The Declassified Record of Amb. Otto Juan Reich–Off. Public Diplomacy

The National Security Archive—George Washington University Ad placed by the Young Republicans, one of the groups under the cognizance of the Office of Public Diplomacy and discussed by Oliver North in a March 20, 1985 memorandum. A National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book Edited by Thomas Blanton March 2, 2001 Jump to the document list

The Bush administration has floated the name of Otto Juan Reich for possible nomination as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs (see Al Kamen, “In the Loop,” The Washington Post, 15 February 2001).   Mr. Reich served in the Reagan administration as assistant administrator of the Agency for International Development (AID) from 1981 to 1983, then as the first director of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean (S/LPD) from 1983 to 1986, and finally as ambassador to Venezuela.Mr. Reich’s tenure at the Office of Public Diplomacy generated major controversy during the exposure of the Iran-contra scandal and left an extensive document trail, some of the highlights of which are included in this Briefing Book.  For example:

* The Comptroller-General of the U.S., a Republican appointee, found that some of the efforts of Mr. Reich’s public diplomacy office were “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities….”  The same September 30, 1987 letter concluded that Mr. Reich’s office had violated “a restriction on the State Department’s annual appropriations prohibiting the use of federal funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress.”  The letter also said, “We do not believe, however, that available evidence will support a conclusion that the applicable antilobbying statute has been violated.”

* The General Accounting Office in an October 30, 1987 letter and report found that Mr. Reich’s office “generally did not follow federal regulations governing contractual procedures” in its contracting “with numerous individuals and several companies.”   The GAO quoted Mr. Reich as saying “he was generally unfamiliar with the details related to the office’s contracting procedures.  Instead he relied on his staff as well as State’s procurement office to ensure that federal regulations were adhered to.”

* The bipartisan report of the Congressional Iran-contra committees (November 1987, p. 34) found that “[i]n fact, ‘public diplomacy’ turned out to mean public relations-lobbying, all at taxpayers’ expense.”  The committees concluded their discussion by quoting the Comptroller-General’s findings in the September 30, 1987 letter.  A detailed critique of the public diplomacy operation, written by Iran-contra committee staff, was deleted from the Iran-contra report after heated partisan debate (see Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, “Iran-Contra’s Untold Story,” Foreign Policy, No. 72, Fall 1988, pp. 3-30).

* A staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (September 7, 1988) summarized various investigations of Mr. Reich’s office and concluded that “senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly to the National Security Council rather than through the normal State Department channels…. Through irregular sole-source, no-bid contracts, S/LPD established and maintained a private network of individuals and organizations whose activities were coordinated with, and sometimes directed by, Col. Oliver North as well as officials of the NSC and S/LPD.  These private individuals and organizations raised and spent funds for the purpose of influencing Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media.  This network raised and funneled money to off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands or to the secret Lake Resources bank account in Switzerland for disbursement at the direction of Oliver North.  Almost all of these activities were hidden from public view and many of the key individuals involved were never questioned or interviewed by the Iran/Contra Committees.”

* Mr. Reich responded in detail to questioning by staff of the Iran/Contra Committees in a formal deposition on July 15, 1987.  The full text of the 122-page deposition is included here.  Part of the questioning revolved around a lengthy March 20, 1985 memo written by Oliver North to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, providing “the chronology of events aimed at securing Congressional approval for renewed support to the Nicaraguan Resistance Forces.”  The chronology contains repeated listings of actions to be taken by “State/LPD (Reich)”; however, Mr. Reich testified that he “never saw it as a tasking memorandum” and that he was unaware that his contractors were involved in lobbying efforts or ads targeted on specific members of Congress.  North’s memo also referred to an advertisement (“53 cents per day supports a freedom fighter”) that was off-message; the text of the ad was attached to Mr. Reich’s deposition as an exhibit.

* On March 12, 1985, one of Mr. Reich’s staff, Daniel “Jake” Jacobowitz, on detail from the U.S. Air Force, wrote a detailed “public diplomacy action plan” that paralleled the North chronology, with candid commentary about the lobbying campaign including a three-item list of audiences:  “U.S. Congress,” “U.S. media,” and “interest groups.”

* On March 13, 1985, Mr. Reich’s deputy, Johnathan S. Miller, wrote a two-page report to White House director of communications Pat Buchanan, giving what Miller called “[f]ive illustrative examples of the Reich ‘White Propaganda’ operation.”  These included op-eds the office had written or placed covertly, without any acknowledgement of the government’s role, and planned op-eds under the contra leaders’ bylines.

* Mr. Reich sought and obtained staff for his office by getting them detailed from various U.S. military units engaged in “psychological operations.”  The declassified documents include requests for these detailees on March 5, 1985 and on September 18, 1985, a staff discussion of the need for detailees on December 10, 1985, a December 16, 1985 request for certificates of appreciation for five detailees, and a plaintive memo to NSC staffer and former CIA official Walt Raymond on January 5, 1986 complaining that the Pentagon had turned down a new request for detailees.  Perhaps the most illuminating discussion of the psyops detailees can be found in a May 30, 1985 memo from Jake Jacobowitz to Mr. Reich about the impending arrival of five detailees, calling them the “A-team” and including the comment “Since he is a PSYOP type he will also be looking for exploitable themes and trends….”

* The final document included here is an April 15, 1984 memo drafted by Mr. Reich for Secretary of State George Shultz to send to President Reagan, describing a specific intervention by Mr. Reich with CBS News as an example of the day-to-day work of the public diplomacy office.

Head of Reagan’s Disinformation Network Still Undermining Nations, Honduran Coup

[SEE: A CIA propaganda apparatus aimed at the American people–Oct. 2001]

Ad placed by the Young Republicans, one of the groups under the cognizance of the Office of Public Diplomacy and discussed by Oliver North in a March 20, 1985 memorandum.

Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat:

The Provocateur, his Protege, and the Toppling of a President – Part One

8 Comments

The story of Otto Reich’s role in fomenting the June coup d’etat in Honduras is not a brief one.  This report will be posted over two days.

OTTO REICH AND THE HONDURAN COUP D’ETAT:
The Provocateur, his Protégé, and the Toppling of a President (Part One)

By Machetera*

The very same day that the coup d’etat in Honduras began, in an emergency session of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D.C., Roy Chaderton, the Venezuelan ambassador to the OAS, spoke with a simmering fury as he looked directly at Hector Morales, the U.S. Ambassador to the OAS.

“There’s a person who’s been very important within U.S. diplomacy, one who has re-connected with old friends and colleagues and helped encourage the coup perpetrators,” he said.

“The gentleman’s name is Otto Reich, former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during the government of George [W.] Bush. We in Venezuela have suffered this man, as the U.S. Ambassador in Venezuela, as an interventionist, we suffered him later in his position as Assistant Secretary of State…we had the First Reich, later, the Second Reich, now unfortunately we’re facing the Third Reich, moving within the Latin American ambit through an NGO [non-governmental organization], to fan the flames of the coup.”

Following Chaderton’s furious denunciation, Reich penned a strange non mea-culpa opinion piece which the Miami Herald obligingly printed, complete with Reich’s deliberate misspellings of Chaderton’s name.  He said that he was not the coup’s “architect,” which is quite some distance from a total denial.

Shortly thereafter, news reports began to circulate about an unusual guest making the rounds in Tegucigalpa.  He had checked into the Plaza Libertador Hotel under the pseudonym Armando Valladares, and was seen making frequent visits to the Presidential Palace and the National Congress. Armando Valladares was the Cuban prisoner who faked paralysis to gain worldwide support for his release, and went on to become chairman of a CIA-linked non-profit front groupin New York: the Human Rights Foundation, until he resigned this July, angry that the Foundation had not supported the coup.  The man traveling under his name was actually Robert Carmona-Borjas, Reich’s protégé and the notorious figurehead for yet another “non-profit” front group: the Arcadia Foundation.  This was the NGO Chaderton was talking about.  Until now, a detailed summary of Arcadia’s activities in Honduras has not been reported outside Latin America.

The story that emerged outside Honduras about Zelaya’s insistence on holding a public opinion poll being the trigger for the coup is only a partial one, because the effort to undermine Zelaya was proceeding on several tracks in the years leading up to the coup.  A whispering campaign about corruption was one of them. Juiced with Reich’s contacts at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the Arcadia Foundation coordinated a farcically one-sided media campaign against the Honduran state telephone company, Hondutel, in order to create the public perception, similar to the accusations made some years ago against Haiti’s deposed president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, that Zelaya’s government was hopelessly corrupt from the top on down, and that Zelaya was unfit for the presidency.

Reich’s history in U.S./Latin American relations is a repellent one.  He has worked tirelessly in support of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, helped the anti-Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch find shelter in the United States, and produced domestic anti-Sandinista propaganda for the Reagan White House,through the State Department Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America.  In that post, he worked with a non-profit front group called Citizens for America tospread that propaganda throughout the U.S. press.  He came to his final State Department post under such a cloud of controversy due to these activities and so many others just like them, that Bush II was forced to install him through a one-year recess appointment in 2001, in order to avoid a Congressional confirmation process that was likely to fail, not to mention dredge up unpleasant reminders.  Once installed, Reich busied himself supporting the unsuccessful 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the successful 2004 coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.

Carmona-Borjas is a Venezuelan attorney who drafted the Carmona decree, named not for himself but for Pedro Carmona, to whom he bears no evident relation.  Pedro Carmona seized power in Venezuela during the two days of the unsuccessful 2002 coup d’etat against Hugo Chávez. The Carmona decree was the document that dissolved the Constitution, the Congress and all other democratic institutions in Venezuela during those two days.  Following his involvement in the failed coup, Carmona-Borjas sought and easily received political asylum in the United States.

Just as there were remarkable similarities in the kidnapping of President Aristide in 2004 in Haiti, and President Zelaya in Honduras, both being put on planes with the shades drawn and flown to unannounced destinations, there were similarities in the use of telecom as a propaganda tool to turn public opinion against them and set the groundwork for them to be prematurely removed from office, and once out, kept out.

A Brief History of Washington’s Relationship to Telecom

From a neoliberal political point of view there are two advantages to a propaganda offensive centered upon telecom corruption.  The first is obvious. If telecom corruption can be tied directly to a leader who is not following Washington’s agenda, it promotes public support for the leader’s removal.  The second is a little less obvious, but equally as important.  It promotes the argument that telecom companies under state control really ought not to be, especially in underdeveloped countries, and would be better off privatized.

To make that argument, one must of course ignore the abundant evidence of telecom corruption in the United States, where men like Bernie Ebbers and Joseph Nacchio, who became telecom kingpins thanks to privatization (called “deregulation” in the U.S.) are serving federal prison terms for accounting fraud and insider trading.  The fact is that telecom, as an essential service in the modern world, has always been a kind of money printing press, and the fight over state control vs. private control is all about who gets to control the switch, and what will be done with the profits.

ITT, which owned the Cuban phone company at the time of the revolution in 1959, was the first foreign owned property to be nationalized in Cuba, in 1961.  In 1973, ITT was so fearful of repeating the experience in Chile that John McCone, a board member and former CIA man promised Henry Kissinger a million dollars to prevent Salvador Allende’s election.  According to the U.S. Ambassador to Chile at the time, Edward Korry, ITT did pay $500,000 to a member of the compensation committee for expropriated properties in Chile, until Allende found out about the payments and nixed the compensation entirely.

In Venezuela in 2007, privatization was also reversed, and Verizon was paid $572 million for its share in the Venezuelan phone company, Cantv. This sent chills down the spine of every U.S. politician and telecom executive or consultant (like Reich) invested in expanding telecom privatization extra-territorially.  And the chill was bipartisan.  Democrats as well as Republicans had benefited equally from global privatization of the telecom mint.

As someone who counted AT&T and Bell Atlantic (Verizon) among his former (acknowledged) clients and a proven antipathy for leftist governments, Reich had plenty of motive.  A front group disguised as a foundation would provide the opportunity.

A Brief History of Washington Front Groups

Political front groups are a relatively recent Washington phenomenon, at least on an overt basis.  The CIA of course, has been in the front group business since its inception.  But during the Reagan years, public front groups with pleasant names and non-profit status began to flourish.  The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is the largest federally funded non-profit front group, set up to funnel enormous amounts of money to the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).  Allan Weinstein, one of the NED’s founders, said “A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”  The NED was formed in 1983, the same year as the corporate funded non-profit Citizens For America, which received contributions from Northrup, Shell Oil, Chase Manhattan and a variety of right-wing tycoons to drive its anti-communist agenda.

The IRI and NDI provide money and resources to foreign groups working in support of U.S. foreign policy, which basically means that in non-capitalist countries or those with non-capitalist leanings, they fund whoever is in opposition.  The corporate supported non-profit front group on the other hand usually has a domestic agenda and is above all, a propaganda tool, used to facilitate favorable press coverage that in turn drives policy.  Relatively unencumbered by burdensome government reporting requirements, they are quite a bit more agile and can be comparatively opaque, both useful qualities in the propaganda business.  In Latin America, where the press is highly concentrated in the hands of a small oligarchy, the front group provides a unique opportunity.  When an oligarchy is eager to topple a leftist president, a front group can be a third-party source of useful allegations which can be printed without question, as well as a distanced, albeit fake, source of comment on reaction to those allegations, adding fuel to the fire.  It’s a kind of self-licking ice-cream cone, and it is exactly the role Arcadia has played in Honduras.

The one thing this type of front group must be certain to do is file for non-profit status in the U.S.  They therefore must make at least a passing effort to put together a plausible board of directors and a credible mission statement, and comply with tax and other public disclosure requirements.  The Arcadia Foundation has the mission statement – a rambling treatise on democracy and civil society, but little else.  Carmona-Borjas shares billing at the group with Betty Bigombe, a Ugandan World Bank consultant who appears to have lent Arcadia nothing beyond her name.  Although Carmona-Borjas has insisted the group’s activities are entirely legal, he has concealed the documents he is required to make available to any member of the public upon request and is reportedly hostile to those who ask to see them.

Both Reich and Carmona-Borjas have denied Reich’s connection to the group, but a legal connection would have been both unnecessary and inconvenient.  Reich could have worked the same way with Arcadia as he did with “Citizens For America,” without being legally tied to the group, and based on the available evidence it seems likely that this is exactly what he did.

The Launch

In the fall of 2007, the El Universal newspaper in Mexico printed a story based on a report it had received from the Arcadia Foundation. Interestingly, the report itself is not available at the Arcadia website, but there are clues to its contents and objectives in the newspaper stories which followed.

The report evidently contained allegations about corruption in the Honduran phone company, peppered with innuendo, a Reich trademark. It claimed that income to Honduras’s phone company, Hondutel, had declined by nearly 50% between 2005 and 2006.  Out of the dozens, if not hundreds of companies involved in Honduran telecom, Arcadia exclusively targeted one: Cable Color, a company owned by the wealthy and influential Honduran family, the Rosenthals, for diverting calls away from Hondutel, thereby depriving the phone company of revenue.

It was an old horse that had seen service once before, in Haiti, against Aristide.

Interconnection and the Haiti Case

All international telecom traffic is subject to interconnection fees with the phone company in the country where the call is terminated.  These interconnection fees are split 50/50 between the company sending the call and the company receiving the call so that they are only paid if there is an excess of traffic in one direction or another.

With underdeveloped countries such as Honduras or Haiti, there is an overwhelming excess of one-way traffic as a result of emigrants to the U.S. orother Western countries calling their families back home.  It is precisely in these extremely poor countries, where the telephone company has not been privatized, that interconnection settlements represent a vital source of revenue to the state.  Until recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) intervened on behalf of the multiple carriers who’d emerged as a result of privatization (deregulation) in the United States, to negotiate interconnection rates with other countries that would apply equally to all carriers.  In 2004 the FCC’s intervention began to be phased out, and since 2006 it has vanished entirely except for a short list of countries that does not include Haiti or Honduras.

During the fixed-rate years, some U.S. companies still tried to get a better deal regardless, and while state owned companies such as Haiti’s Teleco and Honduras’s Hondutel were free to offer lower interconnection rates than those set by the FCC, they were supposed to be offering them equally to all carriers, not just a privileged few, so as not to make a mockery of the FCC’s system. If payments from the U.S. carrier were involved in securing the discount it would also be a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

This appears to be what occurred with IDT, a New Jersey telecom company that negotiated a special rate to interconnect with Haiti’s Teleco.  The FCC’s rate at the time was supposed to be 23 cents per minute for connections to Haiti, but IDT negotiated and received a contract for 9 cents a minute.  When a former IDT employee claimed that part of that fee was a kickback to Aristide, the anti-Aristide lobby went crazy.

The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady, followed by Lucy Komisar writing for another non-profit front group sponsored by a Haitian oligarch, theHaiti Democracy Project, claimed thatAristide knew of and personally benefited from the kickback.  Before, corruption allegations against Aristide had tended to be confined to equally unproven insinuations about profiting from drug trafficking, such as those Reich provided to O’Grady when he sat down with her for an interview in 2002.

None of the defamatory allegations about Aristide’s involvement in any of the schemes could be proven, and a much publicized court case brought against Aristide by the Haitian (U.S.) puppet government was quietly shelved.  But proving the case was secondary to floating the allegations, both as a propaganda tactic against Aristide, and political intimidation of his supporters in the U.S. Congress.

Grey Traffic

In Honduras, Arcadia had no “whistleblower” to rely on, like Michael Jewett, the ex-IDT employee who originally smeared Aristide and whose wrongful dismissal case provided much of the fuel for O’Grady’s and Komisar’s strident accusations.  Carmona-Borjas would have to be a little more creative.  The report he fed El Universal claimed that the Rosenthal’s company, Cable Color, had diverted the incoming international calls and turned them into “grey traffic.”

Grey traffic means that a call is being diverted to an Internet (IP) network rather than a switched one. Voice over IP (VoIP) which is essentially telecom over a broadband connection works this way – Skype and Vonage are both well-known varieties of this kind of service.

Theoretically, an internet service provider (ISP) could purchase lines from a regular phone company like Hondutel, but then use those lines to sell cheap international phone calls to its own customers, providing international phone service at a vastly discounted rate.  This is said to be an exploding practice in Africa.  The only problem with it is that it is usually illegal for an ISP to offer such a service – when phone calls are handled this way, the state or incumbent telephone company, quite naturally, prefers to make an interconnection agreement with whoever is buying the lines for voice purposes, so as not to completely lose out on the revenue.

Carmona-Borjas wasn’t claiming that Cable Color was ending up with the termination fees, as this would have been impossible.  He just mentioned Hondutel’s traffic decline, pointed to Cable Color, said “grey traffic” and left the rest to the reader’s imagination. And he threw in a few extra details.

“According to the report,” said El Universal, “the Cable Color business is owned by the prominent Rosenthal family, with strong political and financial interests, and according to the document, is presently headed by Jaime Rosenthal, proprietor of the El Tiemponewpaper, the television Channel 11, and father of Yani Rosenthal, a presidential minister and someone who is considered in Honduras to be a potential presidential candidate.”

The report was likely fed first to the Mexican paper rather than the Honduran papers, because with the exception of El Tiempo, all are owned by Zelaya’s bitter opponents, the Canahuati Larach family, (Roberto Micheletti, the president of the Honduran National Congress, who would later rise to dictator in the 2009 coup, owns La Tribuna) and the self-interest in publishing such a report was a bit too obvious.  Once the story had been safely floated in Mexico however, El Heraldo, La Prensa and La Tribuna were delighted to run with it and over the next two years, would go on to print Carmona-Borjas’s allegations whenever they surfaced (with frequency), always describing him as the “Vice President of an NGO based in Washington” and raising no questions whatsoever about his funding or other “anti-corruption” projects.

Jaime Rosenthal sent a letter to El Universal which said that the Arcadia report had been “planted” by someone “interested in divulging in Honduras what couldn’t [be published] or wasn’t convenient to publish directly within [Honduras itself].”  Rosenthal pointed out that the decline in Hondutel’s revenues between 2005 and 2006 was directly attributable to the end of its monopoly on terminating international calls, which disappeared on December 31, 2005, when Hondutel opened contracts with two international cellphone service providers. International calls were valued at 16 U.S. cents per minute, he said, “but wireless providers don’t pay anything to Hondutel.”

In a subsequent radio debate between Carmona-Borjas and the Rosenthals, they also explained that Cable Color was in the business of selling phone lines to ISPs and whenever it found that the ISPs were illegally repackaging the service as telephone service rather than internet service, without the benefit of an interconnection agreement, it notified Hondutel, whose responsibility it was to take action.

Arcadia vs. Rosenthal

In that radio debate on September 12, 2007, Yani Rosenthal asked why, if Otto Reich had nothing to do with the Arcadia Foundation, his name had appeared on the foundation’s website until September 10th, and was then erased on September 11th?  Carmona-Borjas initially avoided answering the question, insisting that the Foundation was legally set up within the United States and it had nothing against Yani personally – “…caramba! We congratulate him [on his campaign] and wish him the best…” returning to his accusation that Cable Color had 340 lines connected to Hondutel that were causing great losses for the phone company because they were being used for grey traffic.

Yani responded: “… yesterday when Mr. Roberto Carmona spoke with Channel 5, he said unequivocally that the honorable Otto Reich, whom he respects and deeply admires for being a fighter for democratic principles in the region had nothing to do with the Arcadia Foundation.  These were his words, here you can see what he said last night on Channel 5 and here I’m showing you Arcadia’s website until September 10, where Otto Reich appeared.  And then I show you that here, on September 11, the erasure of the list of the Arcadia Foundation’s members begins and also the report here that Robert Carmona himself signed and sent to Hondutel on July 14, 2006 was also copied to Ambassador Otto Reich.  So, if Mr. Carmona will lie so shamelessly and obviously on something as simple as this where the lie can so easily be seen, what else will he lie about?….I can also show you communication between Cable Color and Hondutel, and how Cable Color cooperated with Hondutel so that Cable Color’s clients who dedicated themselves to this [illegal grey traffic] operation were punished.  And Hondutel even knows about it, there were two businesses who had these numbers and their equipment was confiscated…”

Carmona-Borjas insisted again that Arcadia had nothing whatsoever to do with Reich, qualifying the statement by adding, “from a legal point of view,” and said that any columns that appeared at the Arcadia website were not even necessarily related to Arcadia, which was really more or less an open bulletin board, where even Rosenthal could express his ideas if he wished.  (The only media reports on the Arcadia site then, and now, are those generated by Carmona-Borjas.)

The Rosenthals said they’d been forced to go to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa to explain the situation, since Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan/U.S. citizen, had so helpfully gone there first, supplying the Embassy with a copy of his Arcadia report.

Rasel Tomé, the president of the Honduran telecom regulatory authority CONATEL, joined in, adding that there were no complaints on record at CONATEL against Hondutel or Cable Color for grey traffic, to which Carmona-Borjas repeated that grey traffic was the only possible explanation for such a serious decline in revenue, insinuating that Tomé’s position was based on the fact that he had been the Rosenthal’s attorney for many years.

Tomé would find later find himself the focus of Carmona-Borjas’s unique contacts within the Honduran justice system, when shortly before the coup d’etat on June 28, 2009, he was ordered not to leave the country as a result of an investigation prompted by Carmona-Borjas and a business called Eldi, that had complained that Tomé, along with two other commissioners had illegally granted the license for television channel 12 to the Rosenthals, rather than Eldi.

The previous fall, Carmona-Borjas also filed a complaint at the Public Ministry against Tomé for illegal enrichment, based on the fact that he believed Tomé’s advertising campaign for a seat in the National Congress was so massive that Tomé could not possibly have afforded it.

In yet another radio debate, Tomé called Carmona-Borjas “an international blackmailer, a mercenary, who was being investigated for money laundering and was paid by powerful groups.” Tomé was running for Congress under the Micheletti wing of the Liberal Party.

Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat: The Provocateur, his Protege, and the Toppling of a President – Part Two

Back to Jerusalem: And it’s Burning!

eileen fleming

What follows this expose by The Palestine Monitor, is something I wrote in 2009 and 2005 on this topic.

Jerusalem Is Burning

Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) is one of several organisations working to bring the violations occurring in East Jerusalem to the attention of the world. Their Chief Executive, Rabbi Asherman reports, “I see Jerusalem in flames, and know that my words will not succeed in conveying the horror of what I see or the dread in my heart…”

RHR was formed in 1988 and though the work of the organisation is broad its current focus is on the situation in East Jerusalem, in particular the events unfurling in Sheikh Jarrah.

The struggle for justice in Sheikh Jarrah

Maya Wind is the RHR press officer and every week she has been coordinating demonstrations across Jerusalem to expose and protest the injustices occurring in Sheikh Jarrah.

Sheikh Jarrah is one of the most contentious neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem with 28 properties embroiled in a legal battle between fundamentalist Israeli settlers and the Palestinians who live there. Maya describes the atmosphere as “extremely, extremely explosive. There are constantly violent outbreaks (…) settlers are provocative on purpose.”

The silencing of protest

Israelis from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv gather in Sheikh Jarrah in support of the evicted Palestinian families

Photo: Brady Ng

The protest in Sheikh Jarrah has begun to build a self sustaining momentum, with regular crowds of hundreds turning out. Last week two coach loads of activists drove up from Tel Aviv: it was the largest demonstration yet in Sheikh Jarrah. But as the demonstrators grow in number and the media start to cover the event extensively, so do Israeli security forces attempts to shut the protest down. Last Friday the police refused to grant the permit for marching from West to East Jerusalem and stormed the crowd of demonstrators, arresting 22 of them. The human rights community in Israel has moved quickly to condemn this cynical attempt to silence legitimate protest.

Israeli police cracking down on the demonstrators

Photo: Brady Ng

Holding back the demonstrators

Photo: Brady Ng

As the demonstration continued through the afternoon, the israeli police called for reinforcement for crowd control

Photo: Brady Ng

“The police are calling us outlaws and anarchists, despite the fact that the crowd here is mostly composed of professors from the Hebrew University and Jerusalemite teens who sing protest songs to the sound of drums,”“While the officers suppress our protests, sometimes violently, haredim and settlers riot unhindered in the neighborhood and attack Palestinian residents – sometimes to the point at which they require medical treatment.” said Avner Inbar, a left-wing activist.

Israeli police clear a path for Jewish settlers who are entering Sheikh Jarrah

Photo: Brady Ng

Apathy and dissent

Security tactics are getting more extreme and so to are the reactions ordinary Jerusalemites are having to the demonstration as it weaves from the predominantly Israeli West to the Palestinian East of the city. Maya reports, “We’re called traitors, cursed at, eggs are thrown at us. But that’s only positive, it shows we are having an impact, that we are making people outraged and that’s important because I’m equally outraged by what’s going on here.”

Maya works throughout the week to engage ordinary Israelis with the issue of Sheikh Jarrah, in particular targeting young people through flyering universities and nightclubs where the main obstacle she faces is not opposition but indifference.

“People are just very apathetic; they can’t be bothered to find out what’s happening in East Jerusalem. For many Jerusalemites East Jerusalem might as well be another country, they never venture here.”

With a wisdom that belies her 19 years, Maya joined RHR after being released from Israeli prison last March having served time following her refusal to serve in the Israeli Army. Four years ago a conversation with a Palestinian girl turned her life around.

“I was 15 and I had one conversation with a Palestinian girl who told me one story about something soldiers did to her father and that was the burst of my bubble.”

As a young teenager Maya had to reeducate herself about the reality of the Israeli Occupation and she is now an active member of the peace movement. Alongside the demonstration Maya regularly stays over with families under eviction orders. Her aim is to bring these human rights violations to the attention of the world and to show solidarity with the families under threat, “for the morale of the family it’s very important for them to feel, in this case, that the occupiers care and that there are Israelis who are opposing this.”

To find out more about Sheikh Jarrah on Palestine Monitor

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spi…

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spi…

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spi…

To find out more about Rabbis for Human Rights visit http://www.rhr.org.il/index.php?lan…

---

The Many Layers of NaHalat Shimon beg the question: Where’s the money coming from?
Published first August 8, 2009

[Occupied East Jerusalem] Last Sunday morning just before sunrise, Israeli forces evicted seventy more Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which is being taken over by the Nahalat Shimon settlers.

“The events in Sheikh Jarrah garnered international censure from the European Union, the United Nations (UN) and from Britain, which said it was ‘appalled’ at the move. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday night called the Israeli evictions “deeply regrettable” and she urged “the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions.” [1]

Israeli forces also demolished the Al-Kurd family protest tent for the sixth time. The Al-Kurd family was evicted from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood last November, just prior to my first visit and I returned again on June 10, 2009.

Less than a five minute walk from my room at the Ambassador Hotel and less than ten from the Old City of Jerusalem is the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Around the corner from my hotel and up the hill from the Al-Kurd Tent is a newly erected community center with a plaque “Dedicated to the Children of Shimon Hazadik Neighborhood” from a Dr. Rubin Brecher and family of Lawrence, New York.

According to Jewish tradition, Shimon Hazadik (which means ‘The righteous’) was the High Priest at the time of Alexander the Great. He reminded the people of what’s important in the world and he used to say: “On three things the world stands: the Torah, on Service [prayer] and on acts of kindness.”[2]

Mrs. Al-Kurd, known as Um Kamal [mother of Kamal] and her now deceased husband Mohammed had lived in the neighborhood from 1956 until the morning of November 9, 2008 when the Israeli police enforced a court order that evicted them.

When I returned to the tent on June 10, 2009 and asked Um Kamal where her calm strength and perpetual smile came from, she gestured to the sky and responded, “Allah: God gives me.”

Maher Hannoun interjected, “Um Kamal is a strong woman because she has a strong connection to this land where we both were born! Even for millions of dollars we would never sell our land, our hopes, our dreams! We are here legally and we have a contract that was signed between the government and UNWRRA, but what gives us the real power to fight is seeing all the people who come to be with us here believing in human rights. We need every one to carry our message around the world that this is our home and we will never leave here.

“In Gaza they attacked with F16 tanks. In Jerusalem they attack with evictions and transferring property. More than 500 homes in this neighborhood have already received eviction notices. They are building 200 settler units and an American Israeli company named Nahalat Shimon Builders is behind it.”

Nahalat Shimon is also the name of a settler group and a real estate company.

On August 2, 2009, “Israeli riot police wielding clubs kicked out two Palestinian families from their homes in occupied east Jerusalem on Sunday, defying international protests over Jewish settlement activity in the area. Clashes erupted after police moved in at dawn around the homes in the upmarket Arab district of Sheikh Jarrah following an Israeli court decision ordering the eviction of the 53 Palestinians, including 19 minors.

“I was born in this house and so were my children,” said Maher Hanoun, whose family was evicted along with the neighboring Ghawi household. “Now we are on the streets. We have become refugees.”

“The Supreme Court ordered the evictions following an appeal by the Nahalat Shimon International settler group which claimed Jewish settlers have title deeds for the properties, despite UN and Palestinian denials. Jerusalem authorities have also given permission for the construction of about 20 housing units in Sheikh Jarrah, in defiance of global calls for a halt to all settlement activity in occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank.” [3]

On November 9, 2008, at 3:30 AM, Reverend Richard Toll was awakened in his hotel room in the Ambassador while the Israeli Occupying Forces/IOF broke down the door of the home of the Al Khurd family. Rev. Toll informed me that he was jarred awake by a woman’s pain filled scream that was indescribable.

The Al Khurd family had lived in their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood since the days when east Jerusalem was under Jordanian control. The United Nations upon contract with Jordan allotted them the land after they became refugees when they were expelled from their home in west Jerusalem by Zionists during the 1948 war.

Hasib Nashashibi, of the Ensan Center for Democracy and Human Rights [an NGO coalition of Palestinian Muslim and Christians] explained to me, “When Jordan controlled this land and the UN granted privileges to the Palestinian refugees including those from west Jerusalem, such as education, health care, and relief and development; they also allowed the refugees to give up some privileges and receive a home and land deed instead. Jordan never fulfilled their obligation to send the written documentation that these west Jerusalem refugees are land owners and not tenants. Now the Israeli’s are trying to make them refugees for the second time!”

Since East Jerusalem’s occupation by Israel in 1967, the Oriental Jews Associations and the Knesseth Yisrael Association have been waging a brutal take over of the Khurds’ home, claiming that the land originally belonged to Jews.

In 1972, they succeeded to register the land in their name with the Israeli Land registrar. In 1999, settlers burst into the home and set up an occupation in a wing of the house that belonged to the couple’s son, Raed. The Khurd family hired lawyers and have spent a fortune in court battles and in 2006, the Israeli court finally revoked the claim of ownership by the settlers. However, on February 25, 2007 the Israeli Supreme Court issued an order to evict the settlers but it was never enforced!

In Israeli law, all of Jerusalem, including the eastern half of the city, is considered to be the “indivisible” capital of the Jewish state and religiously fundamentalist settlers have been claiming land all over occupied East Jerusalem based on title deeds that pre-existed 1948.

Since Israel became a state 531 Palestinian villages have been destroyed and 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees in 1948, and Israel continues to make more!

President George W. Bush became a willing collaborator in this on going injustice in his infamous 2004 exchange of letters with Ariel Sharon. Bush agreed that Israel would not be expected to return to the armistice lines of 1949 and declared that Israel would be able to hold on to its “population centers” in the West Bank. This is nothing more than Orwellian spin that attempts to justify the established settlement blocs for every one of them are illegal under international law.

“Michshol Hafrada” is Hebrew for “The Separation Wall” and separation translates to Apartheid in Afrikaan.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out And to whom I was likely to give offence. Something there is that does not love a wall, That wants it down.-Robert Frost

The Wall has divided Palestinians from Palestinians and has stolen their aquifers, denies them access to their land, jobs, families and holy sites and for every mile it consumes over $1.25 Million USA Tax dollars.

The Wall was deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice but no president has yet demanded Israel to tear down this wall!

The so called Holy Land is a Swiss cheese of land locked enclaves; known as Bantustans in Afrikaan. Jewish only colonies have been implanted to divide the Palestinian neighborhoods throughout occupied territory. Over 100,000 Palestinians are trapped and then daily humiliated and tortured at the over 600 checkpoints that deny them access to their families, land, jobs, resources and holy sites.

Since 1967, over 22,000 dwellings -averaging eleven people per unit- have been bulldozed by Israeli forces usually because they interfere with settlement expansion.

Israel attempts to justify their immoral actions with three distinct categories:

1. Collective Punishment: Homes of suspected terrorists-in reality that is anyone who opposes the occupation- as well as the families of suicide/homicide bombers.

These punitive actions amount to 15% of the over 22,000 homes destroyed since 1967.

2. Administrative demolitions for lack of building permits: Israel refuses to issue any and this accounts for 25%. In occupied east Jerusalem one out of four Palestinian homes have a demolition order.

3. Security: The blanket reason given for all of Israel’s injustices and illegal actions.

On December 20, 2006, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his relentless work confronting and challenging South Africa’s Apartheid regime was quoted in The Guardian: ”I’ve been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land. I have seen the humiliation at the checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about…Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice…If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land.”

I imagine Shimon Hazadik might remind “the children” who are taking over the neighborhood that,”From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught…that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, ‘vomit you out’ if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah [command]:

“When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ but also ‘you shall love the other.’” [4]

I also imagine Shimon Hazadik might be interested- as we all should- in knowing from whom and where the money comes from that equips the Nahalat Shimon settlers.

1.  http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0804/p06s12-wome.html
2.  http://www.chabadonline.com/scripts/tgij/paper/Articlecm.asp?articleID=1289
3.   http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=200983\story_3-8-2009_pg4_6
4.   Rabbi Lerner, TIKKUN Magazine, page 35, Sept./Oct. 2007

---

Dear Reader: This chapter is based on an actual email conversation I had with an Episcopal priest, but as I was writing fiction in 2005, I wrote for KEEP HOPE ALIVE. Chapter 16: A CONFRONTATIONAL CONVERSATION “Father Paul, you cannot possibly be telling me that an Episcopal priest has been taken in by fundamentalist theology?” Terese incredulously asked the new assistant to the rector at St. Joan of Arc Episcopal Church in Orlando, who also served at the noon mass every Wednesday. Father Paul Hendricks was a passionate evangelist on a mission to convert every Jew he encountered to become a Christian. Terese had kept her silence for the first six months she had been listening to his Wednesday noon sermons, but finally broke her silence after the rest of the parishioners had departed. Paul sighed and shook his head. “Look, Mrs. Hunter, I read your op/ed in the newspaper about Israel and Palestine, and we both agree we want peace; we just go about it differently.” “Father, let me say that the fastest growing cult in the U.S.A. is the cult of Christian Zionism. Approximately 25 million U.S. Christians believe as you do, and I am most depressed to see that the simple answers of fundamentalism have reached their tentacles into the thinking man’s church. You just preached for thirteen minutes on Genesis 12:3–‘I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse: and in you all the families of the world are blessed’–as if God meant blessings to be political power and military might. Father, surely you understand that the belief of the ancient Israelites, who held that they were chosen, as if they were somehow special from others, as if God esteemed them above others, is just basic primitive nationalism. Come on, Father, looking down on one’s enemies to foster one’s own tribal interest and praying to God to smite one’s enemies is what the ancients did. Isn’t it about time we moved beyond that limited thinking?” Father Paul clenched his fists and held them behind his back, as he suppressed a simmering rage. He stood nine inches above Terese’s upturned head, and with a slick smile and condescending tone told her, “Mrs. Hunter, you are very misled. The text is understood to mean a blessing to Abraham’s lineage–” Terese cut in. “Agreed! And Genesis 12:3 was promised even before Ishmael, the father of the Arab nation, and Isaac, the Jew, were born! And what about the very first mention of Israel? Jacob was renamed Israel for having wrestled and struggled with God. That is how I understand Israel; everyone who struggles and wrestles with God is Israel, too. Israel means more than a geographical location, Father Paul.” “Mrs. Hunter, the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of the prophetic scriptures, and God’s covenant with Israel is eternal, exclusive, and will not be abrogated. I refer you to Genesis 12:1-7, 15:4-7, 17:1-8; Leviticus 26:44-45; and Deuteronomy 7:7:8.” “And Father, I refer you to Matthew 5:43-45, which does not only critique Genesis 12:3; it blows it apart, for Christ commanded, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despite-fully use you, that you maybe children of your Father.” The two had reached Paul’s SUV and he silently prayed he could make a swift escape, but Terese had positioned herself at the driver’s door, and if he were to open it swiftly, she could be easily moved aside. Father Paul entertained the thought for more than a moment, but remained mute and still, as the tiny woman exploded with a torrent of words. “Look, blind allegiance to the Israeli government has allowed them to become a big bully, and isn’t God always on the side of the oppressed? My sense is that you Zionists see the political state of Israel as a replacement for Christ, at the center of the Christian faith, and that certainly is not Christianity! “How do you take Genesis 12:3 to literally mean that blessings equal land and political power, yet ignore God’s promise in Genesis 21:17-20 to ‘make a great nation out of Ishmael’s descendants and that ‘God was with the boy.’ Yet your way of thinking allows the growing apartheid wall to continue, and supports occupation and oppression of people that God also made promises too.” “Mrs. Hunter, why don’t you make an appointment and we can discuss this further? I really have to go.” “Okay, I can take a hint, but let me leave you with this: when religion and politics are in bed together, everybody gets screwed! The Israeli government is using you Zionists as apologists in support of their agenda of illegal occupation and settlements in the West bank, Golan, and Gaza, on literal biblical grounds taken out of context. Your blind allegiance to every act of Israel, understood as being orchestrated by God and which should therefore be condoned, supported, and even praised, makes me want to puke! And I wonder about the true motives of Christians who actually relish the idea of Armageddon and love to speculate on who gets ‘left behind.’ Christ was very clear that there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who were so sure they were in, but get left out. God has always been on the side of the oppressed, and your uncritical endorsement and justification for Israel’s racist and apartheid policies are an abomination.” The stunned and silent priest watched in relief as Terese turned, flipped her braid, and walked away.

Only in Solidarity do “we have it in our power to begin the world again.”-Tom Paine

Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org

Idealogues Are Spoiled Brats

The Ideological Animal

We’re easily manipulated by politics. We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death.

By Jay Dixit

Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she’d be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—”former lefties” who did political 180s after 9/11.

Stillwell, now a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, had been a liberal her whole life, writing off all Republicans as “ignorant, intolerant yahoos.” Yet on 9/11, everything changed for her, as it did for so many. In the days after the attacks, the world seemed “topsy-turvy.” On the political left, she wrote, “There was little sympathy for the victims,” and it seemed to her that progressives were “consumed with hatred for this country” and had “extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.”

Disgusted, she looked elsewhere. She found solace among conservative talk-show hosts and columnists. At first, she felt resonance with the right about the war on terror. But soon she found herself concurring about “smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics.” She embraced gun rights for the first time, drawn to “the idea of self-preservation in perilous times.” Hermarriage broke up due in part to political differences. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, she began going to pro-war rallies.

In 2005, she wrote a column called “The Making of a 9/11 Republican.” Over the year that followed, she received thousands of e-mails from people who’d had similar experiences. There were so many of them that she decided to form a group. And so the 911 Neocons were born.

We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we’re not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, andpersonality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear. How the United States should confront the threat of terrorism remains a subject of endless political debate. But Americans’ response to threats of attack is now more clear-cut than ever. The fear of death alone is surprisingly effective in shaping our political decisions—more powerful, often, than thought itself.

Abstract Art vs. Talk Radio: The Political Personality Standoff

Most people are surprised to learn that there are real, stable differences in personality between conservatives and liberals—not just different views or values, but underlying differences in temperament. Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that’s just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.

“All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats,” quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic,impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• next ›
• last »

situation critical: taliban uprising part5

more about "situation critical: taliban uprising …", posted with vodpod

situation critical: taliban uprising part4

more about "situation critical: taliban uprising …", posted with vodpod

situation critical: taliban uprising part3

more about "situation critical: taliban uprising …", posted with vodpod

situation critical: taliban uprising part2

more about "situation critical: taliban uprising …", posted with vodpod

situation critical: taliban uprising part1

more about "situation critical: taliban uprising …", posted with vodpod

BCCI, THE CIA AND FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

A CIA propaganda apparatus aimed at the American people–Oct. 2001

[SEE: Launching the Private Network–(for Soliciting Funds and Running Guns Past Congress) ;

The Subtle Seeds of the Terror War (1986)]

A CIA propaganda apparatus aimed at the American people

A CIA propaganda apparatus aimed at the American people

By Carla Binion

October 20, 2001 — The following events involving CIA propaganda aimed at the

American people occurred years ago.  However, some of the events’ same participants

and their ideological heirs are around today wielding their influence on Congress, the

president and the public.  One participant, Oliver North, now hosts a war stories

program on Fox network.  This is a little slice of history worth remembering.

Journalist Robert Parry shows why remembering the past is important in “Lost History,”

(The Media Consortium, 1999.) Parry is an award-winning investigative reporter who has

worked at the Associated Press, Newsweek and for PBS’s “Frontline.”  He broke a number

of stories on Iran-Contra and exposed Oliver North’s covert White House intelligence

network.

Parry points out that certain unsavory chapters of American history have been lost to

the public memory.  Some unpleasant historical facts have been glossed over or

whitewashed for innocuous reasons.  However, the history Parry covers in his

above-referenced book has not been lost through benign neglect but, in the author’s

words, because of “a calculated abuse of information in the cause of raw power.”

Parry says that in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration debated the need for a

propaganda apparatus in order to control public opinion.  “Summarizing this debate,”

writes Parry, “Kate Semerad, an external-relations official at the Agency for

International Development, expressed something like envy for the power of totalitarian

states to determine what citizens see and hear.”

In a memo circulated in the early 80s, Semerad wrote, “The totalitarian states whose

intelligence and propaganda apparatus we face have no internal problem in denying

their citizens access to information or even flagrantly lying to them.  We have

neither the apparatus nor the legal mechanism which would allow the success of an

effort to emulate that of Moscow, Habana [sic] and Managua.”

Parry adds the Semerad memo said a U. S. propaganda apparatus was necessary.  “We can

and must go over the heads of our Marxist opponents directly to the American people,”

Semerad wrote.  She also said, “Our targets would be: within the United States, the

Congress, specifically the Foreign Affairs Committees and their staffs, … the general

public [and] the media.”

According to Parry, “the fledgling [propaganda] operation took the initial name of

‘Project Truth.’  Later…Reagan gave the concept the name ‘Project Democracy’ and its

ostensible focus was international.”  Internal Reagan administration records show that

a Project Democracy draft proposal detailed plans to pay for the operation by

‘harnessing financial resources from a ‘coalition of wealthy individuals’; U. S.

defense contractors and private foundations.”

The Project Truth/Project Democracy group recruited CIA propaganda operations expert

Walter Raymond, Jr.  President Reagan chose Raymond to manage both the domestic and

foreign “public diplomacy” campaigns aimed at the American public, the media and

Congress.  Raymond was assigned to the National Security Council staff in 1982.

Presidential executive orders prohibited the CIA from influencing U. S. politics and

policies, according to Parry, as a “safeguard established to prevent the spy agency

from corrupting U. S. democratic institutions and creating a secret shadow

government.”  Parry also writes that federal law barred the Executive Branch from

“spending money to lobby Congress, except for the traditional practices of giving

testimony, making speeches and talking one-on-one with members.”

Walter Raymond later told an Iran-Contra committee he resigned from the CIA in April

1983 so “there would be no question of any contamination of this.”  However, Parry

says that Raymond’s colleagues “remarked that he ran domestic public diplomacy much

the same way he would have organized a CIA propaganda operation against a target

nation.”

Raymond coordinated the “public diplomacy” efforts of the State Department, the

Defense Department, the CIA, the NSC staff, the United States Information Agency and

the Agency for International Development.  Parry writes that a May 5, 1983 “public

diplomacy strategy paper” discussed ways to “correct” public opinion of those opposing

the Reagan administration’s support for the covert war in Nicaragua.

The strategy paper said that in order to alter public opinion, “diplomacy” efforts

should be persistently directed toward Congress and the news media.  The paper said,

“Our public diplomacy effort must be directed to: obtaining congressional support for

economic and security assistance [in El Salvador and] to foster a climate of editorial

and public opinion that will encourage congressional support of administration policy.”

In addition, the strategy paper said “opinion leaders in the mass media” should be

used to convey the Reagan administration’s view to the American people.  Edgar

Chamorro, a Jesuit-trained professor, was chosen by the CIA to help elevate the

contras’ public image.  His job was to sell American journalists on the idea that the

contras were “no longer a bunch of murdering terrorists,” according to Parry.

However, Chamorro became disillusioned over being ordered to tell so many lies and

“felt compromised when instructed to claim contra credit for military actions

conducted by the CIA,” says Parry.  Chamorro was also disheartened by the contras’

extensive, gratuitous brutality, including their kidnapping and killing of an elderly

Nicaraguan couple he knew personally.

During the early 80s, a number of journalists also reported contra wrongdoing,

including violence against innocent civilians.  For example, correspondent Raymond

Bonner in his series of reports for the New York Times, revealed that the U.

S.-supported contras were involved in drug dealing and human rights abuses.

Walter Raymond wrote in a memo to his subordinates that it was important for the

Reagan “perception management” team to work at “gluing black hats on the Sandinistas

and white hats on the [Contras].”  The Sandinistas were essentially labeled evildoers,

while the contras were glamorized as “freedom fighters.”

A National Security Council official told Parry that the Reagan team’s propaganda

campaign was (in Parry’s words)  “modeled after CIA covert operations abroad where a

political goal is more important than the truth.”  The official said, “They were

trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion — using the tools of Walt Raymond’s trade

craft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operation shop.”

Parry writes that another administration official told the Miami Herald’s Alfonso

Chardy, “If you look at it as a whole, the Office of Public Diplomacy was carrying out

a huge psychological operation, the kind the military conduct to influence the

population in denied or enemy territory.”

In order to promote the idea that there was a groundswell of public anti-Sandinsta

sentiment (and therefore influence Congress to go along with Reagan’s policies), the

CIA secretly funneled money to human rights and church groups to encourage them to

promote the Reagan administration’s view of the Sandinistas, according to Parry.

He points out that in “Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation,” Edgar

Chamorro wrote that the CIA funneled money to Nicaraguan exile Humberto Belli to help

publish Belli’s “Nicaragua: Christians Under Fire,” a book attacking the Sandinistas.

Chamorro added, “of course the CIA told us to say that the money for the book…was from

private individuals who wanted to remain anonymous.”

According to Parry, in order to help control American dissenters, Oliver North urged

rightwing security consultant Philip Mabry and others to ask the FBI to open

investigations on contra opponents.  Mabry informed the Boston Globe that North told

him that “if the FBI received letters from five or six unrelated sources all

requesting an investigation of the same groups, that would give the Bureau a mandate

to go ahead and investigate.”  (The Boston Globe, February 29, 1988.)

The FBI had already investigated the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El

Salvador [CISPES] starting in 1981.  Documents released under the Freedom of

Information Act showed that 52 FBI field offices investigated CISPES and 138 related

groups over a four-year period.  Parry writes that the documents revealed that

“enthusiastic FBI agents saw their job as silencing dissent, not enforcing the law.”

He quotes one November 10, 1983 memo from the FBI’s New Orleans office, saying, “It is

imperative at this time to formulate some plan of attack against CISPES and

specifically against individuals who defiantly display their contempt for the U. S.

government by making speeches and propagandizing their cause.”

Parry also says the Philadelphia FBI office, on March 6, 1984, cited 12 organizations

that had protested U. S. intervention in Central America, including the Friends Peace

Committee and a hospital workers union.  A December 14, 1984 FBI report from

Cincinnati, Ohio targeted individuals and groups “involved in activities contrary to

the foreign policy of the United States in Central America.”

(The new Office of Homeland Security recently created by George W. Bush, will have the

authority to suspend a number of citizens’ rights.  This office has potential for

abuse of power far more serious than the above-referenced FBI abuses.)

“While the FBI harassed these peace groups,” writes Parry, “the Reagan administration

relied on the most visible arm of the Casey-Raymond ‘perception management’ network to

pummel out-of-step journalists.”  This public arm was a new office called the Office

of Public Diplomacy for Latin America.

This office was opened at the State Department, and the Reagan administration chose

Otto Reich, a former Miami city official, to run the operation.  Part of Reich’s job

was to pump the Reagan team’s Central American propaganda “through as many outlets as

possible,” says Parry.

Once, when Reagan became angry at CBS News for its coverage of his Central American

policies, Reich visited the CBS News Washington office.  Parry says Secretary of State

George Schultz later sent Reagan a memo saying Reich had complained for one hour to

the offending correspondent, and for two more hours to his Washington bureau chief “to

point out the flaws in the information.”

Schultz also told Reagan that this was only one example of “what the Office of Public

Diplomacy has been doing to improve the quality of information the American people are

receiving….It has been repeated dozens of times over the past months.”

Parry writes that according to Paul Allen of National Public Radio [NPR], Otto Reich

“went ballistic,” demanding meetings with NPR’s executives and reporters after NPR did

a story about a contra massacre of farm workers.  Allen said the segment was “a long

piece and very, very moving….There was no particular effort to apologize for the

contras.  This was just a story about a bunch of people who got caught up in the war

and were shot up.”

Allen says Reich and one of his aides, Jonathan Miller, “made the point that our

broadcasts were being measured….Miller said some ungodly number of minutes were

‘anti-contra.’  We said, ‘how could you decide what was anti-contra?’  But the point

was, ‘we’re monitoring you — holding a stop watch on you.’”

Parry says that in September 1984 he received a Spanish-language manual called

“Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare.”  Most of the text was routine

instruction on the use of propaganda, but, according to Parry, some of the advice

“veered off into violent techniques, apparently drawn from longstanding U. S.

counterinsurgency strategies.”

The CIA had prepared the instruction manual for the contras.  Parry reported to the AP

wires that, “The CIA produced a psychological warfare manual for Nicaraguan rebels

that instructs them to hire professional criminals for ‘selective jobs’ and says some

government officials can be ‘neutralized’ with the ‘selective use of violence,’

intelligence sources say.”

Parry’s AP report continued, “The 90-page manual, written in Spanish, also urges the

rebels to create a ‘martyr’ by arranging a violent demonstration that leads to the

death of one of their supporters, and it tells how to coerce Nicaraguans into carrying

out assignments against their will.”  [AP, October 14, 1984.]

The murder manual story was later picked up by the New York Times and put on the front

page.  Parry says congressional Democrats blasted the CIA “for publishing a booklet

more befitting the traditions of communist Russia than a democracy.”

Days later, Edgar Chamorro affirmed that it was common practice for the contras to

execute Nicaraguan government officials.  [AP, October 20, 1984.]  Parry says the CIA

was enraged because its “perception management” code had been violated.

According to Parry, in October 1987, while the congressional Iran-contra committee

prepared its final report, he discovered a draft chapter had been written on the CIA’s

role in the Reagan team’s propaganda apparatus.  However, certain Republicans fought

to eliminate the story.

The Democrats asked three moderate Republicans — Warren Rudman, William Cohen and

Paul Trible — to sign the majority report.  The moderates said they would sign only

if the draft chapter on public diplomacy was excluded, according to Parry.

The eventual compromise allowed some parts of the draft chapter to remain.  “But,”

writes Parry, “the full chapter with a detailed explanation of the public diplomacy

operation was left on the editing room floor.”

He adds, “The American people were thus spared the draft chapter’s troubling

conclusion: that a domestic covert propaganda apparatus had existed, run by one of the

CIA’s most senior specialists, sent to the NSC by [CIA director] Bill Casey, to create

and coordinate an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism [that] did what a covert CIA

operation in a foreign country might do.  [It] attempted to manipulate the media, the

Congress and public opinion to support the Reagan administration’s policies.”

In the end, Otto Reich’s office at the State Department was shut down.  However, one

senior public diplomacy operative told Parry, “they can shut down the public diplomacy

office, but they can’t shut down public diplomacy.”

Remembering this slice of history gives context and perspective to current events.  It

should also inspire a healthy amount of skepticism regarding what we’re being told

about the war on terrorism, and an interest in learning all we can from reliable

alternative news sources and not exclusively from politicians or from the

corporate-owned media.  If we remember these mistakes from the Iran-contra era, we

might avoid repeating them as we face the era defined by the war on terrorism.

Copyright © 1998-2001 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.

You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of

the content.

The dreaming . . . And then we all woke up

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 20, 2001-I knew I was dreaming.

I knew that I only had to open my eyes, and I would find myself in my bedroom. I would

have one ankle wrapped around my wife’s ankle, and there would be an elderly Maine

Coon cat, in the crook of one arm, between me and my wife. Our big black Maine Coon

FOUS, the Carpet Weasel, would be stretched out along the length of my back, forepaws

pressed against the back of my neck. Upon feeling me stir, he would attempt to placate

me back to sleep with a loud purr and gentle kneads. Outside, it would be utterly

silent, the crickets stilled by the frosts of October, no wind to rustle the dying

leaves, the bears foraging less now that berry and grub season were passed. As I moved

along the corridors of what is real and what is not, I heard my wolf yawn, snapping

his jaws shut with a self-satisfied yawlp and a faint booming reverberation of his

vast nasal passages. I was on the mountain, home.

But the knowing in dreams is endlessly malleable, and the knowing of my real, physical

location was as distant, as a realization, as the knowledge that I could jump in my

vehicle and drive to South America if I wanted.

I was in Washington, DC. More specifically, I was in the White House.

With no sense of surprise, I found myself amidst the cast of “The West Wing.” This was

as it should be, this was right, in the dream sense of rightness.

CJ told me there was something I needed to see, and we went along a subterranean

corridor of the White House, and turning a corner, we went into a necropolis, a

granite forest of tombstones and crypts and mausoleums. A sullen night sky yawned,

wetly and blackly above. I understood in the dream way of understanding, that this was

Arlington. Not the green and trim Arlington of white crosses and marines in dress

uniform, but something darker, far more mediaeval, an Arlington of black plague times,

a mossy boneyard where Vincent Price might laugh.

Looking about (I was alone now) I could see that the dark grey of the steles and

mausoleums had red markings on them, and peering closer, I could see that they were

words, in an alphabet I could not read, written on the noncommittal granite in fresh

blood.

“How trite,” I thought.

I walked to the far side of the boneyard, and as I did, it changed to the charred

skeleton of a hi- rise district, blasted girders pointing to the sky in a “We’re

number one!” gesture in a world where nobody was counting. Off to one side was the

bleached ivory half-dome of the national capitol, lying in the sand like the skull of

a forgotten warrior.

I continued down the corridor, toward my office. I stopped at the office adjoining

mine and popped my head in to say good morning. The guys were there, and returned my

greetings in sober tones. Washington was destroyed, and the pain and shock and grief

went so deep that none of us could talk about it, and so we pretended to function with

the cheery platitudes of a humdrum Monday morning. Did Arizona win? Was Johnson

pitching? How did he do? Who wants a bagel? Cheery notes in minor keys.

Washington was destroyed, and with a pang, I realized I would never watch “West Wing”

again because there was nothing for the show to be about.

Then I woke up.

I woke up to a world where the size of an enemy is described in microns and the depth

of his hatred in religious beliefs.

I went in to the Monday world of cheery platitudes and heard, after shaking my head

over the demise of the A’s, what is inexplicably known in these parts as “the Charlie

story.”

If you know any other human beings, then you’ve certainly heard one of the variations

on it. The variations I first got were that someone, a friend of a friend of a friend

of a brother-in-law who knew a guy who worked at a pizza place in New Jersey and who

had a niece dating a nice Saudi boy, heard about a note the niece got on September 11.

In some cases, she sees the planes flying into the towers, and wonders if her

boyfriend is okay, since the events of that day put all Middle Easterners at risk from

vengeful pseudo-patriots. Or she is immediately suspicious, because the guy was always

so mysterious with his wads of plastique and packets of white powder and leadlined

cases and all.

In any event, the niece (it’s always a niece) goes to the boyfriend’s apartment, and

finds that the place has been cleaned out. Everything is gone, clothes, furniture,

television prayer mat, the works. Everything is gone, in fact, except a note,

addressed to the girl. The note talks in varying degrees of vagueness, about how the

young man is leaving on a jet plane and doesn’t know when he’ll be back again.

Leaving. In other variations, he talks about how he will die this day at the Pentagon

or World Trade Center or the Capitol building.

He finishes up with an admonition that no matter what else she does, she must stay out

of (a list of) major cities on October 31, 2001. In some instances, he tells her to

stay upwind, or 50 miles away, or consider a quick trip to Nepal or some place like

that. Bioweapons will be used, or there are nukes in abandoned warehouses in the

downtown district and no Batman to find them, and on Halloween, all the cities will go

blooie and millions will die.

Is there anything to the story?

Well, we live in times when a lot of scary stuff is going on all at once, and we’re on

the Internet, where rumors and urban legends breed like rats in the dump. In truth, I

would be a lot more surprised if there weren’t stories like this going around.

Keyboards and monitor screens haven’t reduced our ability to huddle around the fire

and enjoy a good, scary story. And the best kind of scary story is the kind where you

walk away, shaking your head and thinking, “It could happen. The story could be true.”

Is the story true? Ask me on November 1. But I’ll give long odds that the story is

totally without foundation, and we’ll all be here to laugh about it on All Saints’ Day.

Of course, I don’t suggest you take that bet. It’s a sucker’s bet. If you win, how are

you going to collect?

We’re all a bit scared, jumpy. If I see a flash from behind on Halloween, the first

thought might not be that the sunlight bounced off the windshield of a passing truck.

I won’t be entirely surprised if old friends in the city don’t call up and remark that

they’ve always wanted to enjoy a peaceful Halloween out of the city, and it’s been

ages since we got together.

I also can’t help but think the envelopes with the childish addressing and lethal

mists are misdirection, intended to distract, to get us focusing on the wrong thing.

It reminds me, once again, that the brave idiot leaders who are blindly smashing the

remains of Afghanistan still don’t know who the enemy actually is, or if there is more

than one group. Or much of anything, for that matter.

I don’t have any faith in our so-called leadership. An illegitimate puppet, held up by

timid neo-fascistic corporate interests, is going to save the world? Ouch.

But I do have faith in We the People. We’ve always had the insulating effects of our

location, and in the past half century, a vast military machine capable of destroying

the world. It’s been quite a while since our capital was threatened, and we’re still

getting used to this novel concept.

But what frightens us also makes us stronger, a uniflex for the emotional muscles. And

we are learning-quickly-that we are not above the world, nor out of it. We have to

stop fooling ourselves now, and realize that we cannot ignore the world, because the

world has no intention of ignoring us.

Perhaps, if we’re very lucky we will learn that we aren’t as bad as the rest of the

world. Rather, we’ll learn the rest of the world is as good as us. It’s a knowledge

we’re going to need, now that we are, once again, a part of the world.

Copyright © 1998-2001 Online Journal™.

Is the EU Helping Mossad to Commit International Terror?

Kawther Salam January 31 2010 – On past 20 January, Mohammad Al-Mabhouh was assassinated in a hotel in Dubai by Mossad people holding EU passports. According to the press, four to seven Israeli Mossad death squads assassinated Al-Mabhouh in his hotel room at the Al-Bostan, Rotana hotel in Dubai. The Mossad injected Al-Mabhouh with a drug which leads to a heart attack. They made copies of all documents he had, and then left his room after hanging a sign on the door with the words “Please do not disturb.” One day before the assassination of Al-Mabhouh, the Israeli infrastructure minister, an extremist squatter, and an organizer of the destruction of the Palestinian houses in Jerusalem and the West bank, Uzi Landau, left the neighboring Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Uzi Landau had been in Abu Dhabi from January 15 to 19, 2010. The Abu Dhabi regime invited the Israeli squatter and terrorist Landau to attend the conference of the agency of renewable energies, which was held in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Minister Landau entered Abu Dhabi with a team of mossad death squads who were with him under the pretext of being his security attachment. It appears that the people posing as Landau’s security attachment were involved in organizing the murder of Mohammad Al-Mabhouh in the neighboring State of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, the information office of the government in the United Arab Emirates said that the Dubai police was able to identify the suspects who killed the Hamas leader, saying they all hold European passports. The Mossad operatives had left Dubai earlier, before the discovery of the crime. The state of Dubai is involved in the assassination of Al-Mabhouh in one way or other, at the very least by appeasing and encouraging the usual terrorism of Israel by participating in the “normalization” of it relations with Israel and allowing an Israeli representative in its territory, as well as allowing freedom of movement to Israelis on its territory, while at the same time Israel does not respect the sovereignty of any Arab country, and puts Israeli interests ahead of the interests of all nations and people, Arab or not. Israeli news stated that the Mossad death squad interrogated Al-Mabhouh in his hotel room before killing him, and that they returned with “precious information” attained following Al-Mabhouh’s interrogation, what most likely means that they tortured him to death if that is not a cover story for a murder in cold blood. Questions which need answers from the European Governments Which is the European country which violated international law and gave the Mossad passports for the commission of this murder in another country and violating its security? Is it Germany, the same European country which has recently gifted Israel with German U212 submarines built fully at the expense of German taxpayers? Among all European countries, Germany is the prime suspect in this sordid crime, as it is known that it the Mossad was always given German passports in the past. I think that giving the Mossad passports is a crime not only against us Palestinians, but against the people of the nation who gave them the passports as well. Is it reasonable that while “fighting” against so-called terrorism, or actually national liberation and self-determination movements, states engage in aiding and abetting, financing and in the commission of international terrorism and in the violation of the borders and the security of another country? How does international law deal with the European state which is involved in such crimes of international terrorism, and in violating the security of other countries? Whatever European country that gave the Mossad it’s own passports or allowed Israel to forge its passports and use them for committing terrorist crimes in another state, is involved in the terror crime itself, and the officials of that state must be treated in accordance to the provisions of international law relating to the crimes of international terrorism. After the funeral of Al-Mabhouh in the Al-Yarmuk Refugee Camp south of Damascus, Khaleed Mash’al said “we will avenge this man. If you [Israel] were happy to assassinate a great man who bravely defeated your soldiers, then this happiness is going to pass”.

:: Article nr. 62794 sent on 01-feb-2010 01:34 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62794

Link: www.kawther.info/wpr/2010/01/31/is-the-eu-helping-mossad-to-commit-international
-terror

Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion

Secret document signalled support for Iraqi dissidents and promised aid, oil and trade deals in return for regime change Michael Savage, January 31, 2010 A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal. Whitehall officials drafted the “contract with the Iraqi people” as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the dictator had been removed. Tony Blair’s team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York. The document, headed “confidential UK/US eyes”, was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today. It states: “We want to work with an Iraq which respects the rights of its people, lives at peace with its neighbours and which observes international law. “The Iraqi people have the right to live in a society based on the rule of law, free from repression, torture and arbitrary arrest; to enjoy respect for human rights, economic freedom and prosperity,” the contract reads. “The record of the current regime in Iraq suggests that its priorities remain elsewhere. “Those who wish to promote change in Iraq deserve our support,” it concludes. “We look forward to the day when Iraq rejoins the international community.” A new regime was to be offered “debt rescheduling” through the Paris Club, an informal group of the richest 19 economies, given help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and handed an EU aid and trade deal. Companies were to be invited to invest in its oil fields. A “comprehensive retraining programme” was to be offered to Iraqi professionals. During his evidence to the inquiry last week, Mr Blair said it was only after 9/11 that serious attention was given to removing Saddam as the attack changed the “calculus of risk”. However, another classified document released by the Iraq inquiry on Friday night showed that No 10 explicitly saw the Contract with the Iraqi People as an early tool to remove the former Iraqi dictator. A memo issued in March 2001 by Sir John Sawers, then Mr Blair’s foreign policy adviser, cited the document under the heading “regime change”. “Regime change. The US and UK would re-make the case against Saddam Hussein. We would issue a Contract with the Iraqi People, setting out our goal of a peaceful, law-abiding Iraq,” the memo states. “The Contract would make clear that the Iraqi regime’s record and behaviour made it impossible for Iraq to meet the criteria for rejoining the international community without fundamental change.” Officials planned to release the contract alongside tougher sanctions against Saddam’s regime being negotiated in 2001. When no agreement was reached and the US began to seek more active measures to remove the Baghdad administration after 9/11, the contract was dropped. The document was not released by the Iraq inquiry, despite being cited as significant by Foreign Office officials. Sir William Patey, the Government’s head of Middle East policy at the time it was drafted, said it was “our way in the Foreign Office of trying to signal that we didn’t think Saddam was a good thing and it would be great if he went”. He said it was used in place of an “explicit policy of trying to get rid of him”. “It was a way of signalling to the Iraqi people that because we don’t have a policy of regime change, it doesn’t mean to say we’re happy with Saddam Hussein, and there is life after Saddam with Iraq being reintegrated into the international community,” he said. Ed Davey, the Foreign Affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said the document called into question Mr Blair’s evidence and should have been made public before his hearing on Friday. “A plan to back Iraqis seeking to oust Saddam may have been far less damaging and certainly more legal than what happened. Yet it shows that Blair’s intent was always for regime change from an early stage and before 9/11,” he said. “Yet again, it seems that critical documents have not been declassified, hampering the questioning of Blair and others.” * Tony Blair is to be recalled by the Chilcot Inquiry to give further evidence, according to The Guardian. It claims that Mr Blair will be questioned in both public and in private after the panel raised concerns that his evidence relating to the legality of the invasion conflicted with that given by the former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith.

:: Article nr. 62799 sent on 01-feb-2010 05:31 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62799

Link: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/plan-to-oust-saddam-drawn-up-two-years-be
fore-the-invasion-1885155.html

Tony Blair is guilty of mass murder

Tony Blair is guilty of mass murder Sabah Jawad & Peter Brierley January 31, 2010 Sabah Jawad from Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation ‘Tony Blair should be tried for his crimes against Iraq—and the legacy the war has left there. A million Iraqis have died, leaving millions orphaned and widowed. The war and occupation have made as many as four million people into refugees. The whole infrastructure of Iraq has been devastated by the occupation. Our heritage has been looted and destroyed, the environment has been poisoned and vital water sources have been lost. Iraq used to be the breadbasket of the region—now once fertile lands are in danger of being transformed into a desert. Children are growing up suffering from disease and deformities. Sectarianism has been elevated to all state institutions and the country is dangerously fragmented. Corruption is rife—government officials have been caught taking bribes of millions of dollars from foreign companies. Iraq’s precious oil resources have been auctioned off to the highest bidder. Meanwhile the profits of private security companies have soared. Ordinary Iraqis who have suffered the most from the illegal war and occupation are left to cope with living under the threat of violence. Unemployment now stands at 50 percent in a country where infrastructure has been shattered. Yet despite everything the Iraqi people will continue with their determined struggle to reject the occupation and build a democratic, free Iraq.’ Peter Brierley whose son Shaun was killed in Iraq in 2003 ‘We’ve been saying what has now come out of the Chilcot inquiry for the last six years. The decision to go to war was made years before it was announced, it was illegal, and it was to depose Saddam Hussein. They denied it all this time, and now it’s out. But that isn’t enough. The only acceptable outcome is for Tony Blair to face investigation for war crimes and crimes against humanity. When he gives evidence Blair will deny these things. Unless they put charges to Blair, the inquiry is in disrepute. The Iraqi people should have a voice too, to come and give evidence. It wasn’t just people who were killed—a whole country was destroyed. Every other day there seems to be a bombing or something similar in Baghdad. The violence only exists because of the instability war has created. We went and met with John Chilcot along with other military families before the inquiry started. I met him individually and he said that if anything illegal came out in the inquiry he wouldn’t hesitate to pass it on. Well now it has come out of their own mouths that it was for regime change. Since I refused to shake Blair’s hand, he seems a bit different. People used to say you’ll never get what you want, but he’s looking less cocky now, less confident. We won’t stop until we get him—and until we get justice.’

:: Article nr. 62807 sent on 01-feb-2010 07:42 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62807

Link: www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=20108

Hillary Clinton’s Prescription: Make The World A NATO Protectorate

Hillary Clinton’s Prescription: Make The World A NATO Protectorate

Rick Rozoff

January 31, 2010 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was busy in London and Paris last week advancing the new Euro-Atlantic agenda for the world. As the top foreign policy official of what her commander-in-chief Barack Obama touted as being the world’s sole military superpower on December 10, she is no ordinary foreign minister. Her position is rather some composite of several ones from previous historical epochs: Viceroy, proconsul, imperial nuncio. When a U.S. secretary of state speaks the world pays heed. Any nation that doesn’t will suffer the consequences of that inattention, that disrespect toward the imperatrix mundi.  (read HERE)

China Confused and Outraged By Obama’s Google and Taiwan Cards

China Confused & Outraged By Obama’s Google & Taiwan Cards

By B. Raman

At a time when Chinese officials and non-Governmental analysts have been highly confused by the unusually strong line taken by Mrs.Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, in support of Internet freedom in the wake of Google’s threat to stop censoring its search engine in China and its protests over alleged Chinese web snooping into the Google mail accounts of Chinese political dissidents and Tibetan and Uighur nationalists, they have been in for another shock by the decision of the administration of  President Barack Obama to notify the Congress on January 29, 2010, of its plans to sell a fresh package of arms to Taiwan in disregard of Chinese protests and sensitivities on the subject.

2. Mrs.Clinton’s strong statement on the question of Internet freedom has already given rise to Chinese allegations of the US reverting to its past policy of “information imperialism” and adopting double standards with regard to restrictions on the Internet in the interest of national security. As a result, earlier speculation and even expectations that the Chinese authorities and Google   could reach a face-saving compromise to facilitate the continued operation of the Google in the Chinese market have been belied so far.

3. The continuing controversy over the Google was till now viewed by the Chinese authorities as an aberration and not as reflective of any change of policy by theObama Administration towards China. However, the Administration’s notification to the Congress  of its plan to sell to Taiwan US $ 6.4 billion worth of Patriot missiles, Black Hawk helicopters and minesweepers has come as a second surprise to Beijing. It is learnt that the Chinese authorities were aware for some time that the sale of this package  was under the consideration of the Obama Administration, but were confident that after the smooth visit of Mr.Obama to China in November last and the importance attached by him to China’s role  as an Asian power with stakes even in South Asia, he will not go ahead with the sale.

4. His surprise (to the Chinese) decision to go ahead with the sale has evoked strong resentment in official circles and has been strongly criticized by non-governmental analysts, who have accused him of being insincere  and projected his decision as a wake-up call to China about the real Obama.

5. In its strong reaction within 24 hours of the notification, the Chinese Government has suspended  (not cancelled) all military exchanges with the US. Mr.QianLihua, Director of the Foreign Affairs office of the Chinese Defence Ministry, lodged a strong protest with the US Defence Attache in Beijing. A press release issued by his office on the protest said:  ”The Chinese military expresses grave indignation and strongly condemns such a move to grossly interfere in China’s internal affairs and harm China’s national security interests. The Taiwan issue is related to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and concerns China’s core interests. The US arms sales to Taiwan gravely violates the three joint communiques between China and the United States, and seriously endangers China’s national security and harms China’s reunification course. Such a move also constitutes severe violation of the agreements reached by the top leaders of both sides on the China-US relations in the new situation. It runs counter to the principles of the joint statement issued during US President Barack Obama’s visit to China in November last year.”

6. A strong commentary on the US notification  by the “China Daily” published on January 31, 2010, said: “ The latest US arms sale to Taiwan has once again come up as a wake-up call. It cannot but let us be clear that in a world where the law of the jungle still prevails, China, like any other developing country, cannot remain aloof from bullies. It is painful to come to such reality. The feeling gripped us when our embassy was bombed in Belgrade; when our ace pilot was knocked down into the sea by a spy plane at door step. It is gripping us now….
More than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the US is still bent on integrating Taiwan into the American defense strategy in Asia, and still dreaming of using the island as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to contain the growth of China. Forget about the pledge that “the United States does not seek to contain China” made by Mr Barack Obama when he was in Beijing just two months ago. Sincerity is subject to proof by action, not by words….China’s response, no matter how vehement, is justified. No country worthy of respect can sit idle while its national security is endangered and core interests damaged. When someone spits on you, you have to get back. Compared with the US, China is still weak, both economically and militarily. The counter-measures that China has taken — ranging from repeated protests to plans to halt military exchanges and punish US companies involved in the arms sale, may not be forceful enough to make Washington smart and mend its ways. But a message has to be sent: From now on, the US shall not expect cooperation from China on a wide range of major regional and international issues. If you don’t care about our interests, why should we care about yours? China must never waver to make sure that it means what it says.”

7. The Chinese  have also been surprised by indications from Washington DC that Mr.Obama intended meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama at a convenient time. He had avoided meeting His Holiness during his last visit to the US which came shortly before Mr.Obama’s visit to China.

8. Chinese analysts are confused as to why this sudden change in the policies of Mr.Obama on two issues—-Taiwan and Tibet— which are among the core concerns of China. Barring what the US viewed as China’s unhelpful stance at the recent Copenhagen summit on climate and Beijing’s dispute with Google, the relations between the two countries have been proceeding smoothly and the Chinese, in Beijing’s perception, have been co-operating with the US in its efforts to stabilize the global economy.

9. Even presuming that the Obama Administration might have been unhappy over the Chinese role in Copenhagen, its dispute with Google over web snooping, its failure to exercise  sufficient pressure on North Korea to return to talks on the nuclear issue and its opposition to robust sanctions against Iran, would that be sufficient cause to go ahead with the arms sale to Taiwan at the risk of serious damage to Sino-US relations? That is a question to which the Chinese have not yet been able to find an answer.

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

UNITED STATES STRATEGICALLY CONFRONTED WITH CHINA-PAKISTAN-SAUDI ARABIA TRIANGLE

By Dr. Subhash Kapila

Introductory Observations

The United States policy establishment and the plethora of think-tanks that abound in Washington seem to be totally oblivious that a strategic triangular relationship comprising China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia is confronting the United States in South West Asia.  China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia strategic triangle is not a newly emergent military configuration.  It commenced with the China-Pakistan strategic nexus in the 1960s and expanded to the China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia strategic triangle by the 1980s.

The China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia strategic triangle today manifests itself not only in military inter-linkages, but also in nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles linkages and inter-dependencies.

The China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia Triangle may not have acquired the contours of a formal military alliance or a security grouping yet, but China’s crafting this strategic triangle and cementing it with China-supplied nuclear weapons and missiles makes it no less potent for the United States.

South West Asia is of significant strategic interests for the United States which politically, strategically and militarily has invested heavily in this region extending from the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf Region and extending to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Strategically ironic is the fact that in United States strategic planning, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia figured high in the United States security architecture for South West Asia.  Ironically further, that while the United States revelled in the belief that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were the new “twin-pillars” of US security architecture in the region, both these Sunni Muslim nations had been strategically enticed by China.

China as an astute practitioner of “strategic acupuncture” strategies had very early recognised that in terms of American strategic pressure-points in East Asia in relation to Taiwan, China could generate counter-pressure points against the United States in South West Asia.  Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, flaunted by the United States as its most “staunch and durable allies” were strategic plums ripe for picking by China.

Except for a brief interlude of the Afghanistan Mujahideen war of the 1980s when the strategic interests of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia coincided with those of the United States, the relationships between the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been testing and uneasy.  Post-9/11 when Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’s direct and indirect involvement became overt, the three-way relations have become even more uneasy.

In marked contrast to their frosty relationships with the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia moved to more proximate relationships with China.  This process could intensify as Pakistan comes under more intense American pressures on Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia perceives that a United States-Iran rapprochement may be forthcoming.

It is worth recording that while Saudi Arabia has significant political and financial leverages over Pakistan and China has a tight military leverage over Pakistan, both these nations have hesitated in assisting the United States by restraining Pakistan’s proclivity to use Islamic Jihadi outfits as instruments of state policy in its region.

One of the reasons which may have prompted President Obama on election as US President to cozy upto China may be to persuade China to use its strong leverages over Pakistan on the Afghanistan issue.

It was an unrealistic move if one had only kept in mind that the reasons that bind China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia into a triangular strategic relationship is to impede United States strategic dominance of South West Asia.

It becomes imperative therefore to understand the pattern and extent of the China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle and what it portends.  To enable this, this Paper intends to examine the following aspects:

• China-Pakistan Strategic Nexus: China Provides the Islamic Nuclear Bomb
• China-Saudi Arabia Strategic Relationship: China Introduces Long Range Ballistic Missiles in Region
• Pakistan-Saudi Arabia Strategic Partnership: The Nuclear Weapons Inter-linkage
• China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle: Confronting the United States in South West Asia.

China-Pakistan Strategic Nexus: China Provides the Islamic Nuclear Bomb

China’s strategic nexus with Pakistan was not forged with a limited aim of playing balance-of-power politics with its Asian rival, namely India.  China’s strategic nexus with Pakistan was forged with much larger strategic aims, and that too focused on the United States.

China’s strategic aims for forging a strategic nexus with Pakistan can be analysed as follows: (1) Transform United States much flaunted staunch ally Pakistan into a strategic counter-pressure point against the United States itself (2) Acquire a strategic foothold on the North Arabian Sea in close proximity of the Hormuz Straits by exploiting Pakistan’s geo-strategic location.  China’s interest in Pakistani naval base of Gwadur backed by land access through China-built Karakoram Highway linking Xingjian to Pakistan are evidence (3) Converting Pakistan into a Chinese military equipment client state with all its strategic implications.

Most significantly, de-stabilizing the United States security and strategic aims in South West Asia, China implanted “The Islamic Nuclear Bomb’ in this highly volatile region by equipping Pakistan with the same, along with long range delivery missiles.  In the process China not only earned the eternal gratitude of Pakistan but also a shackling strategic leverage over Pakistan.  It added to China’s image as a staunch ally of the Islamic World.

Courtesy China and as China’s proxy, Pakistan embarked on nuclear and WMD proliferation to Islamic countries adversarial to the United States like Libya and Iran.

China’s creation of Pakistan as a nuclear weapons state with IRBMs (supplied by North Korea) was a strategic master-stroke aimed at United States overwhelming predominance in South West Asia.  China thus with strategic callousness and strategic irresponsibility initiated a nuclear arms race in this volatile region not only endangering United States strategic interests but global stability too.

China-Saudi Arabia Strategic Relationship: China Introduces Long Range Ballistic Missiles in Region

China’s preying on Saudi Arabia’s strategic uncertainties went in for a repeat performance of China’s preying on Pakistan’s strategic uncertainties.

In both cases China’s predominant strategic aims was to draw out yet another United States staunch military ally from the American strategic orbit.

While in the case of Pakistan, the lure was a nuclear weapons arsenal with Chinese direct assistances, Saudi Arabia was lured by the supply of CSS-2 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) with nuclear weapons capability.

China’s supply of over 50 CSS-2 IRBMs in 1988 with ranges nearing 2,800 km, initiated a missiles acquisition race in South West Asia.  This was yet another example of China’s strategic callousness and strategically irresponsible approach to South West Asia stability.

While analyses at that time surmised that China’s supply of IRBMs to Saudi Arabia were prompted by energy security needs, but it would be equally fair to argue that this was not the sole reason.  Strategic imperatives were also underwriting the deal.

With no geographical contiguity or proximity between China and Saudi Arabia, this strategic partnership has been evolved primarily as a strategic counter-pressure point against the United States.  Saudi Arabia went into this deal with great secrecy and behind the back of the United States, at a time when their relations were good.

US strategic analysts have opined that Saudi Arabia as the most pivotal state in the region has been the “most assiduous” in cultivating China.

Post 9/11, with Saudi Arabia being perceived by most Americans with suspicion, China receives enhanced strategic focus and political focus from Saudi Arabia.  It was not without reason that the Saudi Monarch’s first foreign visit was to China and the Chinese President has paid two visits to Saudi Arabia in a short span of three years.

There is also a nuclear weapons angle involved.  CSS-2 missiles are not precise weapons but area weapons intended for nuclear weapons delivery.  It was a graduated step by Saudi Arabia for ultimate acquisition of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Pakistan-Saudi Arabia Strategic Partnership: The Nuclear Weapons Interlinkage

Pakistan’s financial bondage to Saudi Arabia is widely known and so is widely known that the Saudis have used this financial leverage to control Pakistan’s domestic politics.  It is for nothing that even Pakistan’s military dictators succumb to Saudi monarch’s dictates on Pakistan’s domestic politics.

Pakistan-Saudi Arabia relations extends to close military cooperation including provision of Pakistan Army Contingents for Saudi security in crisis situations. Pakistan has also provided training teams for Saudi Armed Forces.

Pakistan also has acted as proxy for Saudi Arabia in the spread of Wahabi influence in South Asia and South East Asia. Saudi intelligence hierarchy has worked in close conjunction with Pakistan military intelligence in dealings with Al Qaeda and Taliban.

However, more significant than this cooperation has been the Pakistan – Saudi Arabia inter-linkages in respect of Saudi Arabia’s plans for nuclear weapons.

While Saudi Arabia has shied away from a direct acquisition of nuclear weapons (possibly till such time Iran’s nuclear arsenal becomes overt), plans exist for contingency provision of nuclear weapons by Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.

US think-tanks provide the following vital information on Pakistan – Saudi Arabia nuclear inter-linkage (1) Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program (2) Saudi Arabia dignitaries were given access to Pakistan’s nuclear facilities both before and after Pakistan’s nuclear tests (3) In the wake of, Pakistan’s nuclear test, Saudi Arabia supplied free to Pakistan 50,000 barrels of oil per day to offset effect of economic sanction against Pakistan (4) As part of this nuclear weapons partnership, contingency plans exist for Pakistan to provide nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia at short notice.

In this connection, it has further been asserted that (1) Pakistan has practiced the contingency plans of providing Pakistani nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia at short notice for use with Saudi delivery systems (2) Likely that Pakistan Air Force and their Saudi counter parts have jointly practiced this operation.

If Pakistani nuclear weapons would additionally be required to be mated with Chinese- origin Saudi CSS-2 IRBMs then obviously Chinese expertise and participation would be required. That completes the China- Pakistan – Saudi Arabia nuclear weapons and IRBMs triangle with attendant strategic ramifications

China- Pakistan – Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle: Confronting the United States in South West Asia

China- Pakistan – Saudi Arabia as a strategic triangle has not metamorphosed into a full-fledged military alliance to confront the United States.  Nor has this Triangle evolved into a security grouping like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to offset United States strategic creep eastwards towards China.

In terms of confronting the United States, the China – Pakistan – Saudi Arabia operates in a more insidious manner. It needs to be viewed at two levels as follows (1) China perceives its strategic relationships with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as strategic counter-pressure points to offset US pressures in East Asia and else where (2) Pakistan and Saudi Arabia perceive their strategic relationships with China to offset coercive political and strategic pressures from the United States and have flexibility in their policy options.

Overall, the China – Pakistan- Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle is a strategic configuration confronting the United States in volatile South West Asia comprising two nuclear powers, China and Pakistan and a nascent nuclear power, Saudi Arabia. This strategic configuration seriously complicates South West Asia security for the United States.

In this triangular configuration, China has already emerged as the foremost challenger to United States globe predominance. It has strategically penetrated all the strategic quadrants of the globe including Africa. It is not for nothing that the United States has been forced to set up a new military command – The Africa Command.

The second component of this Triangle, namely Pakistan, has constantly double-timed the United States strategically, despite its utter dependency on US financial doles for its existence. It is currently active in thwarting the successful materialization of the Af –Pak strategy to stabilize Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s prospects of disintegration and the safety of its Chinese – origin nuclear weapons and missiles arsenal has emerged as the foremost threat to US national security.

The third component of this triangle, Saudi Arabia has ceased to be a strategic asset to the United States in its South West Asia strategy. Saudi Arabia refused its bases to the United States for Gulf War II operations. Post- Gulf War II, Saudi Arabia as per reports was active in secretly sending Saudis to Iraq to pre-empt the emergence of a Shia – dominated government. Saudi Arabia has strong strategic linkages with China and has now ventured to enlarge its security relationship with Russia.

The overall picture that emerges therefore is that the China – Pakistan – Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle if not in a visibly concerted manner at present is yet engaged in their respective confrontations with the United States, reinforced with the Chinese – origin nuclear and missile deterrence at their disposal.

China has yet not restricted its nuclear weapon and missiles assistance to Pakistan and can be construed by extension to Saudi Arabia.

Concluding Observations

In all likelihood, the South West Asia region may be the area for the next major conflict with global contours. South West Asia more than East Asia may be the strategic region where United States global strategic supremacy is likely to be challenged intensely and subtly.

One wonders whether United States strategic planners and think-tanks have ever realized that for China the region of South West Asia presents a more profitable area to check-mate the United States. Unlike East Asia, where China would have to enter into a direct armed conflict with the United States, in South West Asia, the China – contrived configurations like the China – Pakistan – Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle can strategically check-mate the United States predominance in an indirect manner.

In the long run, the China – Pakistan – Saudi Arabia Strategic Triangle has all the strategic potential to make the costs of United States embedment in South West Asia that much more prohibitive.

(The author is an International Relations and Strategic Affairs analyst.  He is the Consultant, Strategic Affairs with South Asia Analysis Group.  Email:drsubhashkapila.007@gmail.com)

Islam4UK ‘Exposed As British Intelligence Front’

more about "Islam4UK ‘Exposed As British Intellig…", posted with vodpod

Pukhtoonistan=American Vindication

A 60×40 boarding can be seen in Bannu District (NWFP) which distincts NWFP & FATA region from rest of Pakistan.  Currently NWFP is being governed by ANP.  (Online News)

The NWFP main roads were awashed with Separatist Billboards

BANNU-NWFP: (Report by A Khokar) On Indus high way a 40 feet wide bill board is found erected depicting the new map of Afghanistan which includes most of the NWFP province. Keeping in view the turbulent state of affairs of NWFP, the general masses may think that this bill board has been put up by some separatist group in defiance but pity is that under this pictorial map of new Afghanistan there is clearly written in Urdu; Hakumat e Pakistan say Mazoor shudda; means that this billboard is there with the approval of Government of Pakistan.

The mysterious billboards that have sprung up on the other main roads of NWFP are also showing the map of a new country – Pashtunistan – with meticulously defined borders that incorporate most of north-western Pakistan. The Pakistani Pashtun, the bravest and the most loyal subjects of the Pakistani state, are being pushed toward separatism with full speed. This ‘billboard campaign’ has to be the boldest statement of rebellion and separatism ever made in the history of nation-states anywhere in the world. Yet it’s business as usual in Islamabad.

After the provocative mysterious drone missiles attacks in Waziristan that daily drones sorties are killing score s of innocent people and are thus instigating the victims to rabble- rouse against the rulers in Islamabad. [Tang aamad wa ba-jang aamad ] and now here we have got—-this separatist billboards business? What is going on with my country? This is most despicable.

Reportedly these boards are also seen fixed in the area like Luki Marawat and on many other main roads in NWFP. Is there any government in existence and effective in Pakistan or it is being staged all on purpose with the connivance of the stooge government in Islamabad. Looks like; the bitch guarding the house is in agreement with the dacoits [1].

Matter of the fact is that these Billboards have surely been erected by the Present NWFP government which is government of Awami National party . All the Pakistanis be warned and I must say again; be warned;—Say no to any coercion by threat as Pakistanis are being blackjacked (hijacked). This Awami National party is the same old party which has always sided with Soviet Union to seek their assistance in creation of Pashtunistan. They have always been unsuccessful then but after this election; that having secured their anchorage at province and a grip on the governing seats of the realm of the NWFP; their real colour is coming out. Billboard of Pashtunistan are the glaring evidence.

Earlier CIA was backing Tehrik e Taliban and they could create enough of anarchy in the country. Finding it an opportunity to expliot it further, the Awami National Party have abetted CIA and are getting the full assistance from CIA to exploit the present situation to disintegrate Pakistan and carve a new dream state— Pashtunistan extending from Indus river to Jalaabad-Kabul with its capital at Jalalabd. National Awami Party elders have never opted even to be buried in Pakistan. Khan Abdul Ghaffar khan known as Bacha Khan was buried there in Jalalabad. This should be noted that on 21 September 2008 in a party Conference, named as ‘International Day of Peace’ ANP has named 2010 as Bacha khan year. These Bill boards are the out come of that conference.

Court Martial for Planned Attacks On Predator Base at Shamsi, Militant Links

[SEE: Taliban-Pak army links deepening?]

Court martial of colonel, two others from tomorrow

Court-martial of a military officer and two civilians, who went missing in Rawalpindi a few months back, will start on Friday (tomorrow) on charges of spying and inciting army personnel to get involved in terrorist acts, reported BBC on Wednesday.
Colonel Shahid Bashir, a former Air Force pilot and now an advocate Nadeem Ahmad Shah, and Awais Ali Khan, an Engineer, were arrested by a military intelligence agency in Rawalpindi in May this year.
Family sources of the three alleged persons said that they had been informed that all the three of them will undergo field court-martial proceedings for spying.
Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said that it was known to him that some persons were being probed for spying, but the matter of court-martial was not in his knowledge.
The three accused are in Army custody in Kotli District of Azad Kashmir but no details of the allegations levelled on them have been duly furnished so far. Certain sources, however, have told BBC that the three persons have been accused of leaking out some secrets of the PAF airbase Shamsi in Balochistan and inducing Army officers to destructive activities. It is pertinent to mention that former Army Chief General Mirza Aslam Beg had disclosed a few months ago that the said airbase was being used for US drone flights to strike the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The court-martial case will be proceeded in a military court, headed by a Brigadier under Section 31(d) of the Army Act under which the accused, if proved guilty, could be given death sentence.
As per details of the charges sent to the families of the three persons, Col Shahid Bashir of Army Engineering Unit has been charged with leaking out secrets of Shamsi airbase to the people who were planning to attack the airbase.
Col Bashir hails from Faisalabad and he is being interrogated for keeping links with Hizbut Tahrir.
Nadeem Ahmad Shah, a former PAF pilot and a lawyer for the last several years, is an active member of Rawalpindi Bar.
Awais Ali Khan returned to Pakistan in 2002 after getting his Mechanical Engineer’s degree from the US. He is a Green Card holder and husband of an American spouse. He joined service with Air Weapons Complex run by Pakistan Army but two years before he resigned from his service. Since then he has been running his own factory.

Taliban-Pak army links deepening?

Pok Suicide Attack: 3 Soldiers Killed, 11 Hurt

TNN

NEW DELHI: More and more Pakistan army officers are being identified with extremist beliefs, as well as with links to Taliban and other related organisations which is the greater worry inside Pakistan.

In the most recent instance, one Colonel Shahid Bashir and two colleagues, serving army and air force officers, were arrested in [ ED. correction: Rawalpindi] Balochistan and court-martialled in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). They were charged with passing on information to guide terrorist attacks on military establishments inside Pakistan.

The charges were serious. The three officers are members of Hizbul Tehrir, an extremist Islamist group. They were accused of passing on information to the Taliban and later, two civilians were arrested trying to attack the Shamsi air base in Balochistan.

Pakistan has been battling the steady ingress by Taliban sentiments among its officer corps, even though its been long a fact that recruitment for the Pakistan army and the extremist organisations happen from the same provinces, sometimes same villages, making the connections much deeper than otherwise appreciated.

The seriousness of this came to light when a group calling itself Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan actually protested against the court-martial of these officers in Kotli, PoK.

This was unusual, specially since the TTP, for the first time, set off explosions in PoK, raising worries about Taliban infestation in a province that has been relatively free of them. In fact, a TTP spokesperson there said they had set off the explosions as a mark of protest.

The reason why their trial for treason was moved to PoK from Balochistan on January 15 was that under local laws, the accused cannot appeal the decision in the appellate court. Only PoK residents are allowed to do so. This means the military court would be the final arbiter.

Security sources here said that many other army officers, held for links with the Taliban or al-Qaida, have been declared deserters and brought to Kotli cantonment. Remember, even David Headley, alias Daood Gilani, and Tahawwur Rana, caught in the US for planning the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, were also graduates of a Pakistani military school in Hasan Abdal.

Former CIA official and author Robert Baer was quoted as saying that the Pakistan army and ISI links to Taliban militants are so deep that it was impossible to root them out. It is too deep in the army. They can’t root it out. The real question is, is this Taliban influence spreading to Punjab, Sindh and other parts of the country? That is the real worry, said Baer.

Seminar in India targeting the Balochistan

on 10th January 2010 there is a Seminar going to be held in India targetting the Balochistan in which some Pakistani,s are also invited. Main stream media is showing this seminar as a peace process between Pakistan and India in actuall it is to target Balochistan and Kashmir backed by Raw. this Seminar is to discuss autonomy for Kashmir and Balochistan.

the name of conference is India-Pakistan Conference-A Road map towards peace but on special request of India Raw topic of autonomy for Kashmir and Balochistan will also be discussed.  the purpose of this Seminar is to show comparison between the Indian occupied Kashmir freedom movement and Raw backed separatist movements in Balochistan. now i will share the name of the Pakistani’s that are invited in this Seminar. read these names carefully all of these people are those who speaks against Pakistan army, Kashmiri mujahideen, talks about reducing Pakistan defense budget, talks about friendship with Indians.

Iqbal Haider  Human right activist and PPP former minister.
Asma Jahangir Human right activist.
Malik Siraj Akbar anti Pakistan journalist also read in India.
Senator Hasil Khan Bazinjo.
Madeeha Gauhar theatr artist and Human rights activist
and some other people.

no official of Pakistan Government is invited. Mr Iqbal Haider has called this Seminar a good step for Peace between India Pakistan. but actually this Seminar is just to malign Pakistan, Pakistan army, Kashmiri,s and support terrorism in Balochistan.

Posted by ahsan at 12:07 PM

If They Serve As NATO’s Mercenaries, Brits Want to be Paid Like Mercenaries

[London can't afford to fight.  Soldiers continue to play the Great Game at a disadvantage.]

UK taking ‘unfair hit’ in Afghan war: Liam Fox

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, suggested German money should subsidise British forces in Afghanistan, as he called for reform of the 60-year-old Nato military alliance.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Fox claimed it was unfair that the countries doing most of the fighting were also footing the largest bills.
“Our forces are taking a disproportionate share of casualties and our taxpayers are also taking a disproportionate financial burden,” he said. “Some countries neither want to fight nor fund.”
Fox said Nato needed to be reformed so members such as Germany with few troops on the front line would be forced to make cash payments to the states bearing the brunt of the the fighting.
He revealed that he planned to work closely with France, a country which also bears a heavy fighting burden, to grasp the “Nato nettle”.
His outspoken remarks come as the Tories wrestle with the need to make huge cuts in the Ministry of Defence budget while ensuring that the war in Afghanistan is properly funded.
The Conservatives have already said they would cut the cost of the MoD’s bureaucracy by £1 billion, but some estimates suggest that a total of £5 billion may have to be axed from the departmental budget.
“Everybody knows we are going to be working in a very tight financial situation,” Fox said.
However, he said the big decisions on cuts would only emerge from a new strategic defence review, which will be launched after the election.
He added that the refusal by Gordon Brown’s government to provide the Tories with vital data meant it was impossible for them to formulate detailed plans in opposition.
“In none of the major equipment purchases do we know where the penalty clauses lie or what the cost would be of not doing things,” he said. “We can’t know until we are elected.”

Fox gave one example of how Labour had “reclassified” previously public information to sabotage Tory planning.
“We have regularly been asking the government where there are pinch points in skills such as engineers or medics that are limiting ability to operate efficiently,” he said. “The government had previously given us this information.
“This is nothing to do with national security. This is the government covering up its own incompetence.”
Scots-born Fox, 48, has had a seat on the Conservative front benches for the past 16 years — making him a veteran compared with David Cameron and George Osborne.
In 2005 he stood against Cameron for the leadership on a right-wing platform. There had been speculation that his days were numbered of his unfashionably hardline views until Cameron personally endorsed him at the last Conservative party conference.
He made it clear that he has repelled the most recent challenge to his authority — the recruitment of General Sir Richard Dannatt to the Tory team.
The plan announced last year for the former chief of the general staff to become a Tory peer and possibly a defence minister had been hatched without Fox’s knowledge.
Yesterday Fox insisted Dannatt was now just one voice among many. “We have a large number of advisers,” he said. “We are also capable of making up our own minds on issues.”
Fox indicated that the current forces’ chiefs had vetoed Dannatt’s appointment as a minister: “They think there would be a problem in the constitutional relationships if he were to hold a ministerial role.”
If Fox does become defence secretary, he will inherit a dysfunctional department where the three services — the army, navy and air force — are openly hostile to each other. As chief of the general staff, Dannatt was regarded by some as too “army-centric” and made no secret of his contempt for other services.
The shadow defence secretary went out of his way to soothe the fears of the navy chiefs that they might be sidelined. “We are a maritime nation,” he said. “We have to recognise the role that maritime forces will continue to have in the security of the United Kingdom.”
With the Chilcot inquiry on Iraq grabbing the headlines, few politicians want to raise the prospect of a new foreign war. However, Fox warned that the West needed to be ready to use force to combat the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.
“We may be at the early stages of what we may later view as the Iranian crisis,” he said.
Could he conceive of Britain joining in US-led air strikes on Iran? “It is absolutely imperative that Iran knows that everything is on the table.”
A doctor’s dilemma
Liam Fox has disclosed that when he practised as a GP he prescribed large doses of strong painkillers to terminally ill patients knowing it might cause them to die more quickly.
However, he insisted he followed standard medical procedure and said he was opposed to liberalising the laws on assisted suicide.
He said: “If you give [a patient] very big doses of morphine and you know that the chances are you make them more susceptible to pneumonia and to dying more quickly, that’s okay because the primary intention is to alleviate the suffering.
“I see that as being on one side of the moral and ethical line, but to carry out an action whose primary objective is the death of your patient I see as being on the other side of the line.
“It is a very painful issue for any of us who have been in that arena.
“I have always drawn the line between mainstream medical practice and euthanasia. I just can’t cross it.”(The Sunday Times)

Indian Intelligence Agencies–Suckers for the Matahari Angle

[SEE: The cyber security spy ring ; The CIA's Previous Man In India's RAW, Major Rabinder Singh] Indian intelligence revamp to tackle terror

Indian Intelligence agencies would soon have to opt for a drastic change in operational style to augment among others the ‘honey-trap’ strategy to lure terrorists. Keen to take up a major role to fight terror in South Asia and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, Indian security agencies are working on key suggestions and advisories from the USA, Intelligence sources said here.

According to US Intelligence advisories based on their experience of tracking Islamic militants in Afghan region and elsewhere, the government of India has been asked to work on modalities for “luring terrorists in honey-trap by preying on the weaknesses of the militants for pretty women and fairer sex”.

Sources said the centre is, however, in a dilemma on executing certain suggestions like the honey-trap modality.

“This is one area of intelligence operations, the Indian agencies have inherent weaknesses. For traditional and cultural reasons the honey-trap mechanism has not evolved much in Indian agencies,” sources said.

According to sources, the American sleuths also advised their New Delhi counterparts to work on specific areas to meet the new generation challenges from terror operatives.

US officials have pointed out that in recent times the Islamic militants especially in Af-Pak region have shown much improvement in making use of advanced technologies in giving slips to the security apparatus.

There have been instances like terror functionaries successfully concealing microphones and cameras in zipper of trousers. Some have even passed on ‘undetectable explosives’ in the form of digital watches.

The government of India has also been advised to ensure adequate health support for sleuths and informers as many US informers and agents working in that region have suffered ‘terror-fatigue’ and often suffered strokes and heart attacks, sources said.

By Nirendra Dev

The Statesman/Asia News Network

The Vanished Spies

JAYACHANDRAN EXCLUSIVE India’s premier intelligence agency RAW finally admits to being compromised, out spills a few turncoats RANJIT BHUSHAN ALSO IN THIS STORY  The wheel has come full circle at the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Already reeling under the impact of the Rabinder Singh episode—the senior RAW officer is suspected to have defected to the US—there may be more skeletons tumbling out now at India’s premier spy agency. For the first time, the firm has admitted that eight of its key operatives have gone missing—almost all while on critical assignments outside the country— since the agency’s creation in the late ’60s. The Rabinder Singh episode shook RAW out of its reverie. a backlash was expected…. Rabinder is the ninth such known man on the defectors’ list (accessed by Outlook). The file with the names is now on the desk of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Most of the cases go back a few decades but some names are likely to cause deep embarrassment in the spy community. Most of these operatives disappeared while on posting, relocating themselves to countries in North America and West Europe under assumed names and false passports. A number of them, it now turns out, were well-guarded ‘assets’ in the hands of foreign agencies, a euphemism for double agents, and are now green card holders in the United States or UK citizens. Now with the Rabinder Singh episode opening up a can of worms, RAW has been forced into damage control mode. Last fortnight, the PM ordered the file detailing the missing ex-RAW sleuths to be put up before him. Incidentally, that’s when intelligence officials sought to make a differentiation between those who had settled down in the US or UK after retirement—and coincidentally there are scores of them—and those who disappeared without a trace with important confidential documents and information. The list of nine belongs to the latter category. Prominent among the names is Sikandar Lal Malik, personal assistant of RAW founder and superspy, Ramnath Kao. Malik, say RAW sources, was privy to the top-secret decisions taken by Kao during the tumultuous early ’70s, including the plan to “liberate” Bangladesh. On a US posting, Malik disappeared one fine morning and is presumed to be living somewhere in that country now. His defection was a closely guarded secret for many years and is only now being acknowledged as a ‘blow’ to the agency’s reputation. According to sources, it took the agency several years to assess the damage caused: Malik had crucial information because most of Kao’s highly secret correspondence was handled by him. For foreign agencies, which otherwise had little access to Kao, the ‘winning over’ of Malik was a coup. This, because with Malik went a treasure trove of classified information, which may not have been known to anyone other than Kao himself and his boss, the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. Other operatives on the missing list: M.S. Sehgal, a senior field officer close to former RAW chief Girish Saxena. Disappeared while posted as attache in London in 1980. N.Y. Bhaskar, a former attache in Tokyo, managed a green card; was supposed to be liaisoning with the cia. Later, disappeared without a trace in the US. B.R. Bachhar, senior field officer, disappeared in London. As attache in Kathmandu, he was liaisoning with foreign intelligence agencies in the early ’80s. Major R.S. Soni, an undersecretary in RAW on the Pakistan desk at HQ, is believed to have escaped to Canada in the early ’80s. Three months after escape, salary was still being deposited in his account. Shamsher Singh Maharajkumar, an ex-IPS officer posted in Islamabad, Bangkok and Canada. Reportedly settled in Canada after retirement. He’s related to the royal family of Nabha in Punjab. Ashok Sathe, a former attache at Ulan Bator in Mongolia and the lone Indian counsellor in Khurramshahr, Iran. Even as his bosses were debating whether he had or had not defected to the cia, he vanished. He’s also suspected of arson—the RAW office in Khurramshahr burned down, destroying all crucial papers.Said to be living in California now. R. Wadhwa, personal assistant to Balkrishnan, former RAW No. 2, disappeared in London in the early ’90s. Even through all this, it took the latest Rabinder Singh episode to shake the RAW out of its reverie. Some form of a backlash has already started with all telephone numbers inside RAW headquarters changed without notice (for the first time in many years) and certain officials coming under the microscope. Senior intelligence officials, however, still play down the numbers. Says K.N. Daruwala, a former senior intelligence officer: “The RAW has been in place since 1968, and 7-8 defections in this long period is not too bad. And I doubt very much if the quality of information they passed on would have been too useful to user countries.” All the same, there is a view in security circles that the time has come for stocktaking to ‘weed’ out potential turncoats. But it’s easier said than done. Security analysts say in the absence of parliamentary scrutiny, there’s virtually no accountability in the RAW which has seen better days in the ’70s and early ’80s. But now with the upa regime clamouring for a probe, suddenly there is need for action. The PM is being briefed on the changes by national security advisor J.N. Dixit, who’s keen to ‘revamp’ RAW and other intelligence agencies. Top pmo sources say Dixit is concerned with the practice of RAW officials misusing the blanket authorisation to make contacts with foreign agencies. “Increasingly, there’s been mindless and indiscriminate liaisoning conducted under various covers (lately under the cover of fighting terror) and without any monitoring. As per rules, any official making ‘contact’ with a foreign agent has to immediately put it down on paper for his seniors,” says a RAW officer. Over the years, this clause has often been ignored, with deadly consequences. As a case in point, they point to Rabinder Singh’s government-funded visit to the US in 2002. He had no reason to travel there since the course was an exercise in countering hijackers. Not once was Singh asked what he, as an official on the Southeast Asian desk, was doing at an anti-hijacking and hostage-taking programme “because there is little history of such activities in the region assigned to him”, says an official. And this has been a growing trend in RAW, jostling for postings in North America and West Europe despite the regions not directly impacting India’s security concerns. In a confidential note to the government, Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Shukla brought out this anamoly. “There are numerous officers posted in the US, Netherlands, Germany, Japan and other western European countries, whereas in security-sensitive countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and uae, even the sanctioned strength is not being met.” Shukla says it is easy to understand why our RAW officials have overstaffed embassies in West Europe and North America. “All the good ambience, good life, good education for children—at taxpayers’ expense. This process must be reversed,” he says. Question is, how? pmo officials say an operation RAW clean-up has been launched. Dixit has already had two rounds of meeting with current RAW chief C.D. Sahay and other top officials there. In a sense, all this could not have come at a more opportune time. It has raised issues already being discussed quietly in the reclusive intelligence community. Now that it’s out of the closet, just how far is this upa government willing to go? Can it enforce a new, rigorous agenda in an organisation where everyone seems to be his own boss? And will it spur more names on to this list of nine?

Israel Wants Nuke Free Pass, Just Like India

[The Zionist state wants the same ill-gotten nuclear privileges that the Hindu Zionists have unlawfully obtained from the US and other world powers, with no questions asked about production at Dimona, like--why does a state with zero nuclear power generation and no admitted nuclear weapons need so much enriched uranium?  What does Israel do with all those tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, anyway?  SEE: Mordechai Vanunu PHOTOS OF DIMONA]

Israel needs nuclear energy

But we should hang on until 2030, a panel of experts finds.

Amiram Barkat

Nuclear energy is the long-term solution to Israel’s energy needs, a forum of energy experts has determined. The forum warns against reliance on natural gas as a main source of energy for power production. In a position paper prepared ahead of Tuesday’s Herzliya Conference session on planning Israel’s electricity economy for the year 2030, the experts state that renewable energy sources — sun, wind, and water — are too expensive and insufficiently reliable. The tenth Herzliya Conference of the Israel Democracy Institute will open tomorrow at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.”In strategic reliance on gas as a main source for producing energy there are considerable planning and operating problems,” the position paper says. “In general, generating electricity with gas is considered less reliable than generating it with coal.” The experts say that the gas transport system is vulnerable because it is “sensitive to leaks, to falls in pressure, to outbreaks of fire, and particularly to security incidents.”

On the other hand, the position paper states that there was a consensus among the professionals who took part in the discussion on the need to develop the capacity to produce electricity using nuclear energy. However, constructing a nuclear reactor for electricity production in Israel involves some large challenges. Israel is not capable of carrying out a project of this kind by itself, and it would therefore have to buy a reactor as an off-the-shelf product from one of only two manufacturers: Areva of France or Westinghouse on the US. These two companies are currently prevented from supplying the equipment and know-how for constructing a reactor because Israeli is not a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but the experts believe that “it is possible to reach an arrangement that will circumvent Israel’s non-membership of the treaty regime,” and cite the example of India. Several countries have signed cooperation agreements with India on nuclear energy despite the fact that India has not signed the NPT.

However, the experts hedge their findings and recommend postponing the use of nuclear energy as much as possible, until new technology, known as “fourth generation reactor technology”, matures. This technology is considered to be safer and to have less environmental impact, generating less nuclear waste. The technology is expected to be operational towards 2030. Until then, the experts propose raising the amount of electricity produced from existing sources through limited expansion of production using gas and coal, more efficient usage and installation of a smart grid, and additional use of renewable energy sources.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com – on January 31, 201

Launching the Private Network–(for Soliciting Funds and Running Guns Past Congress)

Launching the Private Network–

(for Soliciting Funds and Running Guns Past Congress)

lostchapter from Iran/Contra hearings