranians are supplying and are giving assistance to the people in Iraq who are killing American soldiers,’ said Lieberman, who was attending an international security conference in Munich,”.....

So-called “national security officials” are about ready to proffer “materials,” said to consist of in part “slides and 2 inches of documents,” providing “evidence” of “Iran’s role in supplying Iraqi militants with highly sophisticated and lethal improvised explosive devices and other weaponry,” never mind the nagging question of why exactly Iran would collude with the Iraqi resistance, composed in large part of former enemies......

As the Guardian reports, the neocons are antsy to get moving with their mass murder campaign, blaming Bush for apparent reluctance, if such can be believed. For instance, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of David Wurmser, the neocon accused of spying for AIPAC at the behest of Israel, “is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq.” Of course, she really means making the Arab and Muslim Middle East “safer” for Israel, as Ms. Wurmser is a Revisionist-Herut-Likud “scholar” and co-founder and director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, along with Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence. MEMRI specializes in mistranslating Arabic and Farsi, most notably the speeches of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, thus preparing the groundwork for an attack designed to kill Iranian toddlers and grandmothers.

Another blood-thirsty neocon, Josh Muravchik, purportedly a “Middle East specialist” at the American Enterprise Institute, the criminal organization where Bush gets his “minds,” is “among its most vocal supporters of such a strike” against Iran, although of late he has voiced frustration with the Bushites, as has Wurmser. “The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air.” In lieu of an attack, Muravchik and Wurmser advocate meddling in Iranian domestic affairs, unleashing officially declared terrorist groups against the Iranian people, including Mujahideen-e Khalq, the wacky Marxist cult led by husband and wife team Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. In the 1970s, MEK killed U.S. military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran, not that Dr. Wurmser and Josh Muravchik can be bothered by such niggling details, as their primary focus is Israel, not America.

Finally, as if to demonstrate hysterical propaganda here in the heartland knows no bounds, the Associated Press tells us Iran school kids are being trained as suicide bombers. “Textbooks used in Iran’s schools are instilling students with hatred toward the West, especially the United States, and urging them to become ‘martyrs’ in a global holy war against countries perceived to be enemies of Islam, a new study says,” the news agency reports. “The books emphasize the teachings of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and repeatedly refer to the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ and to Israel as ‘the regime that occupies Jerusalem,’ said the study by the Israel-based Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace,” described as “a shadowy pro-Israel group” by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Normally, such obvious propaganda would be discarded out of hand, but then, as the New York Times demonstrates, the point here is not objectivity and unbiased reportage, but rather greasing the skids for an attack leveled against Iran.

No doubt, after the attack, the New York Times may once again admit it was used, although the neocons guilty will likely remain on staff, as they did after the invasion of Iraq. "

Intelligence Briefings to NYT Notch Up Tension

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch

"President Nixon, a very good poker player, once defined the art of brinkmanship as persuading your opponent that you are insane and, unless appeased by pledges of surrender, quite capable of blowing up the planet.

By these robust standards George Bush is doing a moderately competent job in suggesting that if balked by Iran on the matter of arming the Shi'a in Iraq or pursuing its nuclear program he'll dump high explosive, maybe even a couple of nukes, on that country's relevant research sites, or tell Israel to do the job for him......

Gardiner cautioned that "It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we'll see a few more steps unfold.

"First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led_group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff."

As regards "the outrage stuff", here on cue comes the New York Times' Michael Gordon with a front page story today, February 10, headlined "Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says", and beginning "The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran."......

Another tripwire for escalation would be the UN Security Council Feb 21 deadline for Iran to suspend "all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA," the International Atomic Energy Agency......

The Bush administration is capable of almost any folly, but is it likely that it would bomb Iran's nuclear research labs? Would it really prod Israel into taking on the job?.....

So the job of attacking would fall to the US Air force and US Navy and there are certainly generals, particularly in the Air Force, telling Bush it would be a snap, just as Curt LeMay, at that time head of the Strategic Air Command, told President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis that SAC could "reduce the Soviet Union to a smouldering irradiated ruin in three hours".....

The Democrats take the lead of their presidential hopefuls, who have no intention of being corralled by the Republicans as symps of holocaust deniers who want to destroy Israel. These days, to be a player, any candidate for the US presidency has to raise about $100 million, of which a large tranche will come from American Jews. Barack Obama and John Edwards call for swift withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. When it comes to Iran they roar in unison with Hillary Clinton that no option can be left off the table. In other words, if it comes to it, nuke 'em ....."

By Amira Hass

"....What is the connection between security equipment, the Presidential Guard and an improvement in everyday life? It can be found in a document the Defense Ministry and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) presented on January 12 regarding the "easing of daily life." One of its headings: 'The comprehensive plan for improving the Palestinian population's fabric of life."

The first paragraph is "Steps to empower Abu Mazen," and it includes: "Coordination with the PA chairman's office and those subordinate to him - Approving entry of donations (security equipment) for the Presidential Guard by expedited procedure; easing the movement of VIPs and senior Palestinians...."

From the document we cannot learn about "easing of conditions," but rather about the mentality of an occupier. The document demonstrates that the security establishment continues to adopt methods that played - and still play - a decisive role in the accumulation of tremendous bitterness among the Palestinian public toward senior Fatah officials. It is not important whether the document presented referred to that very security equipment. The important thing is that when the war between the Palestinian security services threatens to turn into a civil war with numerous victims, the security establishment identifies the "empowerment of Abu Mazen" with the strengthening of a security apparatus, and both with an improved "fabric of life."......"

"Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has harshly criticised the US for what he said was an attempt to force its will on the rest of the world. "What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force and one single master," he said to an annual gathering of top security and defence officials in Munich, Germany, on Saturday. "It has nothing in common with democracy because that is the opinion of the majority taking into account the minority opinion," Putin said. "People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves."

'World less safe'

Putin said that the US, above other western nations, had repeatedly overstepped its national borders in questions of international security, a policy that he said had not made the world safer. On the contrary, the world had become less safe, he said. Putin said: "Unilateral actions have not resolved conflicts but have made them worse. "This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure any more because nobody can hide behind international law."

He did not mention any specific conflicts, but he has been very critical of the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Missile defence system

Putin also voiced concern about US plans to build a missile defence system in eastern Europe, probably Poland and the Czech Republic, and the expansion of Nato as possible challenges to Russia. "The process of Nato expansion has nothing to do with modernisation of the alliance or with ensuring security in Europe," Putin said. "On the contrary, it is a serious factor provoking reduction of mutual trust."

He also dismissed suggestions that the European Union and Nato had the right to intervene alone in crisis regions. "The legitimate use of force can only done by the United Nations, it cannot be replaced by EU or Nato," he said.

On the missile defence system, Putin said: "I don't want to accuse anyone of being aggressive" but suggested it would seriously change the balance of power and could provoke an unspecified response. "That balance will be upset completely and one side will have a feeling of complete security and given a free hand in local, and probably in global, conflicts...," he said."

Bush's New "Security" Plan In Iraq

by Dmitriy Sedov

Global Research, February 10, 2007
Strategic Cultural Foundation (Russia)

"In my paper entitled “2007: Opening a New Page in the World’s History”, published in September, 2006, I examined the possibility that a US strike on Iran using small-scale nuclear munitions would to be launched, and that the strike would become the beginning of an epoch of nuclear wars. There were various responses to the paper. Some authors, including recognized experts, doubted the possibility of such a development. At present, few people doubt that there will be a strike on Iran. Rather, the question is whether nuclear or conventional weapons will be used in the offensive.......

The coming war between the US and Iran has to conform to certain parameters defined a priori. The US is tired of Iraq, and the public opinion in the country is turning increasingly anti-war. Therefore, the offensive against Iran has to be swift and victorious. This will save Bush’s political group and give it a higher rating in the country. There can be no doubt that a successful aggression will make Bush extremely popular in the US – in this anti-Christian society the pagan god of victory has long taken the place of the Savior. A triumph will make the US public blind and deaf – it will remain unaware of the price of the US victory for the nations of the Middle East. The crucial circumstance is that only nuclear weapons can guarantee the US victory in this war. Knowing that the US failed to win even in Iraq, a country plagued by religious and ethnic strife, one cannot expect it to prevail in the united and spiritually strong Iran. Only the use of nuclear weapons can make it possible to cause severe damage to the Iranian control system hidden in bunkers and, importantly, to behead its leadership no matter how deep underground it might be hiding. Iran without its leaders and with a paralyzed system of control, with an army devastated by “baby nukes”, is the only option which suits the US - it agrees to talk about peace only to a totally subdued offender. Such talks would let the US leaders’ old dream of a Middle Eastern Disneyland, mastered by the US and Israel, come true.

Here are the facts which illustrate the process of the preparations for the devastation of Iran:

- The UN Security Council Resolution envisions that a further tightening of the sanctions imposed on Iran must take place after February 21, 2007. From the standpoint of the international law, this is a pretext (essentially, a poor one, but a one that does exist) to legalize an aggression against the country.

- Two US aircraft carrier groups armed with nukes are moving into the region. The US aircraft carrier groups have been on missions 5 times over the past 15 years. In 4 cases out of the 5, they launched military offensives. In March, 2007 both groups are to take their combat positions.

- Additional ground forces are shifted to the border between Iraq and Iran. Preparations for a new phase of hostilities are underway.

- In February, Patriot missile defense systems will be ready to defend Israel and the aircraft carrier groups from enemy airstrikes.

- British combat engineers are entering the regions of the future fighting, clearly in order to operate in the Strait of Ormuz, where Iranians are most likely to lay mines.

- The US and Israel launched a powerful information and propaganda campaign preparing the global public opinion for the aggression.

- CENTCOM’s Commander John Abizade, an opponent of the war with Iran, resigned. His position was taken over by Admiral W. Fallon, a veteran of the 1991 Iraq and 1995 Bosnia campaigns.

- John Negroponte has been moved from his position as the First Director of National Intelligence for persistently resisting the use of force against Iran.

- T. Blair, the “staff peacemaker” for the Middle East, never mentions a peaceful settlement of the Iran dossier problem. He makes no attempts to find a way to resolve the crisis in a peaceful way, and this is highly indicative.

All of the above constitutes evidence of Iran’s being prepared for sacrifice. Will a major provocation be orchestrated for this purpose? A number of observers opine that Washington needs one. We believe that what we will see is going to be a plain cowboy-style scenario like the one which materialized in Iraq. Media never stop debating the issue of the “Iranian atomic bomb” – just as they focused on “S. Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction”. It is time for them to start. It absolutely does not matter that eventually nothing of the kind will be found in Iran. Those who disagree will be silenced by force....."

By Gilad Atzmon

"David Ben Gurion, the legendary Zionist leader as well as Israel’s first Prime Minister, used to say: “What matters is not what the Goyim say, what matters is what the Jews do”.

A few days ago a group of Jews who may have been independent at one stage decided to gather and to form a new collective peace-loving humanist synagogue. They call themselves the Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). They are determined to challenge the hegemony of the Board Of Deputies Of British Jews (BOD). I am far from being a supporter of the Board of Deputies, in fact, I despise them. Yet, being a Jew by origin, I have never regarded this body as a representative of either myself or any of my so-called Jewish friends.

Furthermore, being a practicing independent thinker, I regard the BOD as a representation of everything I fight against. Yet, I do acknowledge that this body indeed represents the community of Jews in Britain. I do understand as well that the majority of Jews in Britain and around the world do support Zionism. This is indeed very sad and rather concerning. Yet, far more concerning, is the fact that IJV are not exactly against Israel or Zionism. Like the BOD, they do believe in the right of the Jews to live in peace in Palestine. In their favour it must be said that though they are in favour of the Idea of Jewish state, they want it to be different. They believe in the possibility of morally orientated colonialism in which the colonialists (those who live in Tel Aviv) and the ethnically cleansed (those who live in Gaza, for instance) live in ‘peace’ side by side.

On the face of it, an internal Jewish dispute between two Zionist synagogues shouldn’t really become one of the top priorities of British society. This debate should have taken place on the very yellow pages of the Jewish Chronicle. Yet, the IJV wanted to get the British public on their side. How did they do it? They have peppered their declaration with some humanist post-colonial terminology and planted the word Palestine in every other sentence. It quite important to mention that in the declaration itself the BOD is not mentioned even once. Palestine, on the other hand, is mentioned six times.

Out of the five principles presented by the IJV, three are dedicated to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The author of the declaration must be aware that the British people are gradually becoming more and more aware of the emerging level of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian population. It is rather crucial to emphasize that while the IJV insists upon conveying an image of commitment to the Palestinian issue, they clearly refrain from any substantial ethical commitment to Palestine, Palestinians or humanism. The IJV do not extend beyond the Israeli Left’s Peace-Now rhetoric. Though, they refer to human rights, they clearly refrain from mentioning the Palestinian right of return. They are succumbing to the old leftist Zionist trick; they identify the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as its resolution, with the occupation and its demise. This is obviously a lie and the authors of the IJV declaration are fully conscious of this lie. I would like to believe that more than a few of the IJV signatories are not aware of the sophisticated manipulative document they have signed on.

Once again, the truth must be said. The Palestinian cause is largely about the right of return and a solution to the refugee problem. Though the end of occupation is indeed a necessity, it won’t secure any peace deal. By avoiding the Palestinian cause, the IJV are guilty of dismissing the elementary rights of Palestinians to live on their own land. The IJV may momentarily score some points by taking the Palestinians for a ride while not committing themselves to their real cause. Unfortunately, such an ethical momentum that could be used as a general awakening for Jews was wasted on another exercise in a left Zionist fig leaf operation.

Learning from the success of Ben Gurion and his version of Zionism, I would like to make a suggestion to my Palestinian brothers and sisters. It really doesn’t matter what the Jews say, it matters what the Palestinians do.

By Robert Fisk

"......They were the same special forces who crushed the Islamist rebellion in Hama in February 1982, slaughtering up to - well, a few thousand, according to the regime, at least 10,000 according to Fisk (who was there) and up 20,000 if you believe The New York Times (which I generally don't).

Either way, I've always regarded it as a war crime, along with the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut by Israel's Lebanese militia allies a few months later. Ariel Sharon, who was held personally responsible by Israel's own court of enquiry, is an unindicted war criminal. So is Rifaat.....

Now, of course, there are a few discrepancies in the facts. The Syrians did not use poison gas in Hama, as Abdeh claims. They certainly did level whole areas of the city - they are still level today, although a hotel has been built over one devastated district - and when Rifaat's thugs combed through the ruins later, they executed any civilians who couldn't account for their presence.....

But still... What strikes me is not so much the force of Abdeh's letter but that it was written at all. When the Hama massacre occurred, neighbouring Arab states were silent. Although the Sunni prelates of the city called for a religious war, their fellow clerics in Damascus - and, indeed, in Beirut - were silent. Just as the imams and scholars of Islam were silent when the Algerians began to slaughter each other in a welter of head-chopping and security force executions in the 1990s......

Not a word of criticism. Not a hint of concern. Not a scintilla (an Enoch Powell word, this) of sympathy. An Israeli bombardment of Lebanon? Even an Israeli invasion? That's a war crime - and the Arabs are right, the Israelis do commit war crimes. I saw the evidence of quite a few last summer. But when does Arab blood become less sacred? Why, when it is shed by Arabs. It's not just a failure of self-criticism in the Arab world. In a landscape ruled by monsters whom we in the West have long supported, criticism of any kind is a dodgy undertaking. But can there not be one small sermon of reprobation for what Iraqi Muslims are doing to Iraqi Muslims?

Of course, but the real problem the Arabs now face is that their lands have been overrun and effectively occupied by Western armies. I worked out a few weeks ago that, per head of population - and the world was smaller in the 12th century - there are now about 22 times more Western soldiers in Muslim lands than there were at the time of the Crusades. How do you strike back at these legions and drive them out? Brutally and most terribly, the Iraqis have shown how. I used to say the future of the Bush administration will be decided in Iraq, not in Washington. And this now appears to be true.

So what should we do? Allow the Rifaats of this world to go on enjoying Marbella? And the killers of Hariri go free? And the Arabs remain silent in the face of the shameful atrocities which their brother Muslims have also committed? I'll take a bet that Rifaat will be safe from the UN lads. In Iraq right now, he'd be on "our" side, wouldn't he, battling the Islamic insurgency as he did in Hama? And that, I fear, is the problem. We are all Rifaats now."

As the president and Republicans continue to hype the surge -- and stifle debate about it -- Bush's own war planners are preparing for failure in Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com

"Feb. 08, 2007 | Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. "He's tried this two times -- it's failed twice," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the "surge" tactic. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.'" She repeated his words: "'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."....."

Despite denials, Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian

"US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington. The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision......

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.".....

Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.

In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.....

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.

"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."......

Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.....

Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air.".....

Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. "I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel."......"

10/02/2007

رام الله ـ القدس العربي ـ من وليد عوض: قالت مصادر فلسطينية لـ القدس العربي امس بان الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس يعتزم تعيين النـــائب محمد دحلان نائبا لرئيس الوزراء الفلسطيني اسماعيل هنية المكلف بتشكيل حــكومة الوحدة الوطنية.
وتكمن رغبة عباس في تعيين دحلان في هذا المنصب حسب المصادر لمكانته في اوساط حركة فتح خصوصا في قطاع غزة ومقدرته علي ضبط ابناء الحركة في القطاع.
وكشف مصدر مطلع علي جلسات الحوار في مكة المكرمة أن أجواء الحوار بين وفدي فتح وحماس كانت مريحة جداً وبعيدة عن الشد العصبي فيما شهدت الحوارات مواقف مداعبة وممازحة تركزت في العديد من الأحيان حول دحلان وعلاقته مع حماس، حيث طلب منه عضو المكتب السياسي لحماس موسي أبو مرزوق أن يتحدث بكلمة ولم يرد دحلان، فقال له أبو مرزوق نريد أن نسمع كلمتك يا أبو فادي ، فرد دحلان علي ابو مرزوق مازحا أرجوكم أن لا تتوقفوا عن مناداتي بالإنقلابي فرد عليه أحد قادة حماس الجالسين علي طاولة الحوار لا تحلم بها لأنك مستفيد منها .
وحسب المصدر فإن دحلان بذل جهدا كبيرا في الحوار وبشكل توفيقي وكان ناشطاً في صياغة الإتفاق والبحث عن حلول توفيقية لدرجة أن الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس قال له شو يا محمد إنت معنا والا مع وفد حماس؟ .
كما تم تناول وجبات الغداء بشكل مشترك ولوحظ أن مداعبات عديدة من قبل قيادات حماس إستهدفت دحلان بغرض تلطيف الأجواء ومد الجسور معه حسب وصف المصدر.

Powell: How America Supports the Troops
By Dwayne Powell

"CAIRO (AP) — Wael Abbas hasn't been arrested yet by Egyptian police — but the blogger, who never leaves home without a camera, fears it could happen any day.
State security is keeping a close eye on the democracy activist, most recently for posting graphic cellphone videos on his blog that show what many Egyptians only mention behind closed doors — police brutality and sexual attacks on women.

Egypt arrested a string of prominent bloggers last year, including one who remains jailed and is on trial for allegedly defaming Islam after he published posts criticizing Islamic institutions on his Arabic-language blog.

"I might be next," Abbas said recently at a downtown Cairo coffee shop. He said his family has received anonymous phone calls asking questions about him, which he suspects come from state security. "I think there is a campaign against the bloggers here," he said. "We are exposing what all Egyptians know but weren't talking about."

Abbas is part of a wave of Middle Eastern writers and photographers blogging from a region ridden with censorship and intense pressure not to criticize authorities. Mideast governments for decades have dominated the media, trying to keep a monopoly on information. But bloggers like Abbas are chipping away at that lock, writing about everything from human rights to the region's rulers and even the most taboo topic — Islam.

Weblogs — or blogs for short — started taking off in the Mideast a few years ago as the access to the Internet and technology for creating sites grew. There are now hundreds of Arabic- and Farsi-language blogs written out of the Middle East — many just personal musings but also many that tackle political and social issues.

Bloggers are increasingly getting into trouble as governments crack down by blocking their sites and throwing them in jail. "I firmly believe that blogs now with normal people using them have become the fifth estate. They watch the watchers, especially in this area of the world, because there are no controls over them," said Mahmood al-Yousif, a Bahraini blogger.

Al-Yousif knows firsthand the control his government and others are trying to yield over the Internet. His blog was blocked by authorities briefly last year after he published articles about an election-related scandal, he said.

Rights groups accuse several Mideast governments of increasingly suppressing the Internet by blocking websites and detaining bloggers. Reporters Without Borders has listed five Mideast countries — Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria — on a list of the 13 worst Internet freedom enemies.

Governments defend their Web regulations, saying they are protecting citizens from "immoral" and "defamatory" content. But rights groups and bloggers say they overstep their authority.

"Five years ago, authorities didn't care about bloggers because the Internet's reach was less," said Julien Pain, head of Reporters Without Borders' Internet Freedom Desk. "Now, what is most interesting is the Weblogs in the local languages. You look at what the authorities censor, they censor content in local languages."......

Though the number of Internet users has grown nearly fivefold since 2000, only about 10% of the Middle East's population has access to the Internet, according to the online Internet World Stats, which monitors Web usage around the world. The numbers are generally lower in North Africa, including Egypt, where about 7% of the country's 70 million people use the Internet, the website said....."

An Inteview with Patrick Cockburn

By LEE SUSTAR
CounterPunch

Contributed by Datta

".....DOES THE U.S. bombing in Najaf reflect a greater readiness for aggressive action?

I THINK they're all too ready. You could see it earlier in the week in the attack on Haifa Street, which runs through central Baghdad. They were using missiles and bombs to blow up apartment buildings--to go after the snipers there, no matter who else was in the building.

The fact that they were using large bombs and missiles in the middle of a city as heavily populated as Baghdad seems to me to show a gross disregard for human life....."

"Al-Manar special report – Mohamad Kazan – Translation/

Member of the Loyalty to the Resistance Parliamentary Bloc MP Hasan Fadlallah, unveiled an Israeli plot to create a buffer zone in south Lebanon in collusion with the United Nations. In a press conference, MP Fadlallah also renewed Hezbollah's demand to redeem the arms which were confiscated by security forces, according to the Ministerial Statement which recognizes the right to resist. MP Fadlallah said that Israel is seeking to create the buffer zone after it failed in its July war against Lebanon.

He added that a letter was sent from the head of the unconstitutional government Fouad Saniora to the United Nations, requesting a new and unilateral delineation of the border, knowing that the most recent delineation was made only four years ago. MP Fadlallah showed maps and pictures showing the extent of Israel's incursion, in collusion with the UNIFIL, into more than a southern village like Rmeish, Yaroun and Aytaroun in Bint Jbeil. He demanded these unilateral measures be immediately stopped and called on authorities to eliminate transgressions and return properties to their owners. The Hezbollah MP held the ruling bloc responsible for manipulating the border and neglecting the right of the Lebanese. "

Israel welcomes Saniora's govt. seizure of resistance arms shipment; says it's a positive turn for Israel

"Al-Manar special report – Hasan Hijazi – Translated/

Israel welcomed the announcement by the unconstitutional government of Fouad Saniora, of seizing an arms' shipment intended for the Islamic Resistance. Israeli radio broadcast the news and said that this indicated a new an d positive turn for Israel's benefit. Israeli analysts and commentators quoted senior Israeli officials as saying that they hope Saniora's government would disarm the resistance since Israel's military failed to do so during the war last July. Israeli officials also exploited the seizure of the shipment and the way pro-government media dealt with the issue, to confirm their claims that arms are still flowing from Syria into Lebanon, thus using this as a pretext to continue Israeli violation of the Lebanese airspace. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz also signaled Israel might as well launch military operations against the resistance, under the pretext of fighting arms smuggling. Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot linked between the seizure of arms shipment and the US supply of 60 multi-functional vehicles to Lebanese security forces to help Saniora's government in fighting Hezbollah's attempts to smuggle arms."

Pilgrimage To King Abdullah; All Three Were Bought For Less Than $ 1 Billion.

By Tony Sayegh

When the Palestinians voted for Hamas they voted for a change of course on three fronts: Corruption and financial thievery, resistance and the endless "negotiations" under the Oslo fiasco.

Examining the announced make up of the "unity" government and the fact that it is no longer a Hamas government, make it clear that Hamas, by agreeing to be a part of this FAMAS "government", is failing to live up to what the Palestinians who voted for Hamas were hoping for.

On the financial front the same "White House darling" and World Bank favorite, Salam Fayyad, will hold the key financial reins as finance minister, just as before. The corruption file which Hamas promised to open and the prosecution of all those Palestinian officials (associates of Fayyad) who stole and embezzled millions are issues that are not being discussed now, let alone pursued.

On the Oslo merry-go-round of endless and useless "negotiations" the "new government" is authorizing Abbas to continue with the charade, and nothing will change. So the endless circular path in the "road map" of the Oslo wilderness will be adhered to. The foreign minister is another darling of the Americans, so it would not be a great secret to know what policies he will pursue.

On the resistance front, instead of concentrating on it and escalating it, Hamas is now honoring a self-imposed and a unilateral ceasefire. In addition, thousands of Hamas fighters, instead of being underground and involved in resistance, were brought out in public as part of the so-called Executive Force. This force will now be merged in the PA "security forces" under a minister of the interior who is not from Hamas. Is this not partially, and peacefully, eliminating the "infrastructure of terror" as Usrael calls it? Is this not meeting one of the demands of the Quartet? Of course the "new government" will continue to recieve arms and training from the U.S. to control the Palestinian street.

So what is left? Haniyyah acting as a buffoon cheerleader who could not praise the rotten Saudi king enough? And when he gets tired of cheerleading, perhaps his deputy, who is none other than Mohammad Pinochet Dahlan, can be sent to Washington and Tel Aviv to tell them in private what Haniyyah can't say in public.

What a shame and a fiasco. It would have been much more honorable for Hamas to quit this monstrosity of a government and concentrate on resistance instead, rather than be part of a quisling "government" which is just as corrupt and defeatist as before. Those who urged Hamas not to participate in the elections and not to enter the Oslo stable were right all along.

By Jim Lobe

"U.S. and Israeli hopes of forging of a Sunni Arab alliance to contain Iran and its regional allies may be misplaced, at least at the popular level, according to a major survey of six Arab countries released here Thursday.

The face-to-face survey of a total of 3,850 respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates found that close to 80 percent of Arabs consider Israel and the United States the two biggest external threats to their security. Only six percent cited Iran.

And less than one in four Arabs believe Iran should be pressured to halt its nuclear program, while 61 percent, including majorities in all six countries, said Tehran had the right to pursue it even if, as most believe, the program is designed to develop nuclear weapons......

But Telhami, who will present his findings at a major Brookings-sponsored conference of Islamic leaders in Doha next week, told IPS he doubts these sectarian tensions are changing basic attitudes among the general public on key regional issues in the countries covered in the survey, with the exception of Lebanon.

"The public of the Arab world is not looking at the important issues through the Sunni-Shi'ite divide," he said. "They see them rather through the lens of Israeli-Palestinian issues and anger with U.S. policy (in the region). Most Sunni Arabs take the side of the Shi'ites on the important issues."....

More than three out of four of all respondents described their attitudes towards Washington as either "somewhat" (21 percent) or "very" (57 percent) unfavorable. Negative feelings were strongest in the three monarchies: Jordan, where 90 percent of respondents described their views as unfavorable., Morocco (87 percent), and Saudi Arabia (82 percent).....

As in the past several years, large majorities of Arabs attribute less benign objectives to U.S. policy in the region, including "controlling oil" (75 percent, "protecting Israel"; 69 percent "weakening the Muslim World"; and 68 percent, "the desire to dominate the region." Only nine percent of the weighted aggregates they believed one of Washington's main objectives was promoting democracy.

Majorities, ranging from 51 percent in Lebanon to 68 percent in Jordan and 77 percent in Morocco, believe Iran has the right to pursue its nuclear program

"Even in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose governments are really frightened about Iranian power, their publics do not define Iran as the major threat," noted Telhami, who added that tended to confirm that Arab leaders and their citizenries do not see key issues through the same prism."

"WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - A new poll on Thursday underscored deep Arab unhappiness with the United States but said the negative image could be repaired if Washington brokered a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement.

The survey of 3,850 people in six Arab countries rated President George W. Bush as the most disliked world leader, while the United States and Israel were viewed as significantly greater threats than Iran.

Sixty-seven percent of the respondents said the United States could improve its image by brokering a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement.

A smaller number -- 33 percent -- said this image change could happen if Washington withdrew its troops from Iraq.

The results show the Arab-Israeli conflict "remains the central prism through which people are evaluating the United States", even when the international focus is on the Iraq war and nuclear crisis with Iran, said Shibley Telhami of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Major powers recently backed a U.S. push to revive Israeli-Palestinian talks, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planning to travel to the region next week.

Based on face-to-face interviews conducted for the Saban Center by the Zogby International polling firm last November and December, attitudes were surveyed in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and United Arab Emirates.

Respondents were asked to identify which world leader outside of their own country they disliked most.

Bush was named by 38 percent, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by 11 percent, current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert by 7 percent and British Prime Minister Tony Blair by 3 percent.

HEZBOLLAH LEADER ADMIRED

The most admired leader was Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Islamic militant group in Lebanon, with 14 percent.

French President Jacques Chirac followed with 8 percent, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with 4 percent and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with 3 percent.

Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad and Chavez are all adversaries of the United States, while Chirac was at odds with Washington in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Seventy-nine percent of the respondents cited Israel as their biggest threat, while the United States was named by 74 percent. Iran, which Washington considers a major threat because of its nuclear ambitions, was named by only 6 percent of the Arabs surveyed.

Although Bush and some U.S. politicians insist American troops cannot now be withdrawn from Iraq without leaving worse chaos behind, 44 percent of the Arabs polled said Iraqis will find a way to bridge their differences and 33 percent said a U.S. withdrawal would have no effect on the current situation.

Only 24 percent of the respondents predicted an American withdrawal would cause the Iraqi civil war to expand rapidly."

"The new Palestinian unity government creates a real problem for Israel. It will be headed by a senior Hamas figure, Ismail Haniyeh. Moreover, it will not recognize Israel and does not pretend to meet the Quartet's conditions, as one Hamas leader said.

Yet the same time, it is not a Hamas government, and Hamas will not have a majority in the cabinet. The finance minister-designate, Salem Fayad, is the White House's darling. The foreign minister-designate, academic Ziad Abu Amar, has lectured at many American universities and does not have extremist positions on Israel. And the interior minister, who commands the security forces, will be an independent rather than a Hamas member, though he will be appointed on Hamas' recommendation....."

The Israelis want another go
By Justin Raimondo

"The Israelis, stung by their defeat at the hands of Hezbollah, are aching for a rematch. There have been a number of border incidents since the IDF retreated and the blockade was lifted, the most recent – and most brazen – occurring when the Israelis crossed a security fence, purportedly to search for explosives planted by Hezbollah. They could – and did – use this pretext to launch an invasion, and, in the process, level half the country. The Israelis are merely waiting for the right moment, and that moment, I'm afraid, will come fairly soon unless they're reined in by Washington.

This last is highly unlikely, however: indeed, the dynamics run the other way. Last time around, the neocons in the administration reportedly egged the somewhat reluctant Israelis on, and were sorely disappointed when Tel Aviv relented. Next time, they'll go all the way to Beirut – and won't stop until the Americans get to Tehran.

Those who fear war with Iran had best look to Lebanon, where the first shots are being fired. It is, so far, a proxy war, with the Israelis as our stand-ins and Hezbollah allied with the Iranians. It is only a matter of time, however, before the proxies are dispensed with, and the Americans meet the Iranians on the battlefield.

This is what the American "surge" in Iraq is all about: the White House is preparing for a confrontation with the Iranians. Washington knows full well that, in answer to U.S. airstrikes, Tehran will target U.S. troops caught in the middle of Iraq's civil war. The President has authorized U.S. troops to go after the Iranians supposedly infiltrating Iraq, and the storming of that Iranian consulate in Irbil was not just a random incident. The timing of the crackdown on Shi'ite party militias is also no accident – or does it just so happen that Iran's staunchest Iraqi allies are being suddenly disarmed?.....

Israel's probing the Lebanese frontier is a deliberate provocation, one that will end, if all goes according to plan, in U.S. military action against Iran. Opposing the war in Iraq, now that it's clearly a disaster, is – oddly enough – beside the point. The present danger is the regionalization of the war, which is the real objective of the "surge" – and the clock is ticking. That's why the partisan bickering over how the debate over the anti-surge resolution should proceed in Congress is so dangerous – aside from the sad fact that these wise solons don't even realize what they're voting on. They think they're debating the escalation of the war in Iraq, when what's really going on is an attempt by this administration to extend the war to neighboring countries.

Crippled by their unwillingness to criticize Israel, antiwar Democrats will be sucked into supporting the opening shots of the coming U.S. attack on Iran. The rumblings in Lebanon are the premonitory tremors of a regional earthquake that will shake most of the nations of the Middle East. George W. Bush is far from finished with the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East. The great tragedy is that political resistance to the administration's war moves are too little, too late."

Continue

By Robert Fisk

"For the first time, one of Iraq's principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.

The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet - but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.

Al-Jeelani's group, which also calls itself the "20th Revolution Brigades'', is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters......

There will, the group says, be no negotiations with Mr Maliki's government because they consider it "complicit in the slaughter of Iraqis by militias, the security apparatus and death squads". But they do call for the unity of Iraq and say they "do not recognise the divisions among the Iraqi people".

It is not difficult to guess any American response to those proposals. But FLN [National Liberation Front] contacts with France during the 1954-62 war of independence by Algeria began with such a series of demands - equally impossible to meet but which were eventually developed into real proposals for a French withdrawal....."

By Patrick Cockburn

".....In June 2004, the US and Britain solemnly returned sovereignty to an Iraqi government. It was always a deception, since real power remained with the US. But in the last few weeks, Washington has increasingly treated the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as an irrelevant pawn which it now humiliates on an almost daily basis. In January, eight US helicopters swooped on the long-established Iranian office in Arbil, the Kurdish capital, and arrested five officials. President Bush has announced that Iranians in Iraq deemed a threat to US personnel can be killed. This seems to open the door to an assassination campaign. On Sunday, soldiers from an Iraqi commando unit in Baghdad under strong US influence kidnapped an Iranian diplomat......

The Middle East was destabilised when President Bush first invaded Iraq in 2003. The US midterm elections and the Baker-Hamilton report calling for talks with Iran and Syria were a chance to start defusing the crisis. This opportunity has now passed. It is very unlikely that the US will succeed in crushing the Sadrist movement, with its strong support among the millions of Iraqi Shia. Nor is it likely that the US will be able to stabilise Iraq while at the same time seeking to destabilise Iran and Syria."

ANALYSIS: Unity deal is minimum required to remove the siege

Contributed by Lucia

"....There is no commitment in the letter to keep past agreements and no direct recognition of Israel. But its wording is sufficient, at least for Saudi King Abdullah, to lift the siege from the Palestinian Authority. Because it holds the essential turning point in Hamas' position: the acceptance in theory of the agreements and resolutions, including the Oslo Accords and the Arab League resolutions, such as those adopted by the Arab summit conference in Beirut in 2002, dealing with terms of normalization with Israel.....

All the parties, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, seem to understand that in view of the political situation in Israel and Washington's lack of interest in advancing the political process, it is better to make do with managing the internal Palestinian crisis.

Another question is whether the national unity government would be able to function. The portfolio allocation was agreed on before the Mecca gathering, following the monetary temptation the king had offered the Palestinians if they set up a unity government.

Arab sources say the new government will get half a billion dollars now for "routine maintenance" and additional large sums for rehabilitation and development later.

It is not clear, however, whether it will be possible to merge the armed Hamas and Fatah forces into one.

While the agreement is still subject to the approval of various clauses, for example Mohammed Dahlan's authorities as deputy prime minister, Saudi Arabia has good cause for satisfaction. The agreement will not only enable it to lift the economic siege and funnel money to the PA, but mainly to block Iranian involvement in the Palestinian problem and keep it in "Arab hands.""

***

So Dahlan will be the deputy prime minister! This calls for a celebration; may be even burning another university!

Long Live "National Unity!"

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"A new article in the newsletter Counterpunch examines unresolved questions over whether Israeli agents were tracking the 9/11 hijackers before September 11th. ABC’s 20/20, The Forward, and Salon.com have all covered the story. But where’s the follow up? We speak to the author of the article, Christopher Ketcham; Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn, and Marc Perelman, the Forward reporter who did one of the first reports on the story in 2002.

Freelance journalist Christopher Ketcham has just published a comprehensive piece on this story in the newsletter Counterpunch. The article highlights various interconnected stories: The five Israeli “movers” who witnesses say were cheering after the first plane struck the World Trade Center; the so-called Israeli art students who were living in concentrated areas where hijackers were living around the United States and how two of the hijackers ended up on the Watch List weeks before 9/11.

Christopher Ketcham, the author of the article, joins us on the line from Upstate New York. Alexander Cockburn also joins us on the line. He is the editor of Counterpunch where the piece is published. And with us here in the firehouse studio is Marc Perelman he is the reporter who did one of the first reports on the story for The Forward in 2002."

To watch, listen or read transcript, click here

January 24th, 2007

This is the man who was the finance minister in the previous, corrupt PA government. Hundreds of millions of donated dollars were stolen while he was carrying out the "reforms" Washington insisted on. Apparently, upon the insistence of the Saudis, Washington and the World Bank, he will be the,....., yes you guessed it, the finance minister in the new and improved "unity" government. Let the celebrations begin!

".....There is no question that there will be stability when the Palestinians are given their freedom. The vision that has been laid out by President Bush and embraced by President Abbas is that of peaceful coexistence......

These are matters that are of concern to Israel. But more importantly, I want to spell out a vision of peace with Israel. I seek a warm peace with Israel. I don’t want it so warm that you are in our backyard as you are now, but I seek a warmpeace. I seek strong political ties with Israel; I seek strong economic ties between the independent states of Israel and Palestine .I seek warm relations with Israelis. Yes, we seek warm relations with you. We do not want to simplyget to a point where we just accept each other – we want to have warm relations where we both recognize the mutual economic, political, intellectual and spiritualbenefits of living and working together. We do not want to erect walls; we want to see bridges. We do not want to close you out of our lives – we want to live with you – as your neighbors and as your equals.

At heart, I am an optimist. Why? How? After so much effort from all parties and after such spectacular failure, many question how I can persist in my optimism. The answer lies in the fact that I know that there is a great deal of depth of goodwill on both sides, and on the part of the international community...."

What A Billion Saudi Dollars Can Buy:The "Government" Of FAMAS!
One Little Problem: Searching For A State To "Govern"

Cakewalks, Forgeries and Smoking Guns

By TRISH SCHUH
CounterPunch

""We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Muslim regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan, and Syria will fall to us."

David Ben-Gurion, From "Ben-Gurion, A Biography" by Michael Ben-Zohar, May 1948......

"Regime change is, of course, our goal both in Lebanon and Syria. We wrote long ago that there are three ways to achieve it- the dictator chooses to change; he falls before his own unhappy people; or if he poses a threat to the outside, the outside takes him out..."

-Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), From strategy paper #474 "Priorities in Lebanon & Syria", March 2, 2005.....

From mission statement to mission accomplished, the cakewalks continue. But from Baghdad to Beirut, the forgery looks the same.

Unlike Iraq, there is no 'weapons of mass destruction threat' to facilitate toppling the Syrian regime. This time a United Nations Tribunal could provide the means, deploying Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri's murder as the weapon. But like the US show trial to convict Saddam Hussein, the show trial to convict Syria for Hariri's murder, built by the United Nation's International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC), has a history of problems......

Did the war on Lebanon cover up exposure of a "Salvador-style" slaying of Rafiq Hariri and and the other assassinations blamed on Syria?
Using the Salvador Option against Syria had first been raised by Newsweek and the London Times in January, 2005. After Hariri's death on February 14, Hariri's long-time personal advisor Mustafa Al Naser said: "the assassination of Hariri is the Israeli Mossad's job, aimed at creating political tension in Lebanon." (Asia Times 2/17/05) The Sunday Herald of Scotland hinted at a US role. "With controversial diplomat John Negroponte installed as the all-powerful Director of National Intelligence, is the US about to switch from invasions to covert operations and dirty tricks? The assassination of the former Lebanese PM has aroused suspicions."...."

Photostory, The Electronic Intifada, 8 February 2007

"From 18 to 27 January, various NGO's and solidarity groups in Greece organized the Solidarity Week with the Palestinian People. In various cities in Greece events and campaigns were organized. The activities ended with a joint demonstration in Athens that lead to the embassies of the United States and Israel. The week started with a panel discussion in the Max amphitheater of the National Technical University of Athens. Speakers included representatives of various Palestinian movements."

The sign says, "God will protect his house!"
All the Arab puppets are helpless "doves"

Saudi Arabia Leading The Usraeli Axis Of Arab Puppets Against Iran
Neutralizing Hamas And Syria Is A Key Objective Of The Saudi Drive
King Abdullah: How About A Billion Dollars Mr. Mash'al? Think About It!

By Ramzy Baroud

"......Considering these difficult questions, one must assume that any attack on Iraq is both irrational from a military viewpoint and self-defeating from a political one. However, the quandary with any political analysis of this subject that consults reason or even Machiavellian realpolitik is that it fails to consider history, and in this case, recent history which taught us that the Bush administration functions in a vacuum, separate from commonsense or any other kind of sense. It was around this time, some four years ago, that many hoped that the American military buildup in the Gulf region was aimed at strengthening the US political position against Iraq, to simply convey to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that the US ‘means business’. It was clear from the outset to any even-headed observer that a war against Iraq would destabilise the region and harm the United States’ overall interests in the Middle East. I stated that numerous times on American radio programmes, receiving all sorts of censure for being anti-American and unpatriotic.

Now, we stand at the same critical junction, four years later, as US news networks are readying for another awesome fireworks show, this time over Tehran; dehumanisation of the Iranians has already begun; the public is being fed with all kinds of half-truths and all sorts of rubbish about the Islamic Republic and its people; insanity has returned and the voices of reasons are again, labelled, shunned and marginalised. But for obvious reasons, this time around, war is an evident mistake, a fact that should irk and make every sensible American, every Congressman, every commentator question the wisdom of a new war while the country is on the verge of defeat in another.

Such a reality suggests that the Bush administration is working against the interests of his own people and makes Pilger’s analysis the more poignant; indeed, as irrational as it may seem, the US could very much be on its way to war with Iran.

But as explained by Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998-2005, “getting into Iraq and defeating Saddam was easy. But today, America is stuck there and knows neither how to win, nor how to get out.” Fischer writes: “A mistake is not corrected by repeating it over and over again. Perseverance in error does not correct the error; it merely exacerbates it.”

But this is exactly the key trait that has defined the current Bush administration since its early years in office. It’s committed to duplicating failures; instead of abandoning the Iraqi ship, it insists on setting sail in the same tumultuous sea, another defected one......"

By Brian M Downing
Asia Times

".....As attuned as anyone to recent announcements, insurgent leaders, who have thus far demonstrated formidable tactical skills and increased cooperation among factions, know precisely where and roughly when the new phase will start. Preparations have almost certainly begun. Arms caches, observation positions, fields of fire and tiers of explosive devices are probably being set up for a defense in depth throughout Sunni Baghdad.

Insurgent leaders probably know they cannot defeat the US and Iraqi troops in the battle of Baghdad, at least not in the usual sense. They will seek to inflict high casualties on US and Iraqi troops, force US firepower to devastate Baghdad at least as much as it did Fallujah, and attempt to cause Iraqi army units to disintegrate or at least balk.

They will create diversionary uprisings elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle, strike into Shi'ite neighborhoods of Baghdad, and attempt to cut off the city from fuel and food supplies.

Insurgents will be bolstered by the expectation that high US casualties and the devastation of large parts of Baghdad will decisively transform US opinion into wide and intense opposition insisting on a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, however graceless that might be.

The battle of Baghdad will be furious, and because of its proximity to the Green Zone it will be televised. It will be watched with keen interest throughout the Arab world, which sees in these events the possibility, perhaps now the likelihood, of a long-standing hope - Arabs strategically defeating Americans......

A further aspect in gauging a counterinsurgency's prospects is the sophistication of insurgent organizations. The Ba'ath Party, through which Saddam Hussein ruled, provides important organizational strengths. It had existed clandestinely for many years since the 1940s and, either out of paranoia or astute assessment of domestic and foreign dangers, retained, even while in power, the ability to flee underground and fight its way back to power. The redoubtable Ba'athist cell network now serves as a basis for clandestine operations.

The old Iraqi army figures too. Former officers bring organizational skills, an extant command structure and expertise in weaponry, especially in infantry tactics, mortars and explosives. Disgraced by the seemingly invincible US military twice and dishonored by unceremonious demobilization after Baghdad fell, they burn for vengeance. Guerrilla forces, more suitable to their society and culture than conventional formations, are making vengeance look attainable. Tribal and religious networks also provide organizational patterns and impart moral energies to guerrillas......"

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"The war clock is ticking for the United States, both in Iraq and with Iran. The US-maneuvered United Nations deadline for Iran to stop its uranium-enrichment program is now less than two weeks away. On February 21, the UN's nuclear watchdog will report on whether Iran has heeded the Security Council's demand to stop enriching uranium - to date it has not.......

In reality, the mood in Tehran is increasingly grim. Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, positively scared state-TV viewers - a rarity in media-controlled Iran - when he said the US will try to strike Iran and he's willing to "become a martyr". It's as if Tehran has finally drawn the implications of a two-pronged hardcore militarization of the eastern Mediterranean region. On the one hand there is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allied with Israel against Syria, on the other the Persian Gulf, where the US is lining up against Iran......

The Pentagon's new batch of "warrior intellectuals" and counterinsurgency aces dripping with PhDs have begun their Baghdad strike - but so has the Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance), which, according to the Islammemo website, is now polishing its own counter-plan against "Safavid-American aggression". "Safavids" is a common Sunni reference to the Persian dynasty that converted Iraq to Shi'ism in the 16th century. The resistance plan is a mirror image of the Pentagon's. It also divides the capital into military sectors under a central command. Shoulder-fired missiles will be downing more CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters in (still Sunni) western Baghdad - as happened on Wednesday.....

Every major player also knows that the chain of pretexts is already established: the shaky Maliki government fails to meet the United States' security "benchmarks" (as it certainly will); Iran is set up for the fall; Washington engineers a provocation in the Persian Gulf; the path is cleared for a Congress-approved "defensive" US strike. Democrats in Congress are doing little to prevent the escalation, when they could at least organize themselves to torpedo the "use of force" authorization for Iraq and pass a law preventing the Bush administration from attacking Iran. Russia, China and the European (dis)Union also remain paralyzed......."

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"In a Democracy Now! exclusive, Sami Al-Arian speaks to us from prison where is on a hunger-strike. The Palestinian professor and activist’s case has been one of the most closely watched – and controversial – post-9/11 prosecutions in the United States. Al-Arian has been jailed despite a jury's failure to return a single guilty verdict. In the four years since his arrest, Sami Al-Arian has never conducted a broadcast interview - until now."

Watch, listen or read transcript by clicking here

The question is:

Do you support Iraq's neighbors' policy of restricting the number of Iraqis allowed to enter?

With over 2,500 responses so far, here is the breakdown:

Yes.....32%

No......68%

"BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Sea Knight helicopter crashed Wednesday in an insurgent stronghold northwest of Baghdad, killing all seven people on board, the military said, the fifth chopper lost in Iraq in just over two weeks.

A senior U.S. defense official said the helicopter did not appear to have been hit by hostile fire, but an Iraqi air force officer said it was downed by an anti-aircraft missile and an al-Qaida-linked Sunni group claimed responsibility for the downing.


The twin-rotor CH-46 went down about 20 miles northwest of the capital, said U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell. "A quick reaction force is on site and the investigation is going on as we speak," he told reporters in Baghdad.

The military said later that the Marine CH-46 helicopter went down in the volatile Anbar province while conducting routine operations and all seven crew members and passengers were killed in the crash."

Al Qaeda's 20 Year Plan: Escalation

By ADAM ELKUS
CounterPunch

"Lost in the "surge" debate is the unfortunate reality that escalation in Iraq, just like the invasion itself, plays into al-Qaida's ultimate strategy to eliminate America. As revealed in a 2005 strategy document, al-Qaida hopes to repeat Osama bin Laden's victory over the Soviet empire in Afghanistan by eliminating the chief obstacle in the way of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East. The goal is not, as Bush administration and right-wing pundits proclaim, to conquer or directly destroy America. Osama bin Laden wants to provoke the United States into destroying itself.

The game plan owes at least part of its inspiration from Paul Kennedy's book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In his investigative report The Secret History of Al-Qaeda, Abdel Bari Atwan writes that top al-Qaida ideologist Ayman Al-Zawahiri is a reader and "great admirer" of Kennedy's book. The New York Times Book Review's Michael Howard summarized the book's insights in a manner that must have clicked with budding jihadists observing the Soviet Union's fall at the time: "Power can be maintained only by a prudent balance between the creation of wealth and military expenditure, and great powers in decline almost always hasten their demise by shifting expenditure from the former to the latter.

According to Atwan's analysis of al-Qaida's "20-year plan," the organization aimed to bring about the fall of the American empire by first provoking ­ with the September 11 attacks -- Washington into irrationally invading Muslim lands in pursuit of revenge. Al-Qaida's grand strategists calculated that the invasion would propel the umma, the Muslim community, into joining the jihad. Following the fall of the secular socialist Hussein regime, Iraq has indeed become a training ground for limitless waves of foreign jihadis.

In this context, George W. Bush was a great boon to their efforts. Not only did he invade Iraq, which did not have a thing to do with 9/11, but he did almost everything possible to isolate America from its allies. This policy gave bin Laden ample room to target unpopular pro-American regimes from Madrid to Riyadh. Compared to the Southwest Asian battleground of Afghanistan, Iraq is a more congenial base for al-Qaida, since the language, culture, and terrain are more familiar to most Arabs. The jihadis' strategy is to get America to throw all of its resources into fighting a losing battle against Iraq's lethal patchwork of warring factions.

Bush's "surge" only throws more meat to the jackals, who gain strength and popularity with each web-broadcasted beheading or roadside bomb explosion. Like Afghanistan, Iraq gives would-be jihadis watching the conflict from their computer screens the hope of destroying the military might of the West. The jihadis also hope to expand the conflict to create what Atwan calls a "Triangle of Horror" connecting Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria......"

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An Open Letter to America's Soldiers from the Ranks

By TONY SWINDELL
CounterPunch

"Crimes Listed by the Nuremberg Standard of 1947: a war of aggression, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for its accomplishment; murder or ill-treatment of civilian populations in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; plunder of public or private property; wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; crimes against humanity such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.

Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, the rape of Lebanon, the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, clandestine prisons, the Iraq embargo of the 1990s, Halliburton, and Black Water. There are more, but these will suffice to compare against the Nuremberg Standard. It will not be a difficult task. For example, start with Halliburton and the plunder of public (American taxpayers') property.

How many of you recognize the name of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr.?

I do because he and I stood on and flew over the same ground nearly 40 years ago. Like him, I left a little blood and a lot of sweat in a Godforsaken place halfway around the world, earning four battle stars in 11 months. Plus some cheap tin and ribbon medals made even cheaper by the good friends who never came home with me. Thompson did, too.

Hugh was a helicopter pilot who aimed his guns at American soldiers--members of my brigade -- to keep them from slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai 4. Spotting massacred civilians around My Lai, Thompson and his two-man crew landed beside wounded civilians to give medical help as the infantry company commander and others present kept shooting the wounded. Thompson ordered his crew to open fire if the slaughter continued. No more civilians were shot.

Thompson's story is critical because the march to a nuclear war against Iran has begun, and YOU will the ones carrying it out. There is no way to effectively "confront" Iran except with tactical nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children will die outright or suffer lingering deaths from horrible radiation sicknesses. It will be murder, pure and simple. Look at the suffering around you and multiply it by hundreds.

No doubt you know that back home, 80 per cent of the American people voted in the last election to end the Iraq debacle, but no one in Washington listened. Our two-faced media watchdogs are a gaggle of neocon propaganda peddlers, corporate whores and New World Order shills who helped orchestrate and cheerlead the slaughter, and they sneer at your patriotism behind your backs......"

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Report, UNRWA, 7 February 2007

"Some 90 Palestinian refugee children whose families have been stranded over the last nine months at al-Tanf border crossing point between Iraq and Syria, living in a makeshift refugee camp, started attending an UNRWA tented school on 3 February.

At this school, UNRWA will provide general education for refugee children at elementary and preparatory levels as prescribed by the Syrian Ministry of Education. Managed by the UNRWA education programme, with eight teachers from the refugee community in al-Tanf serving as staff, the school will help cater for the refugees' educational needs. The school is opened in collaboration with UNICEF, who provided the educational material, and UNHCR, who provided the four tents needed for the school. Eight volunteer teachers attended a training course on teaching methodology in Damascus from 16-24 January. These volunteer teachers also joined a group of Agency teachers in peer coaching sessions in their specialisations in order to strengthen their teaching skills.

Around 354 Palestinians who fled targeted harassment and violence in Baghdad are now stranded at al-Tanf in the no man's land between the Syrian and Iraqi borders. All of them fled Baghdad under difficult conditions and have encountered serious human rights abuses. The group feels it's position on the border is insecure and tensions are rising.

"International support is needed to find a solution for Palestinians from Iraq. They are facing a harsh winter in the desert. We hope the opening of these schools will provide some structure and stability in these children's lives" said Panos Moumtzis, Director of UNRWA Affairs, Syria.

UNRWA is a humanitarian and human development Agency providing education, health care, social services, micro-credit and emergency relief to over 4 million registered refugees living in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic. In Syria, the Agency provides assistance to over 430,000."

I repeat this nomination since this candidate offers the following advantages:

1) He is acceptable to Usrael.

2) He has more spine and charisma than the alternatives.

3) He will end the starvation blockade imposed by Usrael/EU/Arab regimes.

4) He will bring a smile to the traumatized and starved Palestinian children.

5) He will give the PA the dignity and respect it deserves.

"At least 334 U.S. soldiers died from combat in Iraq from October to the end of January, the most of any four month period to date. Battles in Baghdad have grown more frequent and roadside bombs have gotten more sophisticated and powerful, yet the president is as determined as ever to send more Americans into what Chuck Hagel called “that grinder.”"

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Mike Luckovich

By Juan Cole

"I could never understand why the members of the Republican Party in the US were so delirious with joy that their president had installed the Da'wa Party in power in Iraq.

But the US intelligence agencies knew all this. So why are they making a big deal about MP Muhammad now?

I do not know. But I entertain deep, dark suspicions that this leak is a means for the US to put pressure on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. He is surely vulnerable to this sort of blackmail himself, since no Da'wa activist in Damascus in the 1980s can have been completely innocent of the organization's then darker side. I suspect the message to al-Maliki is, back off from the Mahdi Army and back off from Iran, or we can arrange to put you in the same docket as MP Muhammad.

As for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, another main component of the ruling bloc in Iraq, it was a Khomeinist organization in the 1980s and 1990s that ran a guerrilla paramilitary, the Badr Corps. I don't know that it ever hit a specifically American target. But it wasn't exactly a US ally. To say the least.

If you start worrying about the Shiite government of Iraq having people in it who were anti-American in the 1980s, you'd have to arrest the lot of them. This is self-evident to US intelligence agencies. Therefore, making a big deal out of Muhammad is likely a way of telegraphing a threat."

By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent

"It is scarcely surprising that the Iranian government believes that the United States is behind the kidnapping of one of its diplomats in Baghdad on Sunday. The Iranians say he was seized by 30 uniformed men from an Iraqi army commando battalion that often works with the US military services in Iraq.

The US had already shown its contempt for any diplomatic immunity protecting Iranians in Iraq by arresting five officials in a long-established Iranian office in the Kurdish city of Arbil last month. The White House had earlier authorised US forces to kill or capture Iranians deemed to be a threat.

It is striking how swiftly Washington is seeking to escalate its confrontation with Iran. Its rhetoric has returned to the strident tone so often heard when the US was accusing Saddam Hussein in 2002 and 2003 of hiding weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world......

The answer to this question is probably that the anti-Iranian tilt of the Bush administration has more to do with American than Iraqi politics. A fresh demon is being presented to the US voter. Iran is portrayed as the hidden hand behind US failure in both Iraq and in Lebanon. The US media, gullible over WMD, is showing itself equally gullible over this exaggerated Iranian threat.

The Bush administration has always shown itself more interested in holding power in Washington than in Baghdad. Whatever its failures on the battlefield, the Republicans were able to retain the presidency and both Houses of Congress in 2004. Confrontation with Iran, diverting attention from the fiasco in Iraq, may be their best chance of holding the White House in 2008."

The images of US 'friendly fire' show how good bombers are at hurting, but how bad they are at winning

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday February 7, 2007
The Guardian

"Watching a person kill another is the purest horror. Watching it done from the air, from a sanitised distance, is less so. Distance launders the bloodletting and technology purifies it. War becomes another video game. The camera sees no broken bodies. If it sees a mistake it does not see the mistake that caused the mistake.....

The recent recourse of British troops in Afghanistan to aerial bombardment has, by general agreement, set back the cause of winning hearts and minds. A relative killed or a village destroyed only fertilises the desire for revenge. "One dead Pashtun recruits 10 Taliban," is not an idle boast. Close air support may win one day's battle, but only to necessitate another. Yet Nato forces in Afghanistan continue to bomb villages from the air.

Britain is now fighting two wars which it is patently losing. In such circumstances the killing of the enemy appears to be the only policy that delivers good news. In Iraq and Afghanistan kill rates have taken on the symbolic role they served in Vietnam. "We may not be winning but they are hurting," is the general's desperate cry. Yesterday we were shown how good bombers are at hurting, but how bad they are at winning. They are war at its most stupid."

By Khalid Amayreh

"Al-Khalil - Representatives of Fatah and Hamas as well as community leaders in Dura, al-Khalil district, on Tuesday reaffirmed their common stand against “saboteurs and agent provocateurs” who are trying to spread the Gaza infighting to the West Bank.

“We affirm our united stand against these faceless and suspicious elements lurking in our midst and seeking to create divisions and spark off infighting in the service of Israel,” said a joint statement by Fatah and Hamas in the Dura region.

Local Fatah and Islamic leaders, who gathered at the municipal council Tuesday afternoon, jointly visited the village of al-Sirri, 5 kilometers southwest of Dura, to show solidarity with the Masri clan following an assassination attempt on Sunday by unknown masked elements on a member of the clan.

Salmaeh al-Masri, 30, was moderately injured in his knee when anonymous gunmen riding a car opened fire on him as he was walking out of the local mosque in the village following the sunset prayers.

Al-Masri, a teacher, was rushed to the al-Ahli Hospital in al-Khalil where he underwent an urgent operation. Treating doctors described his condition as “good.”

Al-Masri was released from hospital Tuesday.

Speaking at the Masri clan’s Diwan or reception house, Ziad Rajoub, Secretary-General of the Fatah chapter in the southern al-Khalil region, said all Palestinians and Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, were united against “those who spill Palestinian blood.”

“He who spills Palestinian blood bears full responsibility for his crime. We will not give criminals and spreaders of division any cover or legitimacy.”

He described the would-be-assassins of al-Masri as “scum and vermin.”

“We will not seek to beautify an ugly face, and anyone who has information on the identity of the attackers must convey it to the police immediately.”

Rajoub urged Palestinians, including political factions and ordinary people, to display “maximal vigilance and national awareness because the agents of the occupation are lurking in our midst for the purpose of destroying our cause.”

Ismael Awawdeh, Chief Engineer at Dura Municipal Council, said that both Hamas and Fatah shouldn’t allow a “bunch of mercenaries, suspicious elements to poison our life and create mischief and malice and mistrust among the brothers.”

“We should call these faceless criminals who open fire on our people here and there by their real name. These are agents of the Israeli intelligence, they are the enemies of our people, I say this regardless of the political title of the perpetrator or the victim.”

A Palestinian intelligence official who spoke at the rally urged citizens to notify the security apparatus of any suspicious individuals and to inform the police of any piece of information that could lead to the apprehension of the perpetrators.

Fakhri Amr, a community leader, warned “all actual or potential evildoers” that “you and you alone would bear responsibility for whatever fully you might commit against another person.”

“We are one family here, and we will not tolerate dragging this area to infighting and tumult,” he asserted."

"Feb 7, 2007 — BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said it was checking reports that a helicopter, possibly a Chinook transport aircraft, had either crashed or made an emergency landing near Baghdad on Wednesday.

An Iraqi policeman who had been to the area northwest of Baghdad told Reuters he had seen wreckage on the ground. One witness who said he saw the helicopter come down also said he had seen wreckage.

U.S. soldiers had moved in to secure the area, witnesses said.

"We have heard about this … but I cannot confirm anything at this stage," said Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

The U.S. military said on Sunday it was adjusting its tactics in Iraq after four helicopters were shot down over a two-week period.

Those helicopters were shot down in four separate incidents in which 21 U.S. servicemen and private security contractors were killed. Dozens of U.S. helicopters have come down, some hit by missiles or gunfire, in four years of fighting in Iraq.

But the high number lost in such a short time had raised questions about whether militants had changed tactics or were using more sophisticated weapons.

At least two witnesses said they saw the helicopter, which they described as a twin-rotor Chinook, come down on Wednesday amid gunfire from the ground. Some witnesses said they saw smoke before the helicopter went down, while others said they had not seen any.

The Chinook has two crew and can carry up to 55 passengers. They are used widely to transport troops and cargo around Iraq."

'Man In The Hood' Tells Of His Tale In Abu Ghraib

"KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 6 (Bernama) -- Ali Shalah, popularly known as 'the man in the hood' in a famous photograph depicting the torture suffered by Iraqis at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, today spilled the beans on the inhumane treatment he received at the detention centre.

Ali, who now heads an organisation representing tortured victims in Iraq, captivated some 2,000 people with his story at the three-day War Crimes Conference at the Putra World Trade Centre, organised by the Perdana Global Peace Organisation headed by former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

"My nightmare began on 13th October, 2003, when I was arrested and put in a small room, which I later found out to be a toilet, which was flooded with water and human waste. I was interrogated in that room.

"They asked me if I was Sunni or Shiaa. I replied that we didn't have that kind of difference in Iraq. They also claimed that I had helped instigate people to oppose the occupation and to reveal the location of Osama bin Laden.

"They also said I was an important person in the Iraqi resistance. I was then marked to be transferred to Abu Ghraib. They wrote "big fish" on my forehead denoting that I was an important detainee," he said, relating his experience at a special session chaired by Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali, the wife of Dr Mahathir.

He said he was then beaten up and put in the truck and then transferred to the prison, which had five sectors with each sector having a tent surrounded by a wall and barbed wire.

The living conditions in these tents were bad with each tent accommodating 45 to 50 detainees, he said, adding that each tent was given only 60 litres of water daily for washing, cooking and cleaning.

"Our breakfast was at 5am, lunch at 8am while dinner was at 1pm. During Ramadhan, food was given at midnight but food was again given during the day, encouraging us to break our fast."

Ali said he was interrogated twice during his stay at the infamous prison but "I heard that detainees were tortured using lighted cigarettes and by injecting hallucinogens".

"After one month, I was called up and my hands were tied, a hood put over my head and transferred to a cell. At the cell they asked me to strip but when I refused they tore my clothes and tied me up again. They then dragged me up a flight of stairs and when I could not move, they beat me repeatedly.


"When I reached the top of the stairs, they tied me up to some steel bars. They then hurled me human waste and urinated on me. Then they put a gun to my head and said that they would execute me there. Another soldier used a megaphone to shout abuses at me and this went on the whole night," Ali further recalled.

He said the next morning he was asked the names of resistance fighters in Iraq and when he replied that he did not know any, they inserted a jagged wooden stick into his rectum, followed by the barrel of a rifle, which caused him to bleed profusely.

"The next morning the interrogator came to my cell and tied me to the grille of the cell and then played the pop song 'By the Rivers of Babylon' continuously until the next morning. The effect on me was that I lost my hearing and lost my mind," he added.

On the 15th day of detention, Ali was given a blanket, in which he made a hole and used it to cover himself.

Soon after this, the former lecturer said he was forcefully placed on top of a carton box containing canned food, had wires connected to his fingers and ordered to stretch his hand out horizontally, and the electricity was switched on.



"As the electric current entered my whole body, I felt as if my eyes were being forced out and sparks were flying out. My teeth were clattering violently and my legs shaking violently as well. My whole body was shaking. I was electrocuted on three separate sessions," he said to pin-drop silence in the hall.

Throughout the torture, he said the interrogators would take photographs of him.

He said he was then left alone in the cell for 49 days, and during this period the torture stopped.

"At the end of the 49th day, I was transferred back to the tents and after 45 days at the tents, I was informed by a prisoner that he overheard some guards saying that I was wrongly arrested and that I would be released.

"I was released in the beginning of March, 2004. I was put into a truck and taken to a highway and then thrown out. A passing car stopped and took me home," he ended his tale.

To a question from the floor after his talk, he said only God kept him alive during his ordeal but the suffering he went through was only "a drop in the ocean"."

Iraqization of War


Vietnamization of War

Analysis by Gareth Porter

"WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (IPS) - The supreme irony of President George W. Bush's campaign to blame Iran for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as attacks on U.S. forces, is that the Shiite militias who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present sectarian crisis did so with the support of both Iran and the neoconservative U.S. war planners.

The U.S. policy decisions that led to the sectarian war can be traced back to the conviction of a group of right-wing zealots with close ties to Israel's Likud Party that overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq would not destabilise the region, because Iraqi Shiites would be allies of the United States and Israel against Iran.

The idea that Iraqi Shiites could be used to advance U.S. power interests in the Middle East was part of a broader right-wing strategy for joint U.S.-Israeli "rollback" of Israel's enemies. In 1996, a task force at the right-wing Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, under Richard Perle advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that such a strategy should begin by taking control of Iraq and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there.

Three years later, the former director of that think tank, David Wurmser, who had migrated to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, spelled out how the United States could use Iraqi Shiites to support that strategy in "Tyranny's Ally". Wurmser sought to refute the realist argument that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would destroy the balance of power between Sunni-controlled Iraq and Shiite Iran on which regional stability depended.

Wurmser proposed replacing the existing "dual containment" policy toward Iran and Iraq with what he called "dual rollback". He did not deny that taking down Hussein's regime would "generate upheaval in Iraq", but he welcomed that prospect, which would "offer the oppressed, majority Shiites of that country an opportunity to enhance their power and prestige."

Whereas the "realists" had assumed the Iraqi Shiites would be "Iran's fifth column", Wurmser argued that the Iraqi Shiite clerics would "present a challenge to Iran's influence and revolution." He cited their rejection of the central concept of the Iranian revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini -- the "rule of the jurisprudent" -- justifying clerical rule.

From that fact, Wurmser leaped to the conclusion that Iraqi Shiites would be an ally of the United States in promoting a "regional rollback of Shiite fundamentalism". Wurmser even suggested that Iraqi Shiites could help pry Lebanese Shiites, with whom they had enjoyed close ties historically, away from the influence of Hezbollah and Iran......."

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What role is the international community playing in the shootings? Is there a civil war going on in Palestine? Still, what is the relationship between sanctions and shootings? What is going to happen from now on?

By Agustin Velloso in Madrid
PalestineChronicle.com

"Is there a civil war going on in Palestine? No, but this question and an affirmative answer is what pro-Israeli media are disseminating all over the world. Hence, the average news consumer does not discuss the “reality” of the civil war.

But, are not we seeing that Palestinians are killing each other in Gaza streets?

What we are seeing is that since Hamas took power in the last legislative elections (January 2006), which were monitored by hundreds of foreign observers, Jimmy Carter amongst them, the Western powers have made all kind of political and economic maneuvers to oust the winner with the help of the loser, Abu Mazen and his Fatah party.

However, Palestine is not Iraq, there are no Western armies in Gaza, is it not an internal Palestinian affair?

It is not an internal affair. Palestine is just one more square of the big Middle East cheesboard. The international community plays in it to its advantage, namely: the control of oil and the support of its ally, Israel. The Western powers support Fatah because they say it represents the ‘moderate’ Palestinians and torpedo Hamas because its program does not fit with the Zionist and Imperialist agendas. Once Hamas obtained the majority of the Legislative Council seats, the powerful leaders, Bush, Rice, Blair, Olmert, Solana and others adopted plan B: to oust Hamas from government no matter the price (to be paid by rank and file Palestinians, of course)......

What is going to happen from now on?

There is ample room to be concerned. It has to be taken into account what Western countries –and their main ally, Israel- have been doing for years in the Middle East: the destruction of several countries, the death of millions and the suffering of many others.

The United States and Israel will keep on arming and funding the pro-cup party and its militias in order to sabotage the Palestinian project and foster instead the creative chaos they are so fond of. For Palestinians this means no return of the refugees, the continuation of the Occupation by close or remote control, the judaization of Jerusalem, the continuation of the ethnic cleansing by Israeli policies and the subjugation of millions of Palestinians in their own land. In any case, nothing different of what has been taking place since 1948."

-Agustín Velloso de Santisteban received his Ph.D. in Education from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain, where he is a lecturer in Comparative Education. He specialises in education in Palestine and education for refugees. He has been Visiting Fellow at London University, Reading University and Stanford University.

"In an interview at Salon today, the maker of a forthcoming PBS documentary warns that America's efforts to "stand up" an Iraqi armed forces may be arming and training the very groups contributing to the country's instability.

Mark Smith, an award-winning television journalist, was interviewed by Salon's Alex Koppelman. His forthcoming documentary is called Gangs of Iraq and will air on PBS as part of its America at a Crossroads series. In the interview, Smith warned that the Mahdi Army, the Shi'a militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr, may be a primary beneficiary of the American effort to build a viable Iraqi security force.

"We're not training the Mahdi Army by intent, but we're providing training for people who may take our training program and then go join the militias," Smith told Koppelman. He added, "As early as August '04, there are photographs of uniformed Iraqi police celebrating with the Mahdi Army after a battle in Najaf."

Smith does not only single out the Mahdi Army. He also notes the heavy infiltration of the police by the Badr Corps, the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

"There are numerous reports of whole units of Badr Corps coming intact into the ministry to work in the police forces," Smith warns.

Smith then suggests that this problem raises large questions about the focus on security forces training in US policy."

By Gilad Atzmon

"The Palestinian activist Reem Abdul Hadi, when asked for her opinion about Jewish anti-Zionist campaigners, said sarcastically: “they are very nice, all fifteen of them…”

I was rather happy to read in yesterday’s Guardian that; “A group of prominent British Jews will today declare independence from the country's Jewish establishment, arguing that it puts support for Israel above the human rights of Palestinians.”

It is indeed about time that Jewish people with influence in art, academia, business and the media raise their voices against Israel’s crimes and its supportive lobbies around the globe. It is rather crucial that Jewish people should openly succumb to true ethical and universal thinking rather than clannish monolithic discourse solely concerned with tribal maintenance.

Earlier today, I logged on to check out what the Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) have to say. If to be honest, though I found more than a few of my friends enlisted, I was rather disappointed with the views expressed by the group.

Once again it was an ‘image’ of moral thinking rather than an authentic ethical commitment. Once again it was a glorifying exposition of Jewish righteousness rather than simply acknowledging the Palestinian cause, i.e., the ‘right of return’. Disappointingly, the declaration wittingly avoids confronting the kernel of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since it is rather established that the Palestinian cause is largely orientated around the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and the failure to resolve the refugee catastrophe, avoiding the issue is nothing less than denying the Palestinians the most elementary human right: the right to live on one’s land. Avoiding the refugee issue is nothing less than dismissing the Palestinians of the most basic human rights.

In other words, when the JIV says “Human rights are universal and indivisible and should be upheld without exception. This is as applicable in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as it is elsewhere,” what they really mean is “Human rights are universal as long as you are not a Palestinian who wants to return to his land.” I may admit that I find this approach rather disappointing. I would really love to believe that more than a few of the Jewish Independent Voices do agree with me on that one. I want to believe that they really fail to grasp what they were signing.

But the independent Jewish humanists do not stop just there; they also say “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peaceful and secure lives.” This may be true. Yet somehow, it sounds to me too much like the highlight of Olmert’s speech. People are entitled to live in peace, nevertheless, the occupier and the colonialist cannot expect to live a secure life. I would even suggest that Jewish intellectuals who dismiss this crucial point might find it hard to secure their position as ‘independent ethical voices’.

The Independent Jewish Voices expect all sides as well to comply with ‘international law’. And I think to myself, in a world where America is a single superpower, international law and UN resolutions have very little to do with ethical thinking. Moreover, even the historically accepted 1947 partition resolution is non-ethical to the bone. Once again, I would expect the ethically orientated Independent Jews to stand out and promote ethical thinking rather than resolutions that are grounded by hegemony and military might.


Eventually, the prominent independent Jews spit it out. They are really against anti-Semitism. “The battle against anti-Semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-Semitic.”

While on the verge of complete dismay, I wonder, wouldn’t it be sufficient to just be against racism in general? Why is it that Jews who regard themselves as Independent Jewish Voices have to declare that fighting anti-Semitism is ‘vital’? The reason is simple. They insist upon not being seen as anti-Semites by their ‘less independent’ brothers. In other words, they, the independent voices, are far from being liberated. They are far from being independent. They are totally imbued within the Jewish discourse. And their message to the world is nothing more than the old two state solution.

I am not impressed."

عبد الباري عطوان

"حرص المتحدثون باسم الوفدين الفلسطينيين اللذين شدا الرحال الي مكة المكرمة للمشاركة في لقاء المصالحة الذي يرعاه العاهل السعودي الملك عبد الله بن عبد العزيز علي تأكيد نواياهم الطيبة، وحرصهم الاكيد علي انجاح هذا اللقاء بالتوصل الي اتفاق حول تشكيل حكومة وحدة وطنية تنهي حال الاحتقان، وتضع حدا للصدامات الدموية المؤسفة، ولكن يظل من السابق لأوانه الاغراق في التفاؤل، لأن النوايا الطيبة شيء، وما يحدث علي الارض شيء آخر مختلف جدا.
اللقاء في حد ذاته ينطوي علي درجة كبيرة من الاهمية، من حيث الزمان والمكان. فأي جهد عربي يصب في محصلة حقن الدماء ولملمة الشمل، وتخفيف معاناة الفلسطينيين تحت الاحتلال، هو جهد محمود، فما شهدته الاراضي العربية المحتلة من صدامات دامية اودت بحياة اكثر من اربعين فلسطينيا، هو امر مؤسف بكل المقاييس.
السؤال هو حول كيفية نجاح لقاء مكة فيما فشلت في انجازه لقاءات ووساطات سابقة وخاصة في غزة ودمشق والقاهرة. فالمسألة ليست مسألة لقاء وتبويس لحي، والقاء مواعظ مطولة حول حقن الدم الفلسطيني، وانما مناقشة الاسباب الحقيقية للخلافات التي قادت الي هذه النتائج المؤسفة، وايجاد حلول عملية لها.
مكة المكرمة استضافت لقاء مماثلا قبل شهرين لقيادات ومراجع عراقية من مختلف المذاهب والطوائف، وبحضور العاهل السعودي نفسه، ووسط مهرجانات اعلامية مماثلة، وجري الاتفاق علي وثيقة مكة التي كانت النقطة الاولي فيها تحريم سفك الدم العراقي، فماذا كانت النتيجة؟ المزيد من السيارات المفخخة واكثر من خمسة آلاف قتيل عراقي من مختلف الطوائف، وتصاعد الحرب الاهلية الطائفية.
الصدامات الفلسطينية ـ الفلسطينية هي اعراض جانبية لمرض خطير مزمن اسمه محاولة امريكية ـ اسرائيلية لإجهاض نتائج عملية ديمقراطية، ومنع حكومة منتخبة من الحكم، ومعاقبة شعب فلسطيني بأسره بسبب تصديق اكذوبة الديمقراطية الامريكية، واختيار ممثليه من خلال انتخابات نزيهة حرة وغير مسبوقة في الوطن العربي بأسره. وطالما ان الجهود منصبة حاليا علي معالجة الاعراض الجانبية، وليس العلة الاساسية، فإن مصير لقاء مكة الفلسطيني لن يكون افضل حالا من لقاء مكة العراقي.
الحكومات العربية ساهمت، كل حسب دوره وحجمه، في انفجار حال الاحتقان الداخلي الفلسطيني، عندما ساهمت في الحصار المالي الخانق المفروض علي الشعب الفلسطيني، وتخلت بطريقة مخجلة عن تعهدها الذي قطعته علي نفسها، في اجتماع لوزراء خارجية الدول العربية في القاهرة، بكسر هذا الحصار وعدم الالتزام به.
فاذا كانت هذه الحكومات عجزت عن فتح معبر لعلاج المرضي او عودة حجاج بيت الله الحرام في موعدهم، فهل ستنجح في ايصال الاموال والمساعدات للجائعين او المجوعين بقرار امريكي ـ اسرائيلي؟ لا نعتقد ذلك، والاجابة مكتوبة علي الحائط بوضوح.
ومع ذلك تظل هناك جوانب ايجابية لهذا اللقاء، اولها التقاء السيدين محمود عباس رئيس السلطة وخالد مشعل رئيس المكتب السياسي لحركة المقاومة الاسلامية حماس كندين متساويين في المكانة والثقل السياسي، وبدعوة من ملك عربي تردد طويلا في الاعتراف بحركة حماس او الالتقاء بأي من المسؤولين الكبار فيها. العاهل السعودي لم يلتق السيد مشعل قبل ذلك، وتجنب لقاء السيد محمود الزهار وزير الخارجية اثناء زيارته للرياض، وحتي عندما وجه دعوة الي السيد اسماعيل هنية رئيس الوزراء لزيارة المملكة وارسل له طائرة خاصة الي العريش، لم تكن دعوة رسمية، وانما لأداء فريضة الحج، حيث توجه دعوات عديدة لقيادات وزعامات سياسية وقبلية وحزبية اسلامية من مختلف انحاء العالم، يلتقون بالعاهل السعودي اثناء أداء مناسك الحج.
عقبتان اساسيتان حالتا دون توصل اللقاءات السابقة بين حركتي فتح و حماس الي اتفاق مصالحة ينهي حالة التوتر، ويسمح بتشكيل حكومة وحدة وطنية:
العقبة الاولي: رفض حركة حماس القبول بنص في خطاب التكليف بتشكيل الحكومة الجديدة، يؤكد علي الالتزام بالاتفاقات الموقعة من قبل السلطة، اي اتفاق اوسلو الذي ينص علي الاعتراف بالدولة العبرية.
العقبة الثانية: تنازل حركة حماس عن الوزارات السيادية لشخصيات مستقلة تسمي بعضها او توافق عليها بشرط مسبق الولايات المتحدة الامريكية، وخاصة منصبي وزير المالية ووزير الداخلية.
حماس ابدت استعدادا لاستبدال كلمة التزام بكلمة احترام وأصرت علي عدم قبول اي اسماء لوزراء يفرضون من قبل جهات خارجية، وامريكية علي وجه التحديد.
وما زال السؤال المطروح في هذا الخصوص هو عما اذا كان السيد مشعل سيتنازل في مكة عما رفض التنازل عنه في دمشق، حيث حلفاؤه السوريون الخلص، اي القبول بكلمة التزام والتخلي عن الاحترام وفي حال تقديمه هذا التنازل الذي يعني الاعتراف باسرائيل، ماذا سيحصل في المقابل؟
بمعني آخر هل سيلغي اتفاق مكة في حال التوصل اليه الخطط الامريكية التي رصدت 128 مليون دولار لتعزيز حرس الرئاسة الفلسطيني ورفع تعداده الي اكثر من عشرة آلاف شخص وتنظيف قوات الامن الوطني الفلسطينية البالغ تعدادها 40 الفا من كل العناصر التي تؤمن بالمقاومة او تتعاطف معها، تحت ذريعة اعادة تأهيل هذه القوات.
وفي حال الاتفاق علي تسمية وزراء الوزارات السيادية هل سيوضع الحرس الرئاسي والمعابر وقوات الامن العام وجهازا المخابرات والامن الوقائي تحت امرة وزير الداخلية الجديد، وبصلاحيات مطلقة؟ وما هو مصير القوة التنفيذية التي اسستها وزارة داخلية حماس لتكون ميليشيا موازية لميليشيات الرئاسة ومستشاريها الامنيين؟
الشعب الفلسطيني كله يتطلع الي نجاح لقاء مكة، ولكن لا بد من توفر الأسس اللازمة لهذا النجاح، ويمكن تلخيصها في النقاط التالية:
اولا: ان تسلم حركة حماس بانها لا يمكن ان تجمع بين السلطة والمعارضة في الوقت نفسه، وتحمل بطيختي المقاومة والحكومة الثقيلتين والمتناقضتين، فلا بد من اسقاط احداهما، فإما القبول بالحكومة وهذا يتطلب القبول بشروطها كاملة، وإما التمسك بالمقاومة وتحمل كل تبعاتها.
شخصيا كنت اتمني لو ان حماس لم تخض الانتخابات التشريعية، وان تتنازل عن تشكيل الحكومة فور الفوز فيها، بعد ان تبين ان هناك انقلابا ضدها، يريد افشالها وعقاب الشعب الفلسطيني بسببها. فلو فعلت حماس ذلك لتضاعفت شعبيتها في اوساط الفلسطينيين في الداخل والخارج.
ثانيا: ان تسلم قيادة حركة فتح بانها خسرت السلطة بسبب فسادها، وليس فساد الحركة، وان عليها ان تتنحي جانبا لطرف ثالث مقبول، وتطهر نفسها من السياسات التي تبنتها اخيرا عندما ربطت نفسها بالمشروع الامريكي، وقبلت ان تتحول الي كونترا فلسطينية، ودون اي مقابل ملموس علي صعيد تحقيق الحد الأدني من المطالب الفلسطينية.
من الصعب ان نري حركة حماس تنسحب من الحكومة وتسلمها بطريقة مباشرة او غير مباشرة للطرف الآخر او من يدورون في فلكه، بعد كل ما حدث من صدامات وصمود في وجه الحصارين الامريكي منه والعربي، ومن المستحيل ان نصدق ان الرئيس عباس سيدير ظهره بالكامل للسيدة كوندوليزا رايس و محور المعتدلين الذي اسسته ويتوقف عن عناق ايهود اولمرت ومطالبته باستئناف المفاوضات. ويعيد حركة فتح الي منابعها الاولي كحركة كفاح وطني.
ثم من يضمن، في حال التوصل الي اتفاق، ان تلتزم به القوي الاقليمية، وتسهل تنفيذه، ونقصد هنا سورية ومصر وايران وهي القوي التي تشعر بحساسية مطلقة تجاه خسارة الورقة الفلسطينية لطرف آخر.
نعم نحن غير متفائلين ليس لاننا لا نريد نجاح مؤتمر مكة، ولكن لاننا نري ان المسألة اكثر تعقيدا من المصافحة والعناق امام كاميرات التلفزة في حضور العاهل السعودي. فنحن امام رأسين يتناطحان من اجل الفوز بسلطة وهمية، ولن يتوقف هذا النطاح الذي تحول اخيرا الي معارك دموية، حتي يفوز كبش ويهزم الآخر.
ونأمل ان نكون مخطئين."

Can Anything Good Come From These Two Stooges?

Pre-Emptive Strike Against Chirac

By DIANA JOHNSTONE
CounterPunch

Paris.

"Four years ago, French President Jacques Chirac saw the Iraq disaster looming and openly warned against it. It was by far the best thing he ever did in his political life, and he is not to be allowed to do it again.

Today another, potentially even greater disaster is looming as Israel and the United States ostentatiously prepare to bomb Iran on the pretext of preventing "a second holocaust". But this time around there is a curious absence of the public opposition and mass protest demonstrations that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It is as though the enormity of events and the comforts of daily life have caused the Western world to give up thinking about grave matters and to take refuge in officially inspected and approved platitudes. Debate is replaced by an alarm system that sends up cries of scandal at any deviation from the accepted discourse......

The alarm bells went off. The "scandal" of Chirac's politically incorrect remarks was the top front page news story in both U.S. and French newspapers.....

First of all, it showed that the French President, a lame duck in the midst of an election campaign to replace him, is too isolated to be able to oppose war against Iran as he opposed war against Iraq. The media are there to shoot him down before he gets off the ground, first of all the newspapers that continue to enjoy the label "leftist", "left-leaning" or "center-left" -- mainly Libération and Le Monde -- but which in reality have become the guardians of Atlanticist orthodoxy (devotion to a "European unity" closely tied to the United States). Chirac's own political party was snatched away from him by his ambitious enemy Nicolas Sarkozy, who has publicly criticized Chirac's departure from the American fold over the war against Iraq. Sarkozy's demonstrations of devotion to Washington and Tel Aviv have won him the enthusiastic support of the organized Jewish community, increasingly inspired by the U.S. pro-Israel lobby......

To get back to the supposed threat to Israel from Iran, a most interesting comment from Israeli Deputy Defense minister Ephraim Sneh was cited by Seymour Hersh in his November 21, 2006 piece in The New Yorker on the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran. Expressing skepticism about the possibility of influencing Iran by diplomatic means, Sneh said:

"The danger isn't as much Ahmadinejad's deciding to launch an attack but Israel's living under a dark cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction... Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who live can live abroad will... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button."

This is truly an amazing statement that deserves careful attention. The Israeli official is suggesting that a war should be launched against a country, not because of what it may do, but because the fear of what it may do risks "killing the Zionist dream". This suggests that the fear of another holocaust, which has been the main argument for Zionism for half a century, is turning around to destroy Zionism itself.

But are we to plunge the world into war to "save the Zionist dream"? Isn't there some other way for Jews to live in the world without fear of genocide? Indeed, hasn't Zionist Israel become the greatest threat to Jews, by attaching them to the fate of a brutal state which is arousing the growing indignation of the world by its treatment of the Palestinians?

For a long time, there has been an unwritten law that only Jews (at risk of being called "self-hating") may criticize Zionism. But things have gone too far. This aggressive paranoia of Israel is not just a "Jewish question", it is dragging the whole world into disaster. Those of us who are not Jewish also have to speak up and say to our Jewish friends:

"We don't want to kill you, but we don't want to die for your Jewish State either. We are all human beings, and we refuse to plunge the world into war to preserve distinctions of identity that may mean a lot to you, but don't mean much of anything to us.""

Arab states fear Iraq-style democracy: PM

"I know why they oppose us, because they fear extension of democracy to their shores. They have this fear because they are a copy of the dictatorship which ruled Iraq," Maliki told Iraqi military commanders Tuesday.

Continue

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"You too can experience the joy that is life in Iraq today" -- Maliki

Hebrew paper: Raid on Islamic University meant to free Shalit

"Nazareth - The Hebrew Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted on Tuesday sources in the PA security apparatuses loyal to PA chief Mahmoud Abbas as affirming that the raid on the Islamic University at the hands the PA presidential guards on Friday was meant to free captured IOF serviceman Gilad Shalit.

The paper alleged that Shalit was detained inside the University since he was captured last June till three months ago when his captors took him to a different place.

Furthermore, the paper unveiled that the PA presidential guards (Force 17) exerted tremendous efforts during the raid to locate Shalit and release him. Officials of the University denied Shalit was detained inside it.

Last month, Hamas and other Palestinian parties accused former PA minister and Fatah MP Mohammed Dahalan of derailing a prisoner swap deal with Israel, and personally promised his Israeli friends to intensify intelligence efforts to locate and free Shalit at no cost to the Israelis. Dahalan’s step was meant to deny Hamas popular credit if a prisoner exchange deal went ahead.

On Friday, which is the weekly day off in Palestine, large numbers of PA security forces loyal to Abbas raided and ransacked the University campus, inflicting heavy damage on it. The losses were estimated at 15 million dollars.

The University president Kamaleen Shaath affirmed that the heavy losses inflicted on the University won’t discourage its officials from pursuing their educational duties and preserving the educational message of that pioneer University.

PA communication and technology minister and chairman of the University’s board of trustees Jamal Al-Khudari seconded Sha’ath affirmation, adding that the University was built with Palestinian blood and sacrifices, and so, harming it at Palestinian hands was disgusting.

The University’s students council, for its part, pledged to abort goals of the assailants, and vowed to defend their University and preserve its message.

In a related matter, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails condemned the armed attack on the PA prisoners’ affairs ministry at the hands of vandal groups believed to be affiliated with the mutiny trend in Fatah faction.

A joint statement issued by Palestinian prisoners from Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and DFLP among other factions branded the attack on the ministry as “criminal and heinous”.

The statement, furthermore, invited the Palestinian people to consolidate their ranks in confronting the Israeli occupation government and defending the Aqsa Mosque."

By Tony Karon

"......The fundamental assumption left unchallenged is that military force is a wise, prudent or legitimate response to the proliferation of nasty weapons among regimes hostile to the U.S. It’s precisely that assumption that has been trashed in Iraq, which even if it had had a couple of hundred (or even thousand) mustard gas and VX shells would still be the catastrophic mess it is today......

My reason for revisiting the morbid saga of media complicity in enabling the Iraq war now is that a new, even more catastrophic war is in the works against Iran — but it’s not a done deal. Cheney, quite probably the most dangerous man in the world given the combination of his extremist views and his proximity to real power, would love to make it happen, and so would the neocons and Likudniks, who are agitating for it with increasing alarm.

Not only do we have a steady stream of hysteria pouring out of the Israeli establishment and its American backers making the absurd comparison between Iran and Nazi Germany, routinely exaggerating both Iran’s intentions and its capabilities. There’s also the new trope — equally absurd, but it’s not like there’s a very effective filter in place — of blaming Iran for things going wrong in Iraq......

The U.S. had promised a major roll-out last week of “evidence” showing Iran was contributing towards instability in Iraq, but it was canceled, reportedly after State and Defense Department officials pushed back against the flimsiness of the evidence on offer. But as Juan Cole notes, the pertinent question worth investigating, then, is “who was spearheading this presentation inside the Bush administration?” 

I wish I had more confidence in the Democrats readiness to stand up to the demagoguery on Iran. And also the media’s. Thank heaven, then, for former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, and his moral clarity on the matter. His recent Senate testimony on Iraq and Iran should be required reading for people covering this story. Extract......

And when you hear the U.S. media echoing half-baked allegations against Iran or flights of fancy about how Washington is building a Sunni Arab united front to push back against the likes of Iran and Hamas, or hawking the same notions that security can be created through the application of military force despite that notion having been so spectacularly discredited in Iraq, remember that it’s often the “expertise” of the same cast of clowns that got the Iraq equation so spectacularly wrong that is now shaping the Iran discussion."

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In this war-torn country, nobody is safe from bloodshed. In Ramadi, Kirkuk and Basra, they count the dead as the violence worsens

"From north to south, from east to west, violence and insecurity have gripped the entirety of Iraq. In January alone, at least 2,000 civilians, Iraqi security forces and US and British troops were killed in violence across the nation.

As President George Bush dispatches an additional 21,500 combat troops ­ and at least as many again in a supporting role ­ to try to bring calm to Baghdad, new figures suggest that violent death is becoming an everyday occurrence across all of Iraq and in cities that rarely make the headlines. In recent weeks places such as Kut and Mosul have reported civilian deaths as a result of gunfire or explosions.

"There has long been this idea that if you control Baghdad you can control the whole country, but that just does not make sense," said Nir Rosen, a fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation who has spent more than two years in Iraq reporting on the violence. "Iraq has fragmented. I don't think Baghdad has any relevance to what is happening in Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra or Ramadi."

In December, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, said: "I think it's still the case that 80 per cent of the violence that we are hearing about is taking place... in four provinces out of the 18."

Of Mr Bush's plan, Mr Rosen said: "It would not make a difference if we sent 100,000 troops... I cannot imagine how they think they can succeed. Americans are not the solution."

Available data suggests that Baghdad is the most perilous place in Iraq. Just last weekend, at least 132 people were killed and more than 300 wounded when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a lorry in the city's Sadriya market.

But it appears that few, if any, parts of the country are safe. Indeed, the most recent figures, collated by The New York Times, may well underestimate the levels of violence in other parts of the country because they rely on media reports, the Iraqi government and the US military, which almost certainly include only a portion of the numbers killed.

Professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and co-author of a 2004 study which estimated that at least 100,000 Iraqis had died since the 2003 invasion, said: "One of the myths that Washington has been pushing is that it is pretty peaceful in Iraq and that the problems only exist in four governates. But if you only count [casualties] in four governates that is what you will find." He added: "There are lots of cities with high amounts of fighting that we don't even know about."

Almost four years after the US and British invasion of Iraq, reliable statistics on the human cost of the war remain scarce. A report, published last October by Dr Garfield's colleagues, estimated that 655,000 civilians and security personnel had lost their lives.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that about two million Iraqis ­ about 8 per cent of the pre-war population ­ have fled the country. An additional 1.7 million people are displaced inside Iraq....."

The longer the US and Britain back dictatorial regimes in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become

A Good Comment
By Mai Yamani
Tuesday February 6, 2007
The Guardian

"Politicians, especially in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, coined the term "detente". Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word "moderates" to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies.

Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to western audiences. And, as the word moderate has been repeated by western leaders and echoed in the international media, these rulers have begun to believe their own billing. But who are they, and are they moderate? Their selection has been fluid at the periphery but solid at the core. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt clearly qualify, whereas Syria, an ally during the 1990-91 Gulf war, was once at the periphery but fell out of step with US interests after 9/11. Likewise, after the death of Arafat and the victory of Hamas, Fatah became moderate, while Iran, moderate under the shah, became "radical" after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
This minuet of political marketing may play well in the west, but not in the Arab world, where the double standards and manipulation are all too plain to see. The Saudi Wahhabis are, after all, fanatics; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is intolerant of dissent; and Jordan, the state closest to the western ideal, is a marginal player. These countries' appalling human rights records, lack of transparency and repression rank them among the world's least moderate. Is there such a thing as a "moderate public beheading"? For the US and UK governments there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in "tradition". Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate.

Nothing, it seems, is more moderate than inertia. So inertia pays. Egypt has received an average of $1.3bn a year in military aid from the US since 1979, and $815m a year in economic assistance. Saudi Arabia relies on oil revenues and the international legitimacy provided by membership of such moderate bulwarks as the WTO and the IMF.

But at home, all other hallmarks of moderation are missing. Amnesty International describes Saudi Arabia as a country where "there are no political parties, no elections, no independent legislature, no trade unions ... no independent judiciary, no independent human rights organisations. The government allows no international human rights organisations to carry out research in the country ... there is strict censorship of media within the country, and strict control of access to the internet, satellite television and other forms of communication with the outside world."

Likewise, Human Rights Watch's report on Egypt describes Mubarak's government as using a "heavy hand against political dissent in 2006. In April 2006, the government renewed emergency rule for an additional two years, providing a continued basis for arbitrary detention and trials before military and state security courts. Torture at the hands of security forces remains a serious problem." Amnesty's report on Egypt concurred: "Torture continued to be used systematically in detention centres ... Several people died in custody in circumstances suggesting that torture or ill-treatment may have caused or contributed to their deaths."

The use of moderate to describe such leaders is necessary to mask the death of Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, with its lofty goal of regionwide democratisation. Indeed, Rice's visit to Egypt in January emphasised the word moderate and completely ignored the word democracy.

The moderates are not democrats, but they are politically useful because of what else they are not: they are not Persian and not Shia, not defiant and not able to act independently of the US. They are moderate only because they do not need to be more radical to achieve absolute power. Mubarak already exercises it, and the al-Sauds are satisfied with the current level of fanaticism in the kingdom. Some are armchair jihadis, but their Islamism serves only to prop up their domestic legitimacy.

What the moderates do need is continued western military and financial cover. So they remain ideological stalwarts. If communism was the enemy of the US, then it was their enemy. If Shia Iran is America's enemy today, it is also the enemy of America's moderate allies.

The relationship with the west is a two-way street. The Saudis invest billions in the US, buy weapons they don't need or cannot use, and provide a thriving market for western goods. But, like Mubarak, the Saudi rulers are old and on the defensive against their own people. The more the US shelters them, the more their legitimacy erodes. And the longer Washington and London prolong the state of denial with the help of pithy and amorphous buzzwords, the more explosive the Middle East will become."

The Status Of The Arabs Today

U.S. Troops Killed In Iraq..............3,101

"Coalition" Troops Killed...............3,355

U.S. Troops Wounded In Iraq........23,279

"A senior political ally of the Israeli prime minister has said that Israel should release its most prominent Palestinian prisoner - a man convicted in fatal attacks on Israelis - in a bid to prop up Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.

Gideon Ezra, the environment minister, is the second senior Israeli official to recently advocate the release of Marwan Barghouti of Abbas's Fatah movement.....

"If we want to blunt Hamas's capabilities ... and if we ultimately want a civil rather than a religious government like those taking shape across the Arab world, we have to make a contribution," Ezra told Army Radio, in defence of freeing Barghouti.

"I think it could definitely help Abu Mazen [Abbas]."....."

Reuters

"Feb. 4 - A video alledgedly showing a U.S. helicopter being shot down in Iraq has been shown on an Islamic militant website.

The U.S. military says it is adjusting its tactics in Iraq after four helicopters were shot down over the past two weeks, killing 21 servicemen and private contractors."

From the Truman Doctrine to the Neo-Conservatives

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, February 5, 2007

PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

EXPOSE WAR CRIMES - CRIMINALISE WAR

5-7 February 2007, Dewan Merdeka, Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur

"The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.

There is mounting evidence that the Bush Administration, in liaison with Israel and NATO, is planning the launching of a nuclear war against Iran, ironically, in retaliation for Tehran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program. The US-Israeli military operation is said to be in "an advanced state of readiness".

If such a plan were to be launched, the war would escalate and eventually engulf the entire Middle-East Central Asian region.

The war could extend beyond the region, as some analysts have suggested, ultimately leading us into a World War III scenario.

The US-led naval deployment (involving a massive deployment of military hardware) is taking place in two distinct theaters: the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean is broadly under the jurisdiction of NATO in liaison with Israel. Directed against Syria, it is conducted under the façade of a UN "peace-keeping" mission. In this context, the Israeli led war on Lebanon last Summer, which was conducive to countless atrocities and the destruction of an entire country, must be viewed as a stage of the broader US sponsored military road-map......"

The US and Israel
The Real Failed States

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
CounterPunch

"Growing references by the US and Israel to the Muslim Middle East as a collection of failed states are part of the propaganda campaign to strip legitimacy from Muslim states and set them up for attack. These accusations spring from the hubris of many Israelis, who see themselves as "God's Chosen People," a guarantee of immunity instead of a call to responsibility, and many Americans, who regard their country as "a city upon a hill" that is "the light of the world." But do the US and Israel fit the profile of successful states, or are they failed states themselves?

A compelling case can be made that the US and Israel are failed states. Israel allegedly is a democracy, but it is controlled by a minority of Zionist zealots who commit atrocities against Palestinians in order to provoke terrorist acts that are then used to perpetuate the right-wing's hold on political power. Israel has perfected blowback as a tool of political control. The Israeli state relies entirely on coercion and has no diplomacy. It stands isolated in the world except for the US, which sustains Israel's existence with money, military weapons, and the US veto in the United Nations.

Israel survives on life support from the US. A state that cannot exist without outside support is a failed state.

What about the United States? The US is an even greater failure. Its existence is not dependent on life support from outside. The US has failed in another way. Not only has the state failed, but the society as well......

The case against Israel and the US does not preclude some Muslim states from also meeting the criteria for failure. However, Iraq, an artificial creation of Western colonial powers, was driven into failure and civil war by American aggression. Iran, a nation with a 5,000 year history, is certainly not a failed state. The main failed states in the Middle East are those that are US puppets. They represent American hegemony, not the interests of their people.

What the US and Israel are attempting to do is to turn the entire Muslim Middle East into failed states, that is, into puppet regimes. By extending their hegemony in the Middle East, the US and Israel hope to prolong their own failed existence."

By Uri Avnery
CounterPunch

".....IT'S NOT the past I am writing about, but the future.

At this moment, people in Washington and in Jerusalem are thinking about a war in Iran. Not if it should be started, but when and how.

If this is to be an American war, its consequences will be many times more grievous than the war in Iraq. Iran is a very hard nut. The Iranian people are united. They have a glorious national tradition, a highly developed national pride and a tough religious ideology. One can bomb their oil facilities, but it is a big country, not dependent on a sophisticated infrastructure, and it cannot be subdued by bombing alone. There will be no alternative to a military attack on the ground.

Bush is already preparing the war. This week he instructed his soldiers in Iraq to hunt down and kill all "Iranian agents" there. That is reminiscent of the infamous "Kommissarbefehl" of June 6, 1941, on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in which Adolf Hitler ordered the summary execution of every captured political commissar of the Red Army. Since the commissars were uniformed soldiers, every commander who carried out the order became a war criminal.

It is quite certain that if the United States does go to war, the Iranian people will rally behind their government. They will draw the conclusion that everything their leaders told them about the West was true. The opposition, which has lately raised its head, will fall silent and disappear. The big-mouthed president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose wisdom is now being questioned by many of his own people, will turn overnight into a national hero. It will be a war of many years, and many thousands of American soldiers--not to mention Iranians--will fall.

President Bush may hesitate and pass the task over to Israel. Lately, Olmert has hinted that it was the Americans who pushed him into the Lebanon war. They believed that the Israeli army would defeat Hizbullah easily, and that this would help the American clients in Beirut. (A similar foolish calculation caused the Americans to give their blessing to Sharon's First Lebanon War in 1982.)

Nowadays, our politicians and generals speak freely about the inevitable attack on Iran. The pro-Israeli lobby in the US, both Jewish and Christian, is toiling mightily to push American public opinion in this direction. All these gentlemen and ladies, in their comfortable villas far from the prospective battlefields, yearn for a war which will cost the lives of the sons and daughters--of other people.

The advocates of the war declare that it is necessary in order to prevent a "Second Holocaust". That has already become a mantra. This week, Jacques Chirac nearly exploded it, when he expressed the self-evident: that if an Iranian nuclear bomb were launched at Israel, Israel would wipe Tehran from the face of the earth. The Iranian rulers are not mad and the "balance of terror" will do its job. But the "friends" of Israel and the USA started to pelt Chirac with verbal rocks, and he hastily retracted.
* * *
LET'S ASSUME for a moment that the Israeli Air force, with the help of the American naval forces that are now being steadily built up in the Persian Gulf, succeeds in bombing targets in Iran. What will happen then?

Iranian missiles will rain down on Tel-Aviv and Haifa. The promise of our Air Force to destroy them on the ground is worth no more than the similar promises we heard about Lebanon. In order to defend Israel, American soldiers would have to go into Iran. Israel's account would be debited with every casualty. If Israel is, God forbid, the first to use a nuclear bomb there, the shame will last forever.

The masses of the Arab--indeed the entire Muslim world, both Sunnis and Shiites, will rally around Iran. The Sunni heads of state, who are embracing Israel now in secret, will run away in panic. We shall be left alone to face the revenge that will come sooner or later. Will we be able to rely on the heirs of Bush, who may be less reckless and more inclined to listen to world public opinion, which will inevitably blame us for this whole adventure?

Iran is not a second Iraq, neither is it Hizbullah multiplied by ten. It is an entirely different story.

But is anyone here thinking about it seriously? Will the successors of the share-selling Chief-of-Staff and the tongue-pushing minister be more thoughtful? Or will they decide upon a new military adventure with the same unbearable lightness?"

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Tom Toles

"It was claimed early in 2005 that the United States was considering resort to what has been called the "Salvadoran Option" in Iraq, in which, as had been done in El Salvador in the 1980s, U.S. Special Forces would train paramilitary squads to hunt down and assassinate rebel leaders and their supporters. [1] A year earlier, it was reported that a sizable fund had been appropriated for the creation of an exile-based paramilitary unit for Iraq, and that the money would more broadly "support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revengeful Iraqi security force." It was expected that this would lead to "a wave of extrajudicial killings" of armed rebels, but also of "nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists."

By Mike Whitney

".....Bush’s new “security strategy” does nothing to promote American interests in Iraq; it benefits Iran alone. The “surge” is a tactic not a strategy. It does not consider the overall objectives of US involvement in Iraq, but continues to pursue the narrow aim of eliminating one enemy over another. This is hopelessly counterproductive and will end in disaster. By focusing all of his military resources on defeating the Sunni-led resistance, Bush has made a “devil’s bargain” with the Iranian-backed Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the biggest gangster in all of Baghdad, who is instigating much of the sectarian violence. Al-Hakim spent 20 years in Iran prior to the fall of Saddam and is clearly allied to the Mullahs. His militia, the Badr Brigade, was trained by the Iranian Republican Guards (as well as the CIA) and is perhaps the most feared death squad in all of Iraq. Al-Hakim’s militia operates out of the Iraqi Interior Ministry and is deeply engaged in the purging of Sunnis from Baghdad.......

Also, according to the conservative Jerusalem Post, “The pro-Iranian Mahdi Army is waging a war to eliminate the entire Palestinian population in Iraq…. Palestinian leaders and activists are describing a ‘systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing’. Thousands of Palestinian families have been forced to flee Iraq since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, but have no place to go.” (“Palestinians ‘Ethnic Cleansing” in Iraq”)

The deliberate attack on Iraqi intellectuals and academics has also gone largely unreported in the western media. In a heart-wrenching article by Layla Anwar, “A Stroll Down Haifa Street”, the author details the assault on a university professor, Ahmed Kamal Nabil. Nabil tells how teachers and students have been targeted as “the last line of resistance against political manipulation and terror in the new Iraq. Academics are targeted because they cannot be ideologically controlled…or sucked into the role of mouth piece for the occupation and its puppets…And academics are targeted because the new Iraq has become one big looting field run by mercenaries, thugs, politically corrupt opportunists, sectarian agitators, fanatical dark minds, and barbarians. And they want it to remain that way. They want to make sure that Iraq will never raise its head again. So they drain it of its intellectuals. In the New Iraq, there is no place for knowledge. Knowledge is the enemy.”......

As Brzezinski said, “If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted, bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.”...."

By Sean Rayment, Sunday Telegraph

"Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone", the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.

Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents......"

By Kurt Nimmo

"It is interesting the Telegraph.co.uk, “Lord” Conrad Black’s online version of a neocon newspaper, would publish a story admitting that the Joint Support Group, described as “a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit,” manages “covert human intelligence sources or agents,” including double agents, that is to say the Brits are engaged in terrorist operations, as long suspected.

“During the [Irish] Troubles, the JSG operated under the cover name of the Force Research Unit (FRU), which between the early 1980s and the late 1990s managed to penetrate the very heart of the IRA. By targeting and then ‘turning’ members of the paramilitary organization with a variety of ‘inducements’” ranging from blackmail to bribes, the FRU operators developed agents at virtually every command level within the IRA,” explains Sean Rayment.

Even a dullard, armed with the appropriate search criteria and Google, can put two and two together in short order and discover that much of the terrorism in Northern Ireland was orchestrated by FRU and the British government, including the despicable “human bomb” technique, that is to say “forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints,” according to the Guardian.

Naturally, all of this shines a new light on the two British SAS operatives caught in Basra, driving around in a car loaded with explosives and disguised as Arabs back in 2005.

Assassinating Irish civilians was part and parcel of “an intelligence operation which had been sanctioned at the highest levels of the British Army and the British Security Service, MI5,” according to Ed Moloney, writing for the Sunday Tribune.

In addition to outright murder, British intelligence encouraged torture. Robert Stevens describes the UDA as “a fascistic, loyalist paramilitary organization,” infamous for running death squads.

Sunday Telegraph documents “confirm that as the UDA’s primary intelligence officer [Brian] Nelson passed on the names, photographs and addresses of suspected IRA members from Army Intelligence records to UDA gunmen and that he carried out assassinations under army direction.” Patrick Finucane was apparently murdered by a FRU sanctioned death squad. The Belfast solicitor was gunned down before his wife and children.

“Beginning in the 1980s the highly secretive FRU was sent into Northern Ireland to recruit and train double agents to work inside the paramilitary groups,” writes Michael S. Rose. “The FRU combated IRA terrorism by the use of paid informers, blackmail, ambushes, and other methods not approved by the Geneva Convention. In the worst case, British officers decided that in cases when it would be difficult to bring suspected IRA terrorists to justice by legitimate means, the FRU would enlist outlawed guerilla groups that possessed both the desire and the means to murder the IRA men. According to Stevens Three, the FRU assisted Protestant terrorists in carrying out what were, in effect, proxy assassinations of Catholics. In order to forge such alliances, the British officers had to overlook the fact that the interests of the Protestant death squads were not those of the United Kingdom and its government.”

In Iraq, the “JSG is the coalition’s secret weapon,” a defense source told the Telegraph. “Their job is to recruit and run covert human intelligence sources or agents—we never use the term informer. The Americans are in awe of the unit because they have nothing like them within their military.” "

U.S. Military: 4 choppers shot down

There have been four recent helicopter crashes in Iraq since January 20. Now, the U.S. Military says these downed crafts were all lost to ground fire.

Click Here To Play Video

The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have been using the same tactics—alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on W.M.D.—to push for the bombing of Iran. As President Bush ups the pressure on Tehran, is he planning to double his Middle East bet?

A Long Article
by Craig Unger
Vanity Fair

"......Whatever the administration's master plan may be, parts of it are already under way. In mid-January, the U.S. sent a second aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf. According to Gardiner, by the end of February the United States will have enough forces in place to mount an assault on Iran. That, in the words of former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, would be "an act of political folly" so severe that "the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end."

The Bush White House has already built the fire. Whether it will light the match remains to be seen."

By Justin Raimondo

"Having destroyed the Iraqi state, and murdered some 600,000 Iraqis in the process, the War Party is now denying all responsibility for the subsequent civil war threatening to plunge the nation into a maelstrom of sectarian violence. Hard to believe, I know, but here's Charles Krauthammer – always in the avant-garde of neocon-dom – blaming it all on … the Iraqis!

"We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?"

If the police invaded and destroyed, say, South Central Los Angeles, bombing the place into rubble and installing a puppet "government" that employed death squads to do its bidding, then, yes, they would indeed have the blood of the victims on their hands......

Do you think Krauthammer is saddened by the vicious killing that is now taking Iraq down into a bloody abyss? Not a chance. The neocons hate Arabs, all of them, Shia and Sunni alike (and the Persians, too). As long as these folks are killing each other, they can't attack the United States – or Israel. That's what motivated the invasion of Iraq, and it's what is pushing them to do the same to Iran – sheer malevolence, but malevolence, I might add, with a purpose......

The ugly secret of the neocons is that their program of "regime change" throughout the Middle East doesn't mean taking down tyrannies and replacing them with governments of a more democratic or even liberal character – it means toppling one regime and replacing it with… nothing. Michael Ledeen, the Machiavelli of this crowd, calls it "creative destruction." I'm not sure how creative it is – although I guess it depends on what you're trying to create – but clearly, by these standards, they have every right to claim Iraq as a "victory" and crow "Mission accomplished!"......"

"Saudi King Abdullah is assured his mediation will bring the Hamas-Fatah peace conference in Mecca Tuesday, Feb. 6, to a successful conclusion. The pledge has come from the tougher side of the two parties as represented by Hamas’ Damascus-based leader Khaled Meshaal.

Meshaal will be coming to the Mecca summit with a five-point compromise plan: 1. Hamas will refrain from reacting to Israel’s counter-terror forays against its operatives on the West Bank as well as from mounting attacks on Israel from that territory. 2. Hamas will not fight Fatah to the finish in the current round of factional war in the Gaza Strip – which has cost more than two dozen lives, many of them civilian, and extensive disruption - although a victory is within its reach. 3. Hamas renounces any intention of displacing Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as head of the Palestinian Authority in the domestic, inter-Arab or international arenas. 4. If the Mecca summit ends in a peace accord, Hamas undertakes to force its acceptance on the Jihad Islami and the Popular Resistance Committees. 5. Following a reconciliation in Mecca, Hamas will seek agreement with Israel for a long-term “hudna” – a lull in warfare - through all available channels - direct or by means of intermediaries, twice or three times removed.

With this plan in hand, Meshaal gave the Saudi monarch advance assurances that for Hamas a failed summit is not an option.

According to DEBKAfile’s Palestinian sources, the Meshaal plan has run into some opposition in the Hamas Shura Council, the organization’s senior political and military decision-making authority. But Meshaal is confident he can carry it through.

Our Middle East sources disclose the motivations behind Hamas’ five-point plan.

First: By Sunday, Feb. 5, Hamas was gaining in the battle against the Fatah fighting groups led by Muhammad Dahlan and saw, that with a final spurt, they could be defeated. Nonetheless, Meshaal held Hamas back from the coup de grace.

DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose the turning-point occurred late last week when Hamas enlisted the Popular Resistance Committees led by Zakariya Durmush. Hamas had captured Dahlan’s brother with documents attesting to Fatah’s plan to assassinate Durmush. A bomb car which Dahlan’s men had rigged for the murder also came to light. This evidence persuaded the PRC to cross the lines to Hamas.

Second: Hamas had determined to avert at all costs an Israeli military strike against the Gaza Strip which would have wipe out Hamas’ military infrastructure and missile stocks.

Third: The Saudi king is expected to present a reconstituted Middle East peace plan at an Arab summit in March. Hamas reckons the plan has a good chance of a positive response in principle from Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. In these circumstances, Hamas finds joining a potential inter-Arab consensus more expedient than a posture of intransigence, especially as the consensus also favors the establishment of a Palestinian unity government for the purpose of breaking out of the US-European-Israeli embargo against the Hamas government. The embargo was again confirmed by the Middle East Quartet last Friday.

For these reasons, the Mecca summit may also reach accord on a Palestinian national coalition. Fatah and Hamas have concurred tentatively on Hamas’ Ismail Haniya remaining as prime minister at the head of a unity government, leaving all six key portfolios to Fatah, including finance. The much debated interior ministry which controls Palestinian security forces will be assigned to a neutral figure. Hamas will hold nine second-string portfolios, but also an overall majority in the Palestinian cabinet."

ريان يحمّل عباس مسؤولية حرق الجامعة الإسلامية ويطالبه بالحضور الفوري لغزة

"غزة - المركز الفلسطيني للإعلام


حمّل الدكتور نزار ريان، القيادي البارز في حركة المقاومة الإسلامية "حماس"، رئيس السلطة محمود عباس، كامل المسؤولية عما حدث في الجامعة الإسلامية، مطالباً إياه بالحضور الفوري لمدينة غزة والكشف عن الفاعلين.

وقال الدكتور ريّان لـ "المركز الفلسطيني الإعلام"، ومن على أنقاض الدمار الذي حل بالمكتبة المركزية في الجامعة الإسلامية "وجدنا مكتوباً على الجدران حرس الرئيس مر من هنا، وفي تاريخنا أن التتار مروا من بغداد ففعلوا شيئاً يشبه هذا الشيء، فنقول التتار مروا من هنا".

وأضاف ريان قوله "نحمل مسؤولية كل الذي جرى في هذا المكان للرئيس محمود عباس بشكل شخصي، حيث أن حرسه الذي صنع هذا الدمار، وكان بإمكانه أن يصنع شيئاً، لكن الرئيس لم يفعل شيئاً لحماية أكبر مؤسسة تعليمية في البلاد إن لم أقل حتى في الوطن العربي".

وأوضح أن الجامعة الإسلامية، وهي مؤسسة عريقة ومتميزة وتحظى بعشرات الجوائز الدولية العالمية، تم إحراقها والإتيان على كل ما فيها، وقال: "نحب أن نخبر كل الناس على المكشوف أننا الآن نعلم الأسماء التي نفذت هذا الأمر، وسيأتي لكل وقت حسابه بإذن الله تعالى، إن حسابهم سيكون بالقانون، وإلا فنحن من حقنا أن ندافع عن مؤسساتنا".

وطالب القيادي في "حماس" رئيس السلطة الفلسطينية محمود عباس بالحضور الفوري إلى مدينة غزة، مشيراً إلى أنّ "كل رؤساء الدنيا إذا جرى في بلدهم أي شيء من هذا القبيل أو دونه يحضرون على الفور".

وفي رده على سؤال حول مخاطبة رئيس السلطة؛ أكد الدكتور نزار ريان أنه تمت مخاطبته بخصوص هذا الأمر "ولم يكن رده سوى أن هذا الفعل لا يعجبه"، وقال ريان "نحن نعلم يقيناً أن هذه المسؤوليات محملة له (عباس) شخصياً لأن هذا حرسه ولا يأتمر إلا بأمره".

وعن موقف "حماس" مما جرى؛ أوضح ريان أنّ الحركة حريصة على فلسطين بشكل كامل، ولذلك تدخل في حوارات من أجل إنهاء الوضع وحتى لا ينشأ صراع أكبر، وقال "نحن نصبر على هذا الأذى حتى لا تزيد الخروقات".

وكانت الجامعة الإسلامية بغزة، كبرى الأكاديميات الفلسطينية، قد استهدفها، ليلة الخميس/الجمعة وفجر الجمعة الماضية (2/2)، حرق وتدمير خلف خسائر كبيرة قدرت بما يزيد عن 15 مليون دولار من قبل قوات حرس رئيس السلطة محمود عباس. "

"Rayyan holds Abbas responsible for destruction in Gaza University

Gaza - Hamas’ senior political leader in Gaza Strip Dr. Nezzar Rayyan has blamed PA chief Mahmoud Abbas for the destruction inflicted by his security forces on the Islamic University in Gaza city Friday, urging him to immediately come to Gaza and see for himself the extent of destruction in that educational edifice.

He explained that graffiti reading “The presidential guards have passed here” were found written on walls of the University, and urged Abbas to come to Gaza and see the extent of mischief his guards inflicted on that pioneer University. He underlined that Abbas was able to thwart the incident but he didn’t.

Moreover, Rayyan, who is also a professor at the University, unveiled that names and identities of the perpetrators are known, stressing that they must be prosecuted for their heinous crime, otherwise, he warned, “we have the right to defend our institutions”.

The Hamas leader, furthermore, underscored that Hamas was and still is very much concerned with ending roots of disputes with Fatah provided that Palestinian national constants and legal rights are preserved.

“We will withstand the harm others are inflicting on us just for the sake of our people, just cause, and our national unity”, Rayyan asserted.

PA security forces loyal to Abbas stormed the University Friday, end of week holiday in Palestine, and torched it. Damage caused was estimated at 15 million dollars."

The Long-Awaited Palestinian "Unity" Government! Enjoy!

The nature of the Quartet: A proxy for Israel
Hamed Atta, Al-Khaleej

By Kurt Nimmo

"“President Bush made a conciliatory political pilgrimage Saturday to an annual gathering full of newly empowered House Democrats and urged bipartisan action on a host of issues that could determine the success or failure of his last two years in the White House,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “Bush’s 19-minute speech before about 175 members of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House caucus was received cordially and respectfully, if not enthusiastically.”

It is a “political pilgrimage” that sends an incisive, unambiguous message: Bush’s neocons will work with the Democrats, not only on “U.S. energy self-sufficiency, global warming, economic competitiveness and immigration,” but also on the mass murder “surge” in Iraq and, soon enough, Iran....."

By Robert Parry

George W. Bush is again guiding the nation toward a preemptive war – this time with Iran – without allowing anything like a full debate of the underlying facts, probable consequences of the conflict or peaceful alternatives.

"Bush is following the same course he chose in the run-up to war in Iraq: he insists that war is “a last resort” yet puts in motion the engines of war; he times the release of alarming intelligence reports for maximum political effect; he brushes aside doubts and warnings; he then presents war as unavoidable or a fait accompli.

Despite the painful lessons from the Iraq War disaster – including more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers dead and Iraq torn apart by sectarian civil war – the key institutions of Washington, particularly the Congress and the press, are playing similar roles, too.

The capital again is possessed of an air of unreality as the clock ticks down to a likely military showdown with Iran.

Though the documentary record is now clear that Bush set his sights on war in Iraq a year or so before the actual invasion, the President is still believed when he insists now that he wants a diplomatic solution with Iran......"

By Eric Margolis

"TORONTO -- The Bush-Cheney administration seems hell-bent on provoking war with Iran, and the U.S.-Iran confrontation is getting very dangerous. The heaviest concentration of U.S. naval strike forces since the 2003 war against Iraq is concentrating off Iran.

In a disturbing replay of that conflict, CIA drones and U.S. Air Force recon aircraft - along with U.S. and British Special Forces - are overflying Iran and probing its nuclear and military installations. The CIA and Britain's MI6 are stirring unrest among Iran's Kurds and Azerbaijanis, and arming Iranian Marxist and royalist exiles.

A belligerent U.S. President George Bush ordered U.S. forces in Iraq to "kill" Iranian agents or diplomats who appear threatening.

U.S. troops in northern Iraq broke into an Iranian liaison office and arrested its military staff. Bush unblushingly warns Iran, not to "meddle" in neighbouring Iraq.

Pentagon sources accused Iran of smuggling weapons and explosives to "Iraqi insurgents" - though the "insurgents" are, in fact, Shia militiamen allied to the U.S.-installed Baghdad regime. Half of the 21,000 additional U.S. troops headed to Iraq are being positioned to cover the Iranian border and block an Iranian threat to the main U.S. Kuwait-Baghdad supply line.

New contingents of U.S. Air Force personnel and warplanes are arriving at key forward air bases in Bulgaria and Romania that link the U.S. to the Mideast and Central Asia. U.S. bases in Britain, Germany, Diego Garcia, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and Pakistan are reported on heightened alert. Turkey is being pressed to allow U.S. and Israeli strike aircraft to use its air space to attack northern Iran.

The Pentagon's latest strike plan against Iran includes over 2,300 "high value" targets such as its dispersed nuclear infrastructure and, worryingly, operating reactors, air and naval bases, ports, telecommunications, air defences, military factories, energy networks, and government buildings. Iran's water and sewage systems, bridges, food storage, and bomb shelters could also be targeted, as Iraq's were in 2001......

Though UN inspectors find no evidence Iran is producing nuclear weapons, Tehran, like Saddam's Iraq, is being told to prove an impossible negative - that it has no nuclear weapons.

With disturbing deja vu, the U.S. Congress and media are swallowing the administration's torrent of unproven allegations against Iran precisely the way they lapped up its grotesque lies about Iraq.

Intelligence analysts would conclude either: Washington is trying to bluff Tehran to abandon its entirely legal but worrisome civilian nuclear power program and thus claim a major victory after so many defeats; or the cornered Bush-Cheney administration is trying to provoke an air and naval war against Iran as a last desperate, ideologically driven assault against the Muslim world, and divert attention from its Iraq debacle......

After his comments became public, Chirac retracted them when Washington's French-haters went apoplectic. But, as he did before Bush's 2003 war against Iraq, Chirac spoke with logic and good sense."

PA infighting to escalate, Shin Bet official says

"As far as Israel is concerned, the clashes in the Palestinian Authority will continue and will escalate, Shin Bet deputy chief Y. said during Sunday's cabinet meeting. "The reason we say this is because each side is attempting to arm itself and is preparing for the next wave of clashes," he added.

Addressing the ceasefire declared by the two organizations over the weekend, Y. said that "this is at least the tenth claming effort, but it doesn’t seem as if it's going toward a truce."....

Minister Gideon Ezra asked during the meeting whether Israel was doing enough to bolster the moderates and whether Israel could consider releasing Palestinian prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, due to this popularity......

The deputy chief also addressed Thursday's raid of the Islamic University in Gaza, and particularly the reports the Iranian arms experts were seized during the raid.

"It was an unusual activity," he said. "We have no confirmation that there were Iranian elements there. This information should be taken with a grain of salt. We have no intelligence and media indication regarding a possibility of Iranian elements."

Following the report on the raid, Palestinian sources said that the most senior Iranian agent, a general, was in charge of Hamas' arms project and had even trained activists manufacturing explosives at the university labs.....

Palestinian President Abbas and Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal are expected to meet Tuesday in another effort to reach a truce. The meeting, according to Y., may also be joined by Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan......

"The Fatah organizations are not controlled by the Fatah leadership today. This is one of the tragedies of the Palestinian people in the past few years. If in the past Hamas and Jihad were rebellious and did not listen to the leadership, today Fatah is in the same situation.

"These organizations have no central command and no father figure, and this is one of the main problems, both in the Palestinian society and towards us. This is a process which has been going on for three years now." "

"A concise, if chilling analysis of the impending Iran attack by the “neocon fascist madmen,” as Tarpley aptly characterizes Bush’s warmongering handlers. Normally, I’d simply point to this MP3 file on the RBN audio archive, but as the archive server is no longer functional, I am including it here (follow previous link). Note: this is a must listen audio file if you are interested in the coming conflict that will, as Webster points out, change our lives forever. As well, it will serve to read John Pilger’s Iran: The war has already begun. Thanks to Conspiracy Central for offering the audio file as a torrent."

A long (over an hour) audio, but well worth your time.
Click here to listen

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Ed Stein

".....In the West Bank, a strategy session by Fatah leaders ended in a shouting match, with some participants demanding Abbas' party take a tougher stand against Hamas in the struggle for control of the Palestinian government, and others pushing to give a mediation effort by Saudi Arabia a chance. In one particularly angry exchange, participants threw an empty cup and a shoe at each other, witnesses said.

"We all agreed that Hamas has been trying for a long time to impose its control on the Gaza Strip, and Fatah needs to stand up to this policy of Hamas," said Amin Makboul, one of the group's members. Under fierce debate, though, is how to do so....."

by Barry Grey
Global Research, February 4, 2007

"Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.

Brzezinski, who opposed the March 2003 invasion and has publicly denounced the war as a colossal foreign policy blunder, began his remarks on what he called the “war of choice” in Iraq by characterizing it as “a historic, strategic and moral calamity.”

“Undertaken under false assumptions,” he continued, “it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean principles and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.”

Brzezinski derided Bush’s talk of a “decisive ideological struggle” against radical Islam as “simplistic and demagogic,” and called it a “mythical historical narrative” employed to justify a “protracted and potentially expanding war.”

“To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.

Most stunning and disturbing was his description of a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” [Emphasis added].

This was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.

That a man such as Brzezinski, with decades of experience in the top echelons of the US foreign policy establishment, a man who has the closest links to the military and to intelligence agencies, should issue such a warning at an open hearing of the US Senate has immense and grave significance.

Brzezinski knows whereof he speaks, having authored provocations of his own while serving as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. In that capacity, as he has since acknowledged in published writings, he drew up the covert plan at the end of the 1970s to mobilize Islamic fundamentalist mujaheddin to topple the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and draw the Soviet Union into a ruinous war in that country.

Following his opening remarks, in response to questions from the senators, Brzezinski reiterated his warning of a provocation.

He called the senators’ attention to a March 27, 2006 report in the New York Times on “a private meeting between the president and Prime Minister Blair, two months before the war, based on a memorandum prepared by the British official present at this meeting.” In the article, Brzezinski said, “the president is cited as saying he is concerned that there may not be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, and that there must be some consideration given to finding a different basis for undertaking the action.”

He continued: “I’ll just read you what this memo allegedly says, according to the New York Times: ‘The memo states that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation.’

“He described the several ways in which this could be done. I won’t go into that... the ways were quite sensational, at least one of them.

“If one is of the view that one is dealing with an implacable enemy that has to be removed, that course of action may under certain circumstances be appealing. I’m afraid that if this situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, and if Iran is perceived as in some fashion involved or responsible, or a potential beneficiary, that temptation could arise.”.....

Following the hearing, this reporter asked Brzezinski directly if he was suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself. The former national security adviser was evasive......."

كونترا فلسطينية بتمويل أمريكي

بقلم : عبد الباري عطوان

عندما اندلعت الاشتباكات الدموية في قطاع غزة، التي أودت بحياة ثلاثين شخصا علي الأقل من خيرة أبناء القضية الواحدة، حاولنا أن نكون متوازنين، وان نضع اللوم علي الجانبين، ولكن عندما أعلنت الإدارة الأمريكية يوم أمس أنها ستقدم ستة وثمانين مليون دولار لتدريب وتسليح الحرس الرئاسي، وتدرس في الوقت نفسه توسيع تقديم المساعدة لتشمل عناصر قوات الأمن الوطني التابعة للرئيس محمود عباس وبعض قادته الأمنيين، فإننا نجد من الصعب علينا أن نلتزم الحياد ونمسك العصا من الوسط، لان هذه الخطوة الأمريكية لا يمكن إلا أن تكون مشروع فتنة، وصب المزيد من الزيت علي نار الحرب الأهلية، أو جمرها الذي ما زال متقدا تحت رماد الاتفاق الأخير للهدنة، الذي يصارع من اجل الثبات.

لا يستطيع احد أن يقنعنا، مهما تبحر في علم البلاغة والبيان، بأن الولايات المتحدة تريد تمويل قوات الرئاسة، والأمن الوطني الفلسطيني، وتسليحها، من اجل التصدي للقوات الإسرائيلية، وتوغلاتها المستمرة في الأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة واغتيالاتها التي لا تفرق بين كتائب القسام وشهداء الاقصي. ولا يمكن لأحد أن يحاججنا أيضا، بان الحكومة الإسرائيلية ستسمح بمرور الأسلحة لهذه القوات، من مصر والأردن، إذا كان لديها ادني شك، في أن هذه الأسلحة ستستخدم ضدها وضد جنودها ومستوطنيها.

نحن الآن، ونقولها بكل أسف وحزن، أمام كونترا فلسطينية جديدة، تدعمها الولايات المتحدة من اجل تصفية المقاومة الفلسطينية وحركاتها، وكل من يفكر بمعارضة الحلول الأمريكية المفروضة، وهي حلول إسرائيلية بالأساس. فمثلما تصدت فرق الكونترا لرجال المقاومة في امريكا الجنوبية واستنزفت الأنظمة الوطنية فيها ستفعل هذه القوات الفلسطينية الشيء نفسه وربما أكثر، أو هذا ما هو مخطط لها أن تفعل. وعلينا ان نتذكر أن نغروبونتي الذي عين قبل شهر نائبا للسيدة رايس هو الأب الشرعي لفكرة الكونترا هذه.

المصيبة ان الكونترا الفلسطينية الجديدة تتطوع بالقيام بمثل هذا الدور الدموي القذر، دون ان يكون هناك اي حل علي الطاولة، يستند الي قرارات الشرعية الدولية، ويحقق الحد الأدني من المطالب الفلسطينية في حق تقرير المصير، والعودة والدولة المستقلة.

ومن المفارقة ان هذا الإعلان الامريكي يتزامن مع اتخاذ حكومة ايهود اولمرت، رئيس الوزراء الاسرائيلي، قرارا بتغيير مسار الجدار العنصري الحالي بحيث يضم مستوطنتين يهوديتين جديدتين في الضفة الغربية، والتصديق علي قرار آخر باقامة مستوطنة في غور الاردن لاستيعاب المستوطنين الذين تم اجلاؤهم من قطاع غزة في الصيف قبل الماضي وبناء كنيس يهودي في باحة المسجد الأقصي.

لا نعرف ما هو الغرض من انشاء حرس رئاسي فلسطيني يزيد تعداده عن عشرة آلاف عنصر، ونحن ما زلنا تحت الاحتلال، ولا يستطيع الرئيس الفلسطيني مغادرة قصره الا بإذن شاويش اسرائيلي. ولا يستطيع رئيس وزراء فلسطين المنتخب الاجتماع مع وزرائه في الضفة الا عبر الهاتف وبتنصت اسرائيلي.

نفهم ان يؤسس رئيس دولة اقليمية عظمي مثل الراحل صدام حسين حرسا جمهوريا ضخما، او ان يفعل الشيء نفسه رئيس روسيا العظمي او حتي رئيس مصر الذي يتنقل بين عدة قصور واستراحات ورثها عن العهد الملكي، ولكن ان يقيم رئيس دولة وهمية لا تزيد مساحتها عن بضعة عشرات الآلاف من الاميال خاضعة للاحتلال وتأتمر بأمره، حرسا رئاسيا، فهذا ما لا يخطر علي بال احد، ولكن كل شيء ممكن في هذا الزمن العباسي السعيد.

هناك مشروع سري يتم طبخه علي نار هادئة من وراء ظهر الشعب الفلسطيني، فتمويل هذه القوات وتسليحها من قبل الولايات المتحدة، وبمباركة اسرائيلية هما العمود الفقري له، وهو مشروع حرب اهلية، يبشر بحمامات دم فلسطينية ـ فلسطينية من خلال استهداف حركات المقاومة الفلسطينية، وكل ما أشيع عن حوارات من اجل تشكيل حكومة وحدة وطنية، والتوصل إلي وفاق بين رأسي السلطة، هو مجرد مناورة لكسب الوقت، واستكمال الاستعدادات للمنازلة الدموية الكبري التي باتت وشيكة جدا.

الدكتور صائب عريقات المستشار السياسي للرئيس عباس قال في تصريحات صحافية تبريرا لهذه الخطوة، بأن الاموال الامريكية ستذهب الي تمويل اجهزة ومعدات لمراقبة المعابر. فإذا كانت الادارة الامريكية حريصة فعلا علي هذه المعابر، فلماذا لا تبادر الي فتحها اولا، وخاصة معبر رفح المغلق منذ ستة اشهر، الا في حالات نادرة. حيث يحشر اكثر من مليون ونصف المليون فلسطيني في قفص كبير اسمه قطاع غزة. فما دخل الأجهزة بمرور المرضي والحجاج والمعتمرين؟

الشعب الفلسطيني يتضور جوعا، والأوبئة تتفشي، والمستشفيات خالية من الأدوية الاساسية بسبب الحصار المالي الامريكي، وعشرات الآلاف من الموظفين، ومعظمهم من حزب الرئيس، لا يجدون رغيف الخبز لاطفالهم، ومع ذلك تستثني الادارة الامريكية قوات الرئاسة من حصارها وترسل عشرات الملايين من الدولارات لاعطائها الاسلحة والذخائر التي ستستخدمها في الاشهر المقبلة لتصفية حركات فلسطينية تتمسك بالثوابت التي انطلقت من اجل تحقيقها الثورة الفلسطينية بزعامة حركة فتح .

ما زال من الصعب معرفة ما اذا كان الرئيس محمود عباس قد تشاور مع اللجنة المركزية، او الكوادر الوطنية الشابة لحركته وكتائب شهداء الاقصي بالذات قبل الموافقة علي الانخراط في هذا المشروع الامريكي الخطير ام لا، ولكن ما نستطيع التكهن به، انه لم يفعل ذلك مطلقا، ولم يلجأ الي اي مرجعيات فلسطينية سواء داخل تنظيمه او خارجه، لان كوادر فتح كما نعرفها هي في قمة الوطنية والحرص علي الثوابت ولا يمكن ان تقبل بالانخراط في حرب تصفيات ضد اناس يرفعون راية المقاومة، ويتطلعون للشهادة. فالمؤكد ان الرئيس عباس بات اسيرا لبعض الشخصيات التي تلتف حوله، وترافقه كظله في حله وترحاله، هذه الايام، وتزين له محاسن القبول بالاملاءات والمخططات الامريكية.

النوايا تتجه الآن الي حل قوات الامن الفلسطينية، او غربلتها، كنتيجة للاتصالات التي اجراها خبراء امريكيون مع قادة الاجهزة الأمنية الفلسطينية. والغربلة تعني ابعاد او تجميد كل عنصر ما زال يتمسك بحق العودة، وقيام دولة فلسطينية عاصمتها القدس، ويتعاطف مع المقاومة، اي اننا امام خطوة مماثلة بحل الجيش العراقي، ولن نفاجأ اذا ما جاءت النتائج متطابقة.

الشعب الفلسطيني يقف الآن امام مجزرتين ، الاولي بشرية كنتيجة لحرب التصفيات التي من المتوقع ان تنفذها الكونترا الجديدة، والثانية سياسية ، ستترتب مباشرة علي المجزرة الاولي، وسيكون عنوانها فرض تسوية منقوصة، ومعيبة، علي الشعب الفلسطيني وفق المقاييس الامريكية والاسرائيلية.

الادارة الامريكية تريد تنظيف المنطقة العربية من حركتين اساسيتين للمقاومة، هما حماس و حزب الله ، قبل الانطلاق نحو الحرب الكبري ضد ايران، بغطاء عربي من الدول المعتدلة، ومشاركة اسرائيلية كاملة.

فليس من قبيل الصدفة ان تتحدث السيدة كوندوليزا رايس عن دولة فلسطينية مؤقتة قبل اجتماعها الثاني مع وزراء الدول العربية المعتدلة في الكويت. فالمؤقت سيصبح دائما، وسيظل مرهونا بمدي الرضوخ للاملاءات الامريكية والاسرائيلية.

الرئيس عباس يقدم علي مقامرة جديدة، اخطر بكثير من مقامرة اوسلو ، قد تكون باهظة التكاليف بالنسبة الي الشعب الفلسطيني، فقد عقد العزم مثلما يتراءي لنا، ان يكون جزءا اصيلا في تحالف المعتدلين او حلف بغداد الجديد، اعتقادا منه ان الرئيس عرفات اخطأ عندما وقف ضد تحالف مماثل ايام حرب الخليج الاولي عام 1991، وضم الدول نفسها عدا الأردن، وبما سمي في حينه دول اعلان دمشق .

الرئيس عرفات لم يخطئ عندما وقف في خندق شعبه في مواجهة الخندق الامريكي المقابل، لانه كان يدرك بحدسه الوطني ان بوصلته الوطنية هي الاكثر دقة ومصداقية. فقد حققت امريكا غرضها من اخراج القوات العراقية من الكويت، وتدمير العراق، ونزع اسلحته، ولم تقدم للعرب، وحلفائها علي وجه الخصوص غير حرب اهلية دموية في عراق مفتت ممزق، وخلل اساسي في موازين القوي لمصلحة اسرائيل في الغرب وايران في الشرق.

كان اشرف للسيد عباس ان يتهم بأنه رئيس ضعيف، علي ان يدخل التاريخ كرئيس اشعل فتيل الحرب الاهلية الفلسطينية ووضع اوراقه في السلة الامريكية مقابل حلول جزئية هزيلة، هذا اذا حصل علي هذه المكافأة

ENOUGH! TRY HIM FOR TREASON.
HE IS NOT MY PRESIDENT.
IF THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL DOES NOT TRY HIM, THEN IT WILL HAVE LOST ITS REASON TO EXIST.