Citigroup to pay $75 million to settle SEC charges

By Maria Aspan

NEW YORK | Thu Jul 29, 2010 9:46pm EDT

Citigroup Inc (C.N) will pay $75 million to settle charges that it failed to disclose subprime exposure to investors in 2007, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Thursday.

The SEC also charged a Citigroup executive and a former chief financial officer of misrepresenting the bank’s exposure, although not with intentional misconduct. It was one of a very few cases in which financial executives have faced any kind of charges, civil or criminal, related to the 2008 credit meltdown.

Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) agreed to pay $550 million to settle civil fraud charges over how it marketed a subprime mortgage product. At the time, the SEC’s enforcement director said the agency was continuing to probe subprime deals across a wide variety of institutions.

It is unclear if he was referring specifically to the Citigroup probe, but the SEC in general has been looking at banks’ subprime misdeeds for years.

The comparatively small settlement against Citigroup came a full three years after the bank began understating its subprime exposure. To many analysts, it will prolong the financial sector’s pain.

“This is the type of stuff that erodes investor confidence,” said Matt McCormick, a portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Investment Counsel Inc.

It is also the type of stuff that feeds other lawsuits. Steven Singer, a plaintiffs’ attorney representing bondholders who are suing Citigroup on related charges, said the SEC’s settlement would be “very helpful” to his case.

Some analysts railed against the SEC’s actions.

“If the goal of the SEC is every two or three weeks to come out and say that there’s another financial company that’s done something wrong,” the agency will drive home the belief “that the financial system in the United States is rotten, that it’s run by crooks who create fraudulent products,” said Dick Bove, analyst at Rochdale Securities.

As investors wait for more regulatory shoes to drop, “the markets will continue to act in the volatile fashion that they are right now,” he said.

INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY

Citigroup understated its exposure by about $40 billion, the SEC said. The agency charged Citigroup with material omission of disclosure requirements.

Failing to disclose exposure is serious business to investors, who decide how much to pay for bank stocks in part by trying to figure out the real value of the company’s assets minus its liabilities.

Under the settlement, the bank did not admit or deny the allegations. The SEC has asked a federal judge to approve the agreement.

Citigroup spokesman Jon Diat said the bank was pleased that it had reached a deal with the SEC.

Former Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden, who left the bank in 2009, agreed to pay $100,000 under the settlement.

“This is the highest-ranking corporate officer to be yet named in the still-continuing investigation of the 2008-2009 crisis,” said John Coffee, law professor at Columbia.

Arthur Tildesley Jr, Citigroup’s former head of investor relations and current head of cross-marketing, agreed to pay $80,000.

Crittenden and Tildesley “were repeatedly provided with information about the full extent of Citigroup’s subprime exposure” during 2007, but both “helped draft and then approved” disclosures to investors that under-reported that exposure, the SEC said on Thursday.

Crittenden’s lawyer, John Carroll of Skadden Arps, said via email that the former CFO “did not admit or deny any liability” and “is pleased to have resolved this matter.”

Tildesley’s lawyer, Mark Stein at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, declined to comment and referred queries to Citigroup.

Diat called Crittenden “a highly valued senior officer” who “played a critical role in helping Citi navigate” the financial crisis. He said Tildesley is “a highly valued employee” who “is making significant contributions to the company.”

MISSING $40 BILLION

In the second and third quarters of 2007, Citigroup told investors that its subprime exposure was $13 billion or less, when in fact it was more than $50 billion, the SEC said. The $13 billion figure omitted two categories of subprime-backed assets totaling roughly $40 billion of exposure.

Citigroup did not disclose its true subprime exposure until November 2007. By the end of that year, it had posted a huge writedown on subprime assets. Its chief executive, Charles Prince, resigned, in large part because of the writedowns.

Citigroup’s bad bets on subprime and other assets eventually forced the government to provide $45 billion of capital to the bank across three rescues in 2008 and 2009. The government still owns an almost 18 percent stake in the bank.

Citigroup shares closed up 3 cents at $4.12 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday..

(Reporting by Maria Aspan; additional reporting by Dan Wilchins in New York and Emma Ashburn in Washington; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz, Maureen Bavdek, Matthew Lewis and Bernard Orr) Source

Considering how much the banks received in tax payer money seems to me a few of the executives should have went to jail and lost everything they own rather then the settlements, after all the taxpayers actually payed for the settlements. Now Didn’t they? What a sham. The criminals are still free. Now that is American justice for you. The Rich swindlers walk free.

Recent

Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

DoD Document Reveals Military Was Concerned About Gulf War Vets’ Exposure to Depleted Uranium in 1993

Another oil spill in Gulf of Mexico

The attack on the Gaza relief flotilla jeopardizes Israel itself

Nobel Peace Prizes ‘are being awarded illegally’

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

By Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy

July 28, 2010

With at least 25,000 people slaughtered in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel battle, three questions remain unanswered: Who is being killed, who is doing the killing and why are people being killed? This is apparently considered a small matter to US leaders in the discussions about failed states, narco-states and the false claim that violence is spilling across the border.

President Calderón has stated repeatedly that 90 percent of the dead are connected to drug organizations. The United States has silently endorsed this statement and is bankrolling it with $1.4 billion through Plan Mérida, the three-year assistance plan passed by the Bush administration in 2008. Yet the daily torrent of local press accounts from Ciudad Juárez makes it clear that most of the murder victims are ordinary Mexicans who magically morph into drug cartel members before their blood dries on the streets, sidewalks, vacant lots, pool halls and barrooms where they fall dead, riddled with bullets. Juárez is ground zero in this war: more than one-fourth of the 25,000 dead that the Mexican government admits to since December 2006 have occurred in this one border city of slightly over 1.5 million people, nearly 6,300 as of July 21, 2010. When three people attached to the US Consulate in Ciudad Juárez were killed in March this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the murders “the latest horrible reminder of how much work we have to do together.”

Just what is this work?

No one seems to know, but on the ground it is death. Calderón’s war, assisted by the United States, terrorizes the Mexican people, generates thousands of documented human rights abuses by the police and Mexican Army and inspires lies told by American politicians that violence is spilling across the border (in fact, it has been declining on the US side of the border for years).

We are told of a War on Drugs that has no observable effect on drug distribution, price or sales in the United States. We are told the Mexican Army is incorruptible, when the Mexican government’s own human rights office has collected thousands of complaints that the army robs, kidnaps, steals, tortures, rapes and kills innocent citizens. We are told repeatedly that it is a war between cartels or that it is a war by the Mexican government against cartels, yet no evidence is presented to back up these claims. The evidence we do have is that the killings are not investigated, that the military suffers almost no casualties and that thousands of Mexicans have filed affidavits claiming abuse, often lethal, by the Mexican army.

Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices.

This war gets personal. A friend calls late at night from Juárez and says if he is murdered before morning, be sure to tell his wife. It never occurs to him to call the police, nor does it occur to you.

A friend who is a Mexican reporter flees to the United States because the Mexican Army has come to his house and plans to kill him for writing a news story that displeases the generals. He is promptly thrown into prison by the Department of Homeland Security because he is considered a menace to American society.

On the Mexican side, a mother, stepfather and pregnant daughter are chased down on a highway in the Valle de Juárez, and shot in their car, while two toddlers watch. On the US side, a man receives a phone call and his father tells him, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dead.” He hears his sister pleading for her life, “Don’t kill me. No don’t kill me.” He thinks his niece and nephew are dead also, but they are taken to a hospital, sprayed with shattered glass. The little boy watched his mother die, her head blown apart by the bullets. A cousin waits in a parking lot surrounded by chainlink and razor-wire on the US side of the bridge for the bodies to be delivered so that he can bring them home. The next day, the family takes to the parking lots of two fast-food outlets in their hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico, for a carwash. Young girls in pink shorts and T-shirts wave hand-lettered signs. They will wash your car and accept donations to help bury their parents and sister, to buy clothes for two small orphans. “This was just a family,” says cousin Cristina, collecting donations in a zippered bag. She says they are in shock, the full impact of what happened has yet to sink in. So for now, they will raise the money they need to take care of the children. An American family.

Or, you visit the room where nine people were shot to death in August 2008 as they raised their arms to praise God during a prayer meeting. Forty hours later, flies buzz over what lingers in cracks in the tile floor and bloody handprints mark the wall. This was the scene of the first of several mass killings at drug rehab centers where at least fifty people have been massacred over the past two years in Juárez and Chihuahua City. An evangelical preacher who survived the slaughter that night said she saw a truckload of soldiers parked at the end of the street a hundred yards from the building and that the automatic rifle fire went on for fifteen minutes.

Or you talk with a former member of the Juárez cartel who is shocked to learn of a new cabinet appointment by President Calderón because he says he used to deliver suitcases of money to the man as payment from the Juárez cartel.

The claim that ninety percent of the dead are criminals seems at best to be self-delusion. In June 2010, El Universal, a major daily in Mexico City, noted that the federal government had investigated only 5 percent of the first 22,000 executions, according to confidential material turned over to the Mexican Senate by the Mexican Attorney General. What constituted an investigation was not explained.

On June 21, Cronica, another Mexico City paper, presented a National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) study that examined more than 5,000 complaints filed by Mexican citizens against the army. Besides incidents of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping and robbery, the report described scenes like the following: “June 1, 2007, in the community of La Joya de los Martinez, Sinaloa de Leyva: Members of the Army were camped at the edge of the highway, drinking alcoholic beverages. Two of them were inebriated and probably under the influence of some drug. They opened fire against a truck that drove along the road carrying eight members of the Esparza Galaviz family. One adult and two minors died…The soldiers arranged sacks of decomposing marijuana on the vehicle that had been attacked and killed one of their own soldiers, whose body was arranged at the crime scene to indicate that the civilian drivers had been the aggressors and had killed the soldier.”

The CNDH also names the army as responsible for the shooting deaths of Martin and Brayan Almanza Salazar, aged 9 and 5, on April 3, 2010, as they traveled to the beach in Matamoros with their family. The only thing noteworthy about these cases is that they ever became public knowledge. Many more victims and survivors remain silent—afraid to report what has happened to them to any Mexican official or news reporter.

Such incidents pass unnoticed in the US press and apparently do not capture the attention of our government. Nor does the fact that in the midst of what is repeatedly called a war against drug cartels by both the American and Mexican governments and press, Mexican soldiers seem immune to bullets. With over 8,000 Mexicans killed in 2009 alone, the army reported losses of thirty-five that year. According to Reporters Without Borders, a total of sixty-seven journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, while eleven others have gone missing since 2003. Mexico is now one of the most dangerous places in the world to be reporter. And possibly the safest place in the world to be a soldier.

When there is a noteworthy massacre, the Mexican government says it proves the drug industry is crumbling. When there is a period of relative peace, the Mexican government says it shows their policy is winning. On the night of July 15, a remote-controlled car bomb exploded in downtown Juárez, killing at least three people—a federal policeman, a kidnap victim dressed in a police uniform and used as a decoy and a physician who rushed to the scene from his private office to help dozens of people injured in the blast. A graffiti message attributed the blast to the Juárez cartel and claimed it as a warning to police who work for the Sinaloa cartel.

On July 20, the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, minimized the Juárez bombing, saying that it was not aimed indiscriminately at civilians and that it did not indicate any escalation in violence. He parroted the declaration of Mexican Attorney General Arturo Chávez that the motivation for the bombing is economic, not ideological, and that “we have no evidence in the country of narco-terrorism.” US Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual also indicated that this violence in Mexico, which also included a grenade attack on the US Consulate in Nuevo Laredo a few months ago, “is disturbing but has not reached the level of terrorism.” We are supposed to believe in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, but that they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism? This, despite numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives being used in recent attacks in the states of Michoacan, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other places in Mexico. And that “armed commandos” dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008.

No one asks or answers this question: How does such an escalation benefit the drug smuggling business which has not been diminished at all during the past three years of hyper-violence in Mexico? Each year, the death toll rises, each year there is no evidence of any disruption in the delivery of drugs to American consumers, each year the United States asserts its renewed support for this war. And each year, the basic claims about the war go unquestioned.

Let us make this simple: no one knows how many are dying, no one knows who is killing them and no one knows what role the drug industry has in these killings. There has been no investigation of the dead and so no one really knows whether they were criminals or why they died. There have been no interviews with heads of drug organizations and so no one really knows what they are thinking or what they are trying to accomplish.

It is difficult to have a useful discussion without facts, but it seems to be very easy to make policy without facts. We can look forward to fewer facts and more unquestioned and unsubstantiated government claims. Such as the response by General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, commander of the Joint Operation Chihuahua, to a 2008 report by El Diario de Juárez that one out of three Juárez citizens believed the army occupation of the city had accomplished little or nothing. “Those who feel this way, it is because their interests are affected or because they are paid by the narco-traffickers,” he said. “Who are these citizens?”

General Jorge Juárez Loera, the first commander of the Joint Operation Chihuahua, put it this way: “I would like to see reporters change their articles and instead of writing about one more murder victim, they should say, ‘one less criminal.’ ” Source

So who is behind the murder of these people the US and Mexican Governments. This is just a way to terrorize the Mexican people. There is no war on Drugs it is just a fabricated bunch of crap used to kill people.  If there was a real war on drugs do you think the US soldiers would be guarding the poppy field in Afghanistan.  People, drugs on the streets are good for governments, drugged up people are easier to manipulate. It also gives the governments scape goats to use to steal more tax dollars for scrupulous purposes.  The money is then used for well obviously the Military, in other words war. Profits are made from the sale of weapons etc etc.

The so called drug war is a scam. Always was and always will be. How much you want to bet a lot or all of the money used for the Mexican Military is spent in the US. Weapons manufacturers benefit from Mexico’s fake drug war.  US tax dollars again making Americas rich, richer.

Recent

DoD Document Reveals Military Was Concerned About Gulf War Vets’ Exposure to Depleted Uranium in 1993

Another oil spill in Gulf of Mexico

The attack on the Gaza relief flotilla jeopardizes Israel itself

Nobel Peace Prizes ‘are being awarded illegally’

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

DoD Document Reveals Military Was Concerned About Gulf War Vets’ Exposure to Depleted Uranium in 1993

“The VA does not listen to expert scientists. The VA does not even listen to Congress,” said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) in his testimony. “Two decades of inaction have already passed. Gulf War veterans urgently want to avoid the four decades of endless suffering endured by our Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange.”

By: Mike Ludwig,

July 28 2010

For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans.

But a little-known 1993 Defense Department document written by then-Brigadier Gen. Eric Shinseki, now the secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), shows that the Pentagon was concerned about DU contamination and the agency had ordered medical testing on all personnel that were exposed to the toxic substance.

The memo, under the subject line, “Review of Draft to Congress – Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army — Action Memorandum,” makes some small revisions to the details of these three orders from the DoD:

1. Provide adequate training for personnel who may come in contact with DU contaminated equipment.

2. Complete medical testing of all personnel exposed to DU in the Persian Gulf War.

3. Develop a plan for DU contaminated equipment recovery during future operations.

The VA, however, never conducted the medical tests, which may have deprived hundreds of thousands of veterans from receiving medical care to treat cancer and other diseases that result from exposure to DU.

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center recently reported that ten years of data confirm that service members tend to have higher rates of certain cancers compared to civilians, according to the Army Times. While researchers suspected that service members are diagnosed with cancer more often and at a younger age because they have guaranteed access to health care and mandatory exams, the data does not explain the disparities in diagnosis among branches of the military. For example, the rate of lung cancer among sailors is twice that of other branches, while Marines have much lower cancer rates across the board.

On Tuesday, the VA’s ongoing failure to treat and diagnose Gulf War related illnesses came up during a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee hearing where a veterans advocacy group urged Shinseki to undertake comprehensive research on the correlation between chronic illness and exposure to DU in munitions during the Gulf War.

Armed with Shinseki’s August 19, 1993 memo, Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), said the VA, and Shinseki in particular, have “a rare opportunity for a second chance.”

“In military terms, VCS asks VA for a ceasefire,” said Paul Sullivan, the executive director for VCS. “VCS urges VA leadership to stop and listen to our veterans before time runs out, as VA is killing veterans slowly with bureaucratic delays and mismanaged research that prevent us from receiving treatments or benefits in a timely manner.”

Sullivan, himself a Gulf War veteran, told the subcommittee that the VA has refused to listen to scientists and veterans who are concerned about DU, leaving thousands of veterans suffering from chronic illnesses related to the conflict unsure if they will ever receive a solid diagnosis to justify the benefits and treatment they need.

Of the 697,000 men and woman who served in Gulf War operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield between 1990 and 1991, about 250,000 suffer from symptoms collectively known as “Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses.” The symptoms include fatigue, weakness, gastrointestinal problems, cognitive dysfunction, sleep disturbances, persistent headaches, skin rashes, respiratory conditions and mood changes, according to the VA.

The VCS also petitioned Shinseki to investigate the 2009 termination of a $75 million research project on Gulf War illnesses at the University of Texas medical center. Last year the VCS filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records of the “internal sabotage” of Gulf War Veterans Illnesses research and the intentional delaying of research and treatment, according to Sullivan. The VA has yet to release any documents about the impeded research, and VCS filed a FOIA appeal on June 29.

Sullivan said the VCS simply wants the government to support independent testing on veterans exposed to DU, but the Department of Defense prefers a “don’t look, don’t find policy.”

“As a Gulf War veteran, I have watched too many of my friends die without answers, without treatment, and without benefits,” Sullivan said. “In a few cases, veterans completed suicide due to Gulf War illness and the frustration of dealing with VA.”

Sullivan testified as disturbing reports have emerged in recent months from Fallujah, Iraq, about the skyrocketing rates of birth defects and cancer,  which are being blamed on DU-laced bombs and munitions used by US and British forces during a brutal coalition assault on the city in 2004. Iraqi human rights officials are reportedly planning to file a lawsuit.

DU is a dense metal added to munitions and bombs to pierce tanks and armor, and the military seems to chose unrestricted use of the radioactive substance over its soldiers’ safety. Sullivan told Truthout that original medical tests ordered in a 1993 memo, which also called for personnel to be trained in dealing with contaminated equipment, were canceled after a training video scared soldiers.

“It was pulled after [the training video] was seen by some soldiers who became upset when they saw soldiers in moon suits holding Geiger counters, and the military realized that the training could present a problem in the battlefield where soldiers need to disregard exposure issues while trying to kill the enemy,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said that the DU “follow-up” program the VA consistently references was inadequate as it consisted of sporadic studies on only a small fraction of estimated 400,000 veterans exposed to the radioactive heavy metal.

“The VA does not listen to expert scientists. The VA does not even listen to Congress,” Sullivan said in his testimony. “Two decades of inaction have already passed. Gulf War veterans urgently want to avoid the four decades of endless suffering endured by our Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange.”

Sullivan said it took 40 years and an act of Congress to fund and sanction independent studies that proved the VA was responsible for providing benefits to soldier suffering from Agent Orange-related diseases.

The VA now recognizes that exposure to Agent Orange, an herbicide sprayed across Vietnam to kill foliage and expose guerrilla fighters, has plagued veterans with several deadly diseases and disorders.

VCS also advocated for the research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that became the foundation of new PTSD rules, making it easier for veterans to receive benefits.

Last week, the VA announced $2.8 million worth of research on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, a sum Sullivan called “paltry.” A VA press release announcing the research does not mention DU. The release references a recent Institute of Medicine report that identified the quarter million veterans affected by various symptoms associated with Gulf War illness, which “cannot be ascribed to any psychiatric disorder and likely result from genetic and environmental factors, although the data are not strong enough to draw conclusions about specific causes.”

Popular medical science holds that kidney damage is the primary health problem associated with exposure to high amounts of DU. The heavy metal is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium, and is also linked to lung cancer in some cases and leukemia in even fewer cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Some critics have claimed that the WHO and governments have suppressed links between DU and cancer.

The debate over the use of DU in conventional warfare will rage on as the Fallujah fallout continues, but according to Sullivan, there is only one way for thousands of Gulf War veterans at home to know the truth and receive the relief they deserve.

“After 20 years of waiting, we refuse to wait on more empty promises from VA. The first step is for Secretary Shinseki and Chief of Staff Gingrich to immediately clean house of VA bureaucrats who have so utterly and miserably failed our veterans for too long,” said Sullivan, vowing to petition Congress if the VA refuses to respond. “Our waiting must end now.” Source

Related

Soldiers, Mental illness, Drugs and Suicide

Another Gulf War Syndrome? Burn Pits

Depleated Uranium Information

War “Pollution” Equals Millions of Deaths

The Brits do not treat their veterans well either.

Traumatised British troops get payout pittance after Afghanistan and Iraq

Canadian Forces not tracking incidence of brain injuries, hearing loss

Wars are not to help anyone just for world domination and Soldiers are nothing but cannon fodder. Leaders send them off to war and could care less if they are killed,maimed or sick when they return home. They are treated like garbage just to be thrown in the trash.

200,000 War Veterans homeless in US

US-NATO Using Military Might To Control World Energy Resources

More than half of British public against UK mission in Afghanistan

(Afghanistan 1) A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

Did Contractor Expose Troops To Toxin?

These guys get away with  murder,  authorizing torture and sending soldiers to die for Corporations interests and personal profits due from war. They are traitors to their country and are responsible for every death due to the wars they authorized. So they can murder millions of people and walk away rich and untouched by law. How sick. They are gutless, cowards and should be in prison for the rest of their lives as well as those who helped orchestrated the fabricated lies to start wars. They an anyone one who started unjust wars should be in prison. They are not doing this to protect Americans or help people in war torn country have a better life. They could care less who dies. They do not work for the American people they work for personal  profits and corporations.

Senate Report Links Bush to Detainee Homicides; Media Yawns

Cheney admits authorizing detainee’s torture

US-NATO Using Military Might To Control World Energy Resources

U.S. acknowledges it held 12 juveniles at Guantanamo Bay prison

• Devastation in Iraq
• Images if Iraq Democracy
• Images of Iraq Falluja massacres Made by USA
• Images of Iraq War Crimes
• Iraq Freedom!!!
• Iraq USA did it in Najaf, Baghdad, Kufa 08/2004
• Iraq War Images
• Iraq: USA Terror On Al Falluja ( 7 days = 850 killed more than 1500 wounded )
• Afghan Massacre Convoy Of Death

Why: War in Iraq and Afghanistan

‘Peace won’t cost the earth’ but it might save the environment

Recent

Another oil spill in Gulf of Mexico

The attack on the Gaza relief flotilla jeopardizes Israel itself

Nobel Peace Prizes ‘are being awarded illegally’

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Another oil spill in Gulf of Mexico

July 28 2010

A new oil spill has been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, nearly 100 days after the BP-run oil rig disaster, which caused the worst environmental crisis in US history.

The fresh spill off Louisiana’s coast occurred as a tugboat struck an abandoned well in Barataria Bay in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The collision sent a plume of oil and gas 100ft into the air. A mile-long slick has since spread across the area, which is surrounded by wildlife-rich wetlands.

Oil spill response operations have already begun and rescue crews have set up a two-mile-long perimeter around the site to protect vessels and mariners from the spill.

Admiral Thad Allen, the US Coast Guard chief, said Tuesday “response crews were able to take advantage of ‘significant resources’, vessels of opportunity, skimming equipment and boom already in the area to work on the Gulf oil spill.”

The well, which was once owned by Cedyco Corporation, was abandoned in November 2008.

The spill is at least the third leak in the area since the BP oil catastrophe began on April 20, after an explosion left 11 people killed in the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Three months into the oil spill, the London-based BP has finally managed to place a containment cap over the well, temporarily halting the gushing oil.

However, the leak is expected to continue until mid-August when the company will complete the building of two relief wells. Source

BP may never get the leak totally fixed. Seems they have done a pretty sloppy job.  That’s a lot of oil in the ocean and a lot of damage to the environment. Now another oil leak and who is responsible for this one we must ask ourselves?

Blowout: BP’s deadly oil rig disaster

Update on the Oil Spills—All of Them

By Jeffrey Kluger

July 28, 2010

Michigan is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of oil spills. But as of Monday, add the state to the list of those laying booms, scrambling cleanup teams and otherwise trying to stanch the flow of thick crude leaking from a busted oil pipe. And add that spill  to yet another new gusher the Gulf of Mexico—this one just 65 miles south of New Orleans—the third such incident to occur on a drilling platform other than BP’s lost Deepwater Horizon since that rig exploded and sank on April 20.

If you’re tempted to write your senator about the sudden spate of  spills, don’t bother. The new leaks are occurring just days after Harry Reid and his timorous Democratic majority walked away from their year-in-the-making energy bill, under threat of filibuster from Mitch McConnell and his snarling GOP minority.

The Michigan incident has a lot of similarities to the BP disaster—albeit writ small. Once again it’s an international company that’s to blame—this time Canada’s Enbridge Energy Partners. Once again, it’s a body of water at risk—this time the Kalamazoo River and perhaps Morrow Lake, which lies in the path of the spill. And once again, a CEO is promising to make things right.

“Our intention is to return your community and the waterways to their original state,” announced Enbridge chief Patrick Daniel. Once again too, the company is so far underachieving. Daniel toured the spill site with Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and conceded that the clean-up effort so far is “anemic.”

The spill came from a rupture in a 30-in. diameter pipe that on a typical day carries 190,000 bbls (8 million gal.) of oil between Indiana and Ontario. The breach was sealed quickly, but not before  19,500 bbls (800,000 gal.) of crude got away. Residents of nearby homes  were evacuated, locals were warned against approaching the spill or inhaling its fumes, and workers deployed 14,000 ft. of boom—with 45,000 more on hand—to contain a river slick that has so far spread 20 miles.

Things have not been brought so readily under control in the Gulf, where a tugboat struck a shallow-water well in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay on Tuesday morning, rupturing the wellhead and sending water, oil and gas spewing into the air. The modest depth of the water should make the spill much easier to stop than  BP’s, but for now the shower of crude is continuing to climb 100 ft. in the air, creating a comparatively small slick that’s being  contained by 6,000 ft. of boom. This is the second beating Barataria Bay has taken this summer, having just been cleaned of BP oil last week.

The Gulf’s other two recent leaks are also comparatively minor—and comparatively common—and would not be making news at all if not for the BP elephant that’s been in the room for more than 100 days now. But that’s just the point. The only way to slake our thirst for oil is to continue to engage in industrial practices that are inherently dirty, unreliable and extremely dangerous. The only way to avoid the problem is either to invent a magic bullet that satisfies all our energy demands spotlessly and cheaply or to count on our legislators to cowboy up and pass the tough legislation necessary to price carbon, cap emissions and encourage the development of clean renewable technologies like wind and solar. For now, the safer bet is on  the magic. Source

Recent

The attack on the Gaza relief flotilla jeopardizes Israel itself

Nobel Peace Prizes ‘are being awarded illegally’

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

The attack on the Gaza relief flotilla jeopardizes Israel itself

Israel – What Next

July 28 2010

- The IDF has not become more competent in recent years. By almost all accounts—including the Israeli government’s own commission of inquiry—it performed abysmally in the 2006 Lebanon war. … Finally, there is the danger that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could have terrible consequences for the United States. The last thing America needs is another war with an Islamic country, especially one that could easily interfere in its ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the Pentagon opposes striking Iran, whether with Israeli or U.S. forces. But Netanyahu might do it anyway if he thinks it would be good for Israel, even if it were bad for the United States. -

By John J. Mearsheimer  in the American Conservative

Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state.

The bungled assault on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the flotilla, shows once again that Israel is addicted to using military force yet unable to do so effectively. One would think that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would improve over time from all the practice. Instead, it has become the gang that cannot shoot straight.

The IDF last scored a clear-cut victory in the Six Day War in 1967; the record since then is a litany of unsuccessful campaigns. The War of Attrition (1969-70) was at best a draw, and Israel fell victim to one of the great surprise attacks in military history in the October War of 1973. In 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon and ended up in a protracted and bloody fight with Hezbollah. Eighteen years later, Israel conceded defeat and pulled out of the Lebanese quagmire. Israel tried to quell the First Intifada by force in the late 1980s, with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin telling his troops to break the bones of the Palestinian demonstrators. But that strategy failed and Israel was forced to join the Oslo Peace Process instead, which was another failed endeavor.

The IDF has not become more competent in recent years. By almost all accounts—including the Israeli government’s own commission of inquiry—it performed abysmally in the 2006 Lebanon war. The IDF then launched a new campaign against the people of Gaza in December 2008, in part to “restore Israel’s deterrence” but also to weaken or topple Hamas. Although the mighty IDF was free to pummel Gaza at will, Hamas survived and Israel was widely condemned for the destruction and killing it wrought on Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, the Goldstone Report, written under UN auspices, accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Earlier this year, the Mossad murdered a Hamas leader in Dubai, but the assassins were seen on multiple security cameras and were found to have used forged passports from Australia and a handful of European countries. The result was an embarrassing diplomatic row, with Australia, Ireland, and Britain each expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Given this history, it is not surprising that the IDF mishandled the operation against the Gaza flotilla, despite having weeks to plan it. The assault forces that landed on the Mavi Marmara were unprepared for serious resistance and responded by shooting nine activists, some at point-blank range. None of the activists had their own guns. The bloody operation was condemned around the world—except in the United States, of course. Even within Israel, the IDF was roundly criticized for this latest failure.

These ill-conceived operations have harmful consequences for Israel. Failures leave adversaries intact and make Israeli leaders worry that their deterrent reputation is being undermined. To rectify that, the IDF is turned loose again, but the result is usually another misadventure, which gives Israel new incentives to do it again, and so on. This spiral logic, coupled with Israel’s intoxication with military force, helps explain why the Israeli press routinely carries articles predicting where Israel’s next war will be.

Israel’s recent debacles have also damaged its international reputation. Respondents to a 2010 worldwide opinion poll done for the BBC said that Israel, Iran, and Pakistan had the most negative influence in the world; even North Korea ranked better. More worrying for Israel is that its once close strategic relationship with Turkey has been badly damaged by the 2008-09 Gaza war and especially by the assault on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship filled with Turkish nationals. But surely the most troubling development for Israel is the growing chorus of voices in the United States who say that Israel’s behavior is threatening American interests around the world, to include endangering its soldiers. If that sentiment grows, it could seriously harm Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Life as an Apartheid State

The flotilla tragedy highlights another way in which Israel is in deep trouble. Israel’s response makes it obvious that its leaders are not interested in allowing the Palestinians to have a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank, but instead are bent on creating a “Greater Israel” in which the Palestinians are confined to a handful of impoverished enclaves.

Israel insists that its blockade is solely intended to keep weapons out of Gaza. Hardly anyone would criticize Israel if this were true, but it is not. The real aim of the blockade is to punish the people of Gaza for supporting Hamas and resisting Israel’s efforts to maintain Gaza as a giant open-air prison. Of course, there was much evidence that this was the case before the debacle on the Mavi Marmara. When the blockade began in 2006, Dov Weisglass, a close aide to Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, said, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” And the Gaza onslaught 18 months ago was designed to punish the Gazans, not enforce a weapons embargo. The ships in the flotilla were transporting humanitarian aid, not weapons for Hamas, and Israel’s willingness to use deadly force to prevent a humanitarian aid convoy from reaching Gaza makes it abundantly clear that Israel wants to humiliate and subdue the Palestinians, not live side-by-side with them in separate states.

Collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza is unlikely to end anytime soon. Israel’s leaders have shown little interest in lifting the blockade or negotiating sincerely. The sad truth is that Israel has been brutalizing the Palestinians for so long that it is almost impossible to break the habit. It is hardly surprising that Jimmy Carter said last year, “the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than human beings.” They are, and they will be for the foreseeable future.

Consequently, there is not going to be a two-state solution. Instead, Gaza and the West Bank will become part of a Greater Israel, which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Israelis and their American supporters invariably bristle at this comparison, but that is their future if they create a Greater Israel while denying full political rights to an Arab population that will soon outnumber the Jewish population in the entirety of the land. In fact, two former Israeli prime ministers—Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak—have made this very point. Olmert went so far as to argue, “as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He’s right, because Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state. Like racist South Africa, it will eventually evolve into a democratic bi-national state whose politics will be dominated by the more numerous Palestinians. But that process will take many years, and during that time, Israel will continue to oppress the Palestinians. Its actions will be seen and condemned by growing numbers of people and more and more governments around the world. Israel is unwittingly destroying its own future as a Jewish state, and doing so with tacit U.S. support.

America’s Albatross

The combination of Israel’s strategic incompetence and its gradual transformation into an apartheid state creates significant problems for the United States. There is growing recognition in both countries that their interests are diverging; indeed this perspective is even garnering attention inside the American Jewish community. Jewish Week, for example, recently published an article entitled “The Gaza Blockade: What Do You Do When U.S. and Israeli Interests Aren’t in Synch?” Leaders in both countries are now saying that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is undermining U.S. security. Vice President Biden and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, both made this point recently, and the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset in June, “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

It is easy to see why. Because the United States gives Israel so much support and U.S. politicians routinely laud the “special relationship” in the most lavish terms, people around the globe naturally associate the United States with Israel’s actions. Unfortunately, this makes huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world furious with the United States for supporting Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. That anger in turn helps fuel terrorism against America. Remember that the 9/11 Commission Report, which describes Khalid Sheik Muhammad as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” concludes that his “animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” Osama bin Laden’s hostility toward the United States was fuelled in part by this same concern.

Popular anger toward the United States also threatens the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, key U.S. allies who are frequently seen as America’s lackeys. The collapse of any of these regimes would be a big blow to the U.S. position in the region; however, Washington’s unyielding support for Israel makes these governments weaker, not stronger. More importantly, the rupture in Israel’s relationship with Turkey will surely damage America’s otherwise close relationship with Turkey, a NATO member and a key U.S. ally in Europe and the Middle East.

Finally, there is the danger that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could have terrible consequences for the United States. The last thing America needs is another war with an Islamic country, especially one that could easily interfere in its ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the Pentagon opposes striking Iran, whether with Israeli or U.S. forces. But Netanyahu might do it anyway if he thinks it would be good for Israel, even if it were bad for the United States.

Dark Days Ahead for the Lobby

Israel’s troubled trajectory is also causing major headaches for its American supporters. First, there is the matter of choosing between Israel and the United States. This is sometimes referred to as the issue of dual loyalty, but that term is a misnomer. Americans are allowed to have dual citizenship—and in effect, dual loyalty—and this is no problem as long as the interests of the other country are in synch with America’s interests. For decades, Israel’s supporters have striven to shape public discourse in the United States so that most Americans believe the two countries’ interests are identical. That situation is changing, however. Not only is there now open talk about clashing interests, but knowledgeable people are openly asking whether Israel’s actions are detrimental to U.S. security.

The lobby has been scrambling to discredit this new discourse, either by reasserting the standard argument that Israel’s interests are synonymous with America’s or by claiming that Israel—to quote a recent statement by Mortimer Zuckerman, a key figure in the lobby—“has been an ally that has paid dividends exceeding its costs.” A more sophisticated approach, which is reflected in an AIPAC-sponsored letter that 337 congresspersons sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March, acknowledges that there will be differences between the two countries, but argues that “such differences are best resolved quietly, in trust and confidence.” In other words, keep the differences behind closed doors and away from the American public. It is too late, however, to quell the public debate about whether Israel’s actions are damaging U.S. interests. In fact, it is likely to grow louder and more contentious with time.

This changing discourse creates a daunting problem for Israel’s supporters, because they will have to side either with Israel or the United States when the two countries’ interests clash. Thus far, most of the key individuals and institutions in the lobby have sided with Israel when there was a dispute. For example, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu have had two big public fights over settlements. Both times the lobby sided with Netanyahu and helped him thwart Obama. It seems clear that individuals like Abraham Foxman, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, and organizations like AIPAC are primarily concerned about Israel’s interests, not America’s.

This situation is very dangerous for the lobby. The real problem is not dual loyalty but choosing between the two loyalties and ultimately putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of America. The lobby’s unstinting commitment to defending Israel, which sometimes means shortchanging U.S. interests, is likely to become more apparent to more Americans in the future, and that could lead to a wicked backlash against Israel’s supporters as well as Israel.

The lobby faces yet another challenge: defending an apartheid state in the liberal West is not going to be easy. Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Israel has become like white-ruled South Africa—and that day is not far off—support for Israel inside the American Jewish community is likely to diminish significantly. The main reason is that apartheid is a despicable political system that is fundamentally at odds with basic American values as well as core Jewish values. For sure there will be some Jews who will defend Israel no matter what kind of political system it has. But their numbers will shrink over time, in large part because survey data shows that younger American Jews feel less attachment to Israel than their elders, which makes them less inclined to defend Israel blindly.

The bottom line is that Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state over the long term because it will not be able to depend on the American Jewish community to defend such a reprehensible political order.

Assisted Suicide

Israel is facing a bleak future, yet there is no reason to think that it will change course anytime soon. The political center of gravity in Israel has shifted sharply to the right and there is no sizable pro-peace political party or movement. Moreover, it remains firmly committed to the belief that what cannot be solved by force can be solved with greater force, and many Israelis view the Palestinians with contempt if not hatred. Neither the Palestinians nor any of Israel’s immediate neighbors are powerful enough to deter it, and the lobby will remain influential enough over the next decade to protect Israel from meaningful U.S. pressure.

Remarkably, the lobby is helping Israel commit national suicide while also doing serious damage to American security interests. Voices challenging this tragic situation have grown slightly more numerous in recent years, but the majority of political commentators and virtually all U.S. politicians seem blissfully ignorant of where this is headed, or unwilling to risk their careers by speaking out.
__________________________________________

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Source

Israel harms itself all the time this is nothing new. Seems they want everyone to hate them. They certainly go out of their way to make people hate what they do. They do some extremely horrid things.

Stealing body parts from people.

Torturing people including children.

Throwing thousands of Palestinians in prisons including children and Israelis who refuse to go to war or protest against Israels actions.

Radiating Jewish children.

Experimenting with radiation on their own people.

Using weapons of mass destruction on Palestinians or their neighbours that will also kill their own people and those in neighbouring countries.

Starving innocent people to achive a foolish political agenda.

Assiting the US in horrid wars as a funnel tunnel for money and weapons.

Israel is a rouge state and an Apartheid state. They helped South Africa create their Apartheid state as well.

Assassinations. Starting wars. Attacking the USS Liberty ETC.

Using terroist ideologies to take Palestine away from the Palestinian people.

Israel is not just a threat to the US it is a threat to the world. They love war. They just adore war.

Their history speaks for itself. Unfortunately most people don’t know all the horrid things they have done. What a shame.

Those who speak out against what they do and attempt to bring the truth to the fore front are demonized and terrorized.

Those who attempt to defend the Palestinians many times are killed by the Israelis as in the case of Rachel Corrie.

Children and others who protest peacefully are many times shot, injured or killed.

Wage war not to defend itself, but to simply attempt to prove they are more powerful.

Hamas did not break the ceasefire in 2008 Israel did.

Gaza (1): A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Jews around the world who fail to see the light and  blindly support Israel, obviously do not see the danger Israel posses, no only to the world at large, but to all Jews world wide. To be so blind is rather sad. One has to wonder how anyone could be so brainwashed.

There is enough evidence and history to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, Israel is dangerous.

These are just a few stories about Israel. These are a mere tip of a gigantic iceberg. There are more in my Archives.

Foreign control of large swathes of the Sinai Peninsula obtained through fraud and Israeli involvement

Israel And Apartheid: By People Who Knew Apartheid

Fake Al Qaeda, Fake Passports, Fake planes, Fake Hijackers

Haaretz Threatened for Exposing Israeli Assassination Cover-Up

IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank

Arrest of Israeli officer leading organ trafficking ring

Israeli troops attack protesters injuring and killing Again!

The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Rachel Corrie’s parents Get Nasty Letter from professor at Haifa University

Dubai police chief to seek Netanyahu arrest

Israel “blackmails Gaza’s patients to turn them into collaborators”

Amir, ten years old, abducted by Israeli soldiers from his bed

“This Time We Went Too Far” Truth and Consequences in the Gaza Invasion

E-book on Jewish National Fund’s role in colonization of Palestine

Israel on Trial – The Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Children of Gaza are Suffering, Scarred, Trapped

Full Israeli  El Al flight took off on 9/11 from JFK to Tel Aviv

Mossad using Spanish passport Arrested in Algeria

British MPs call for review of arms export to Israel

Australia: Fraser calls for expulsion of Israeli diplomats

Israel to Allow Shoes into Gaza Strip After Three Year Ban

UK warns of Israel travel amid passport scandal

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Israel floods Gaza villages, displacing a hundred families

US/Israeli Charity uses little Palestinian Childs photo to raise money for Israel’s Hungry

Turkey, Lebanon lash out at Israeli Violation of airspace

Gaza sees more newborns of malformation

Israeli war crimes: Soldiers admit to deliberate killing of Gaza civilians

Slavery and Human Trafficking Crimes

Jewish town, Mitzpeh Kamon, won’t let Arab build home on his own land

Israeli settlers attack mosque in West Bank

Jewish lobby wages war on Christmas trees and all symbols of Christianity

Israeli Occupation Authorities Deny Gaza Christians Permission to Travel to Bethlehem at Christmas

“We will have to kill them all”: Israeli Effie Eitam

West Bank Rabbi: Jews can kill Gentiles who threaten Israel including Children and even Babies

The Eviction Of Palestinian Families Continue, When they want a home the Israeli’s just steal it

UN Calls for Israel to Open Crossing for Goods

A Palestinian student has been handcuffed, blindfolded and forcibly expelled to the Gaza

Recent

Nobel Peace Prizes ‘are being awarded illegally’

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

Nobel Peace Prizes ‘are being awarded illegally’

Norwegian author claims the committee behind the coveted award routinely violates the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will

By Hugh O’Shaughnessy

July 25 2010

Can we have our Nobel Peace Prize back, please? We got most of our decisions wrong. We should have laid much more emphasis on abolishing the military and outlawing wars, but we didn’t. Such is the message about to go out to the more undeserving winners of one of the world’s most coveted awards.

More than half the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded since 1946 have been awarded illegally, says Fredrik Heffermehl, a Norwegian lawyer and peace activist, because they do not follow the expressed will of the millionaire inventor of dynamite. He says all but one of 10 prizes awarded since 1999 are illegitimate under Norwegian and Swedish law.

Mr Heffermehl’s verdict, which caused controversy when it was set out in his book Nobels Vilje (Nobel’s Will) published in Norwegian in 2008, is likely to stir up passionate discussion next month when Greenwood Press publishes Picking Up the Peaces: Why the Nobel Peace Prize Violates Alfred Nobel’s Will and How to Fix It.

Mr Heffermehl’s book emphasises that Nobel’s will concentrated on rewarding the struggle to end wars through an international order based on law and abolition of military forces. Few of the recent winners can be seen to have engaged in that struggle. Among those awards he names as illegitimate are: Mother Teresa (1979); Lech Walesa (1983); Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin (1994); Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi (2003); Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai (2004); and Al Gore (2007).

The will, dated 27 November 1895, disbursed large sums to various relatives, friends and servants before leaving the bulk of the estate to establishing the awards that bear his name. The relevant sentence setting out the terms of what he called a prize for the “champions of peace” is: “One part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Bruce Kent, a member of the Movement for the Abolition of War, said: “Nobel’s Will is a revelation. It is quite clear that over many years the Nobel prize committee has frequently made the award on the basis of what it would have liked Nobel to intend, not on what he clearly did intend. If the executors of any ordinary will did this they would either be sued or prosecuted.” Source

I guess Obamas Peace prize is also illegitimate as well, he has done nothing but increase war. Create more military bases and added more soldiers to wars, more money for wars as well. No Peace prize for that. Obama has done nothing to deserve the Nobel Peace prize. I thought it was absolutely foolish giving it to him.  Nobel must be rolling over in his grave over that one. Can we have our Nobel Peace Prize back, please?

Recent

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

US House Vote on Afghan War Funding a Disgrace

By Jason Ditz

July 27, 2010

In a 308-114 vote Tuesday the House of Representatives ignored a massive influx of new evidence underscoring the futility of the conflict in Afghanistan, approving a massive new appropriation of emergency war funding.

The vote came just two days after the world was treated to a massive leak of some 92,000 classified documents. The documents provided hundreds of incidents, in excruciating detail, showing just how poorly the war has been going, how many civilians have been killed, and how aware of both of these facts the military has been, despite its official claims to the contrary.

Though a number of the revelations that came to light were hardly secret to the analysts keeping a close eye on the Afghan War, the leaks have brought the grim realities of the war to the public in ways that nothing before ever could. Allegations of CIA assassination teams and massive, unreported civilian casualties are all well and good, but now having the actual documents detailing the events makes them impossible to ignore.

And while this is true for the media, it is doubly so for the House of Representatives, which after last Thursday’s rebuke from the Senate faced an all-or-nothing vote to provide some $33 billion in emergency war funds in order to maintain the conflict for the rest of the fiscal year.

Indeed, the most damning revelation of all may not be any of the particular incidents, disgraceful though they may be, but the fact that the military understands full well how poorly this conflict is going, even as it continues to tell Congress and the American public to expect blatantly unrealistic progress in the near term.

Those of us paying attention knew that the war was going disastrously, and the military has known that the war was going disastrously, but now we know that they know, and that makes all the rhetoric to the contrary seem absurd at best and downright offensive when it comes to shipping tens of thousands of additional soldiers to the windblown hills of Central Asia to kill and be killed. The goals were always ill defined and now it should be clear to everyone that they are unattainable at any rate.

Yet when it came down to it, with all excuses gone, and with no ability to credibly claim the war is anything but an unmitigated disaster, the hawkish members of Congress did what they always do; voted for the war and condemned the leaks on general principle.

And all excuses are gone; no one can claim that they went into this vote with blinders on, or that pledges of impending progress from the military brass overwhelmed common sense. The 308 Congressmen, roughly evenly split between both parties, did the American public, humanity, and common decency a great disservice.

With the war getting worse by the minute, Congress has shrugged off its responsibilities and chosen to defer the decision to pull the plug on this heedless endeavor largely to save face.

But this delay, though it may appeal to some, comes at a dear price, one far beyond the $33 billion price tag attached to the war segment of the bill. Prolonging the war will mean hundreds of additional troops slain in the next few months, and untold thousands of innocent civilians. With all alleged goals out of reach at any rate, can the American public really countenance the cowardice our lawmakers needed to keep this war going? Source

The war in Afghanistan is simply for Heroin, The Pipeline, More US Military Bases and Control over the region.

Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11 nor did anyone living there.

Bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11 and the US had and still have absolutely no proof he was involved in 9/11.

He is also dead and has been since December of 2001, the link to the information is in  US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

There are links to a few other interesting articles you may find interesting as well.

Can’t comment on how accurate or reliable Wikileaks are, but this is the story at any rate.

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
• Covert unit hunts leaders for ‘kill or capture’
• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato
• Read the Guardian’s full war logs investigation

By Nick Davies and David Leigh

July 25, 2010

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama’s “surge” strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of “under-resourcing” under Obama’s predecessor, saying: “It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009.”

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: “We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us.”

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed “blue on white” in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians’ expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: “Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story.”

A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: “We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions.”

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: “These files bring to light what’s been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I’ve investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians.” The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified “secret” at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its “uncensorable” servers.

Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon’s criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian’s articles. Source

From February 2009 British officer leaked 8,000 Civilians killed in Afghanistan

I doubt that Pakistan or Iran are helping the insurgents, that is just another ploy to start yet more wars. Wars are for profits, resources and control over regions. The US and Israel both want Iran and Pakistan for Oil and Pipelines.

Keeping a war going is very profitable for many Corporations as well as those who invest in them. Many politicians in the US invest in such companies.

Be sure to also check this link. The CIA does some awful things War mongering for example. They may be responsible for starting a few wars and they also participate in wars as well.  A bit of history and information at the link below.

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

Recent

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

By Bill Quigley

July 27, 2010

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?

Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.

One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.

Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.

Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.

African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.

Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.

Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.

Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial – the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, “Who wouldn’t rather do three years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn’t do?”

Eight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.

Nine. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.

Ten. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.

Eleven. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.

Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.

Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.

Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!

So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.

Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.

Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. “These people”, whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.

This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country’s police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror – domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.

What to do?

Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.

We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?

It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says “Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system.”

Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Source

Racism and maybe a lot of greed. One has to wonder how many others are like these people. I bet there are many more they just haven’t been caught as of yet is all. There are a lot of for profit prisons in the US.

Ex-US judge pleads guilty to child prison scam

Conahan received bribes from a for-profit juvenile detention centre after closing a county-run facility

July 23 2010

Former Pennsylvania judge Michael Conahan has pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy charge for helping put juvenile defendants behind bars in exchange for bribes.

He is accused along with former judge Mark Ciavarella of taking $2.8m (£1.8m) from a profit-making detention centres. Mr Ciavarella denies wrongdoing.

The two pleaded guilty last year but a federal judge tossed out part of the plea agreement for being too lenient.

Conahan faces up to 20 years in jail.

US District Judge Edwin Kosik rejected the 87-month jail term set out last year in Conahan’s agreement. Under that deal, the former judge would have been able to back out if he was dissatisfied with his sentence.

Judge Kosik has accepted Conahan’s current plea agreement with prosecutors, which has no such get-out clause.

Cash for kids

Prosecutors in a federal court in Scranton, Pennsylvania, said Conahan had closed a county-owned juvenile detention centre in 2002, just before signing an agreement to use a for-profit centre.

Prosecutors say Mr Ciavarella, a former juvenile court judge, then allegedly worked with Mr Conahan to ensure a constant flow of detainees.

The two men were originally charged in early 2009 with accepting money from the builder and owner of a for-profit detention centre that housed county juveniles in exchange for giving children longer, harsher sentences.

A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center alleges that Mr Ciavarella gave excessively harsh sentences to 1,000-2,000 juveniles between 2003 and 2006.

Some of the children were shackled, denied lawyers, and pulled from their homes for offences which included stealing change from cars and failure to appear as witnesses.

The indictment was part of a larger probe into corruption in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which has so far implicated more than 20 others. Source

Two US judges charged with taking more than $2m (£1.4m) in kickbacks from a privately-run detention centre have pleaded guilty to fraud.

February 13 2009

Prosecutors say Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took the money in return for giving young offenders long sentences to serve in the centre.

The deal allowed PA Child Care LLC and a sister company to receive extra government funds, they say.

The judges in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, have both been suspended.

They have pleaded guilty to honest services fraud and tax fraud.

The plea agreements provide for prison sentences of more than seven years.

Mr Conahan had shut down a county detention centre in 2002 and signed a deal with PA Child Care LLC to send offenders to its new centre, prosecutors say.

They said Mr Ciavarella sent youths to the detention centre while taking money in return, though the judge has specifically denied sending youths to jail for cash, the Associated Press news agency reports.

‘Disgraced’

Campaigners have complained that Mr Ciavarella gave out overly harsh sentences for minor offenses.

A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences.

Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.

The judge sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centres from 2003 to 2006, compared with a state average of one in 10, the AP reported.

“Your statement that I have disgraced my judgeship is true,” Mr Ciavarella wrote in a letter to the court, Reuters news agency reports.

“My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.”

Mr Conahan made no comment. Source

Recent

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

July 24, 2010

By Sherwood Ross

The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its creator President Harry Truman that it might degenerate into “an American Gestapo.” It has  been just that for so long it is beyond redemption. It represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently.

Over the years “the Agency” as it is known, has given U.S. presidents so much wrong information on so many critical issues, broken so many laws, subverted so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many dictators, and killed and tortured so many innocent human beings that the pages of its official history could be written in blood, not ink. People the world over regard it as infamous, and that evaluation, sadly for the reputation of America, is largely accurate.  Besides, since President Obama has half a dozen other major intelligence agencies to rely on for guidance, why does he need the CIA? In one swoop he could lop an estimated 27,000 employees off the Federal payroll, save taxpayers umpteen billions, and wipe the CIA stain from the American flag.

If you think this is a “radical” idea, think again. What is “radical” is to empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has said, is chilling. These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur again.

“The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before—beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama,” writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book “Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA”(Random House). Weiner has won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the intelligence community. “It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before—beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before…”

In Iran in 1953, for example, a CIA-directed coup restored the Shah (king) to absolute power, initiating what journalist William Blum in “Rogue State” (Common Courage Press) called “a period of 25 years of repression and torture; while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the US and Britain each getting 40 percent.”  About the same time in Guatemala, Blum adds, a CIA-organized coup “overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims—indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century.” The massive slaughter compares, at least in terms of sheer numbers, with Hitler’s massacre of Romanian and Ukranian Jews during the holocaust. Yet few Americans know of it.

Blum provides yet other examples of CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow neutralist president Sukarno. It plotted Sukarno’s assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government, including bombing runs by American pilots, Blum reported This particular attempt, like one in Costa Rica about the same time, failed. So did the CIA attempt in Iraq in 1960 to assassinate President Abdul Kassem. Other ventures proved more “successful”.

In Laos, the CIA was involved in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960, creating a clandestine army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In Ecuador, the CIA ousted President Jose Velasco for recognizing the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The CIA also arranged the murder of elected Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and installation of Mobutu Seko who ruled “with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers,” Blum recalls.

In Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a military coup against leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of elected President Salvador Allende in 1973 and brought to power the murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet who executed 3,000 political opponents and tortured thousands more.  In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped subvert the elections and backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month of operation. “Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine,” Blum writes.

In South Africa, the CIA gave the apartheid government information that led to the arrest of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who subsequently spent years in prison. In Bolivia, in 1964, the CIA overthrew President Victor Paz; in Australia from 1972-75, the CIA slipped millions of dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party; ditto, Brazil in 1962; in Laos in 1960, the CIA stuffed ballot boxes to help a strongman into power;  in Portugal in the Seventies the candidates it financed triumphed over a pro-labor government; in the Philippines, the CIA backed governments in the 1970-90 period that employed torture and summary execution against its own people; in El Salvador, the CIA in the Nineties backed the wealthy in a civil war in which 75,000 civilians were killed; and the list goes on and on.

Of course, the hatred that the CIA engenders for the American people and American business interests is enormous. Because the Agency operates largely in secret, most Americans are unaware of the crimes it perpetrates in their names. As Chalmers Johnson writes in “Blowback”(Henry Holt), former long-time CIA director Robert Gates, now Obama’s defense secretary, admitted U.S. intelligence services began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet invasion in December, 1979.

As has often been the case, the CIA responded to a criminal order from one of the succession of imperial presidents that have occupied the White House, in this instance one dated July 3, 1979, from President Jimmy Carter. The Agency was ordered to aid the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul—aid that might sucker the Kremlin into invading. “The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on,” Johnson writes, helping bin Laden train many of the 35,000 Arab Afghans.

Thus Carter, like his successors in the George H.W. Bush government — Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell, “all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the ‘collateral damage’ that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance,” Johnson added. Worse, the Bush-Cheney regime after 9/11 “set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officer and contractors used techniques that included torture,” Weiner has written. By some estimates, the CIA in 2006 held 14,000 souls in 11 secret prisons, a vast crime against humanity.

That the CIA has zero interest in justice and engages in gratuitous cruelty may be seen from the indiscriminate dragnet arrests it has perpetrated: “CIA officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand people in more than one hundred countries in the year after 9/11,” Weiner writes, adding that only 14 men of all those seized “were high-ranking authority figures within al Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency jailed hundreds of nobodies…(who) became ghost prisoners in the war on terror.”

As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence, the record of the CIA has been a fiasco. The Agency was telling President Carter the Shah of Iran was beloved by his people and was firmly entrenched in power in 1979 when any reader of Harper’s magazine, available on newsstands for a buck, could read that his overthrow was imminent—and it was. Over the years, the Agency has been wrong far more often than it has been right.

According to an Associated Press report, when confirmed by the Senate as the new CIA director, Leon Panetta said the Obama administration would not prosecute CIA officers that “participated in harsh interrogations even if they constituted torture as long as they did not go beyond their instructions.” This will allow interrogators to evade prosecution for following the clearly criminal orders they would have been justified to disobey.

“Panetta also said that the Obama administration would continue to transfer foreign detainees to other countries for questioning but only if U.S. officials are confident that the prisoners will not be tortured,” the AP story continued. If past is prologue, how confident can Panetta be the CIA’s fellow goons in Egypt and Morocco will stop torturing prisoners? Why did the CIA kidnap men off the streets of Milan and New York and fly them to those countries in the first place if not for torture? They certainly weren’t treating them to a Mediterranean vacation. By its long and nearly perfect record of reckless disregard for international law, the CIA has deprived itself of the right to exist.

It will be worse than unfortunate if President Obama continues the inhumane (and illegal) CIA renditions that President Bill Clinton began and President Bush vastly expanded. If the White House thinks its operatives can roam the world and arrest and torture any person it chooses without a court order, without due process, and without answering for their crimes, this signifies Americans believe themselves to be a Master Race better than others and above international law. That’s not much different from the philosophy that motivated Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. It would be the supreme irony if the American electorate that repudiated racism last November has voted into its highest office a constitutional lawyer who reaffirms his predecessor’s illegal views on this activity. Renditions must be stopped. The CIA must be abolished. Source

Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes’

The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday.

It’s part of an ongoing legal debate about the CIA and U.S. military’s lethal drone operations, which have escalated in recent months…

NATO Smears a Truth-Teller in Afghanistan

When the CIA/US needed money or weapons shipped into a country they enlisted the help of Israel. Israel was the funnel tunnel used by the US.
Israel’s Latin American trail of terror

June 5 2003

By Jeremy Bigwood

“I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements” said Colombian paramilitary leader and indicted drug trafficker Carlos Castao in his ghostwritten autobiography, Mi Confesin. Castao, who leads the Colombian paramilitaries, known by their Spanish acronym AUC, the largest right-wing paramilitary force to ever exist in the western hemisphere reveals that he was trained in the arts of war in Israel as a young man of 18 in the 1980s. He glowingly adds: “I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis,” in his chapter-long account of his Israel experiences.

Castao’s right-wing Phalange-like AUC force is now by far the worst human rights violator in all of the Americas, and ties between that organisation and Israel are continually surfacing in the press.

Outside the law

The AUC paramilitaries are a fighting force that originally grew out of killers hired to protect drug-running operations and large landowners. They were organised into a cohesive force by Castao in 1997. It exists outside the law but often coordinates its actions with the Colombian military, in a way similar to the relationship of the Lebanese Phalange to the Israeli army throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

According to a 1989 Colombian Secret Police intelligence report, apart from training Carlos Castao in 1983, Israeli trainers arrived in Colombia in 1987 to train him and other paramilitaries who would later make up the AUC.
Fifty of the paramilitaries’ “best” students were then sent on scholarships to Israel for further training according to a Colombian police intelligence report, and the AUC became the most prominent paramilitary force in the hemisphere, with some 10,000-12,000 men in arms.

The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala.
In May of last year, GIRSA, an Israeli company associated with the Israeli Defence Forces and based in Guatemala was able to buy 3000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition that were then handed over to AUC paramilitaries in Colombia.

Links with the continent

Israel’s military relations with right-wing groups and regimes spans Latin America from Mexico to the southernmost tip of Chile, starting just a few years after the Israeli state came into existence.
Since then, the list of countries Israel has supplied, trained and advised includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela.
But it isn’t only the sales of planes, guns and weapons system deals that characterises the Israeli presence in Latin America.
Where Israel has excelled is in advising, training and running intelligence and counter-insurgency operations in the Latin American “dirty war” civil conflicts of Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and now Colombia.

In the case of the Salvadoran conflict – a civil war between the right-wing landowning class supported by a particularly violent military pitted against left-wing popular organisations – the Israelis were present from the beginning. Besides arms sales, they helped train ANSESAL, the secret police who were later to form the framework of the infamous death squads that would kill tens of thousands of mostly civilian activists.

From 1975 to 1979, 83% of El Salvador’s military imports came from Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. By 1981, many of those in the civilian popular political movements who had survived the death squads headed for the hills to become guerrillas.

By 1981 there was an open civil war in El Salvador which took over a decade to resolve through negotiations.
Even though the US was openly backing the Salvadoran Army by 1981, as late as November 1983 it was asking for more Israeli “practical assistance” there, according to a declassified secret document obtained recently by Aljazeera.
Among the assistance asked for were helicopters, trucks, rifles, ammunition, and combat infantry advisors to work at both the “company and battalion level of the Salvadoran Army”.

One notable Salvadoran officer trained by the Israelis was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, who always held a high opinion of the Israelis. It was Major D’Aubuisson who ordered the assassination of El Salvador’s archbishop amongst thousands of other murders.
Later he would organise the right-wing National Republican Alliance Party (ARENA) and send his son to study abroad in the relative safety of Israel.

Dirty war

Amazingly, while the Israelis were training the El Salvadoran death squads they were also supporting the anti-semitic Argentine military government of the late 1970s and early 1980s – at a time when that government was involved_in another “dirty war” of death squads and disappearances.

In 1978, Nicaragua’s dictator Somoza was making his last stand against a general uprising of the Sandinista-led population who were sick of his family’s dynasty which had ruled and monopolised the county for half a century. The Israelis and the US had been supplying Somoza with weapons for years. But when President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976 he ordered a cessation of all US military assistance to Nicaragua.

Filling the void, the Israelis immediately increased their weapons supplies to Somoza until he fled the country when the Sandinistas took power.

Israeli operatives then helped train right-wing Nicaraguan Contras in Honduran and Costa Rican camps to fight the Sandinista government, according to Colombian police intelligence reports Aljazeera_has obtained.
At least some of the same Israeli operatives had also previously trained the nucleus of the paramilitary organisations that would become the AUC in Colombia.

But by far the bloodiest case of Israeli involvement in Latin America was its involvement in Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s. As in El Salvador, a civil war pitted a populist but, in this case, mainly Indian left against a mainly European oligarchy protected by a brutal Mestizo Army.

As Guatemalan President Carlos Arana said in 1971, “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.”
Active involvement

The Israelis supplied Guatemala with Galil rifles, and built an ammunition factory for them, as well as supplying armoured personnel carriers and Arava planes. Behind the scenes, they were actively involved in the bloodiest counter-insurgency campaign the hemisphere has known since the European conquest, in which at least 200,000 (mostly Indians) were killed.
Like Israel’s original occupation of Palestine, several entire Guatemalan Indian villages were razed and a million people displaced. “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea,” said Guatemalan President Rios Montt in 1982.

Guatemalan army officers credit Israeli support with turning the tide against the uprising, not only in the countryside where Israeli counter-insurgency techniques and assistance set up strategic-hamlet-like “development poles” along the lines of the Israeli kibbutz, but also in the cities where “Israeli communication technicians and instructors” working through then-sophisticated computers were able to locate and then decimate guerrillas and their supporters in Guatemala City in 1981.
From the late 1970s until the 1990s, the US could not overtly support the Guatemalan army because of its horrendous human rights record (although there was some covert support), but many in the US government, especially in the CIA, supported Israel in taking up the slack.

Wrong

But the US grew to regret its actions. On 10 March 1999, US President Bill Clinton issued an apology for US involvement in the war: The “United States… support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong.” No similar statement has ever been forthcoming from the Israelis.

At the present time, the only major insurgency war in Latin America is in Colombia, where Israel has an overt involvement.
Besides the dozen or so Kfir IAI C-7 jet fighters they have sold the Colombian government, and the Galil rifles produced in Bogota under licence, most of the Israeli ties to the government’s counter-insurgency war are closely-guarded secrets.
Aljazeera’s attempts to obtain clarification on these and other issues for this story were stonewalled by the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Why does Israel continue to provide arms and expertise to the pariahs of the world? Clearly, part of the reason is the revenues produced by arms sales, and part of it has do with keeping up with trends in counter-insurgent war across the globe.
But another factor is what is demanded of Israel by the world’s only superpower, the US, in partial exchange for the superpower’s continued support for Israeli dominance in the Middle East. Assistance

This relationship can be best illustrated by recently declassified 1983 US government documents obtained by the Washington, DC-based National Security Archives through the Freedom of Information Act.
One such declassified document is a 1983 memo from the notorious Colonel Oliver North of the Reagan Administration’s National Security Council and reads: “As discussed with you yesterday, I asked CIA, Defense, and State to suggest practical assistance which the Israelis might offer in Guatemala and El Salvador.”
Another document, this time a 1983 cable from the US Ambassador in Guatemala to Washington Frederic Chapin shows the money trail.

He says that at a time when the US did not want to be seen directly assisting Guatemala, “we have reason to believe that our good friends the Israelis are prepared, or already have, offered substantial amounts of military equipment to the GOG (Government of Guatemala) on credit terms up to 20 years…(I pass over the importance of making huge concessionary loans to Israel so that it can make term loans in our own backyard).”

In other words, during civil wars in which the US does not want to be seen getting its hands dirty in Latin America, the superpower loans Israel money at a very good rate, and then Israel uses these funds to do the “dirty work”. In this regard, in Latin America at least, Israel has become the hit-man for the US. Source

Israel Trains Other Undemocratic, Abusive Regimes

For years, Israeli military expertise has been shared with other abusive undemocratic regimes across the globe. In the 1980s, Israeli security forces trained a Honduran military intelligence unit, Battalion 316, that disappeared, tortured and killed Honduran citizens. Israel also trained members of the South African apartheid regime’s Inkatha hit squads that targeted ANC leaders. US aid to Israel, then, has led to the support of regimes that US taxpayers perhaps would not have otherwise aided. Source

lsrael’s ties with South Africa seem to be especially disturbing to many who follow Israel’s international activities. Perhaps it is natural that Israel has been castigated more harshly for its arms sales to South Africa than for its sales to other countries: first, because there has been for a decade an arms embargo against South Africa; and second, because of the unsurpassed criminality of the white regime and the uses to which it puts the Israeli-supplied weapons.

Also

Israel has also been involved with the Mozambican “contras,” the South African-backed MNR (Mozambique National Resistance or “Renamo”), which has brought great economic and social distress to Mozambique. Renamo has a particular reputation for ideological incoherence, being regarded by most other right-wing insurgencies as a gang of cutthroats. For several years there have been stories coming from Southern Africa of captured mercenaries of Renamo who say they were trained in neighboring Malawi-one of the four nations to maintain relations with Israel after the Organization of African Unity (OAU) declared a diplomatic embargo in 1973-by Israelis. And more than one report has told of “substantial Israeli aid” to the MNR, thought to have been funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia as well as South Africa and former Portuguese nationalists. Source

Israel and El Salvador
Israel and Guatemala
Isreal and Nicaragua and the Contras
Israel and Honduras and Costa Rica

Haiti Government was also toppled by the US

Israel and US were behind the Georgian Attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia

CIA Torture Tactics Endorsed in Secret Memos

Repression in the Dominican Republic

Another tactic used by the US

A Detailed Description of Management Strategy Fraud

Recent

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Peace activist and Iraq war veteran Mike Prysner was one of the 160 people arrested in the Anti-war march from the White House to the Capitol Building in September 2007.

July 26 2010

Michael Prysner, an Iraq war veteran and peace activist, was a corporal in the US army that invaded Iraq in 2003, today he is a leader of March Forward, an organization of American veterans from both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict.

Iraq was invaded by a multinational coalition led by the United States in 2003.

The invasion which took place under former US President George W. Bush, overthrew the Ba’ath Regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

On 1 May 2003, Bush declared the “end of major combat operations” in Iraq, while onboard the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln with a large “Mission Accomplished” banner displayed behind him.

In December of 2003 Saddam himself was captured. Then why are US forces still in Iraq?

The following is the transcript of Prysner’s interview hosted by David Becker, discussing Prysner’s experience in the Iraq war.

Becker: You went to Iraq in 2003, just tell us quickly where you went and what you did.

Prysner: I was a member of 10th Mountain Division and I was deployed to Iraq in March 2003 as a part of the initial invasion and landed in the north of the country and pushed on, took the Northern city of Kirkuk and operated in that area for 12 months.

Becker: What did you do at first? What was your job?

Prysner: My job initially was to operate this radar system that was made famous by the previous Gulf War, known as the high way of death, where thousands of people were killed who were fleeing the violence because they were just hit by air strikes and artillery strikes.

My job was to operate a radar system that called in those air strikes, so when we are learning to do this job we are shown pictures of the high way of death and how wonderful the system was and how effective it was.

It was kind of the model operation that we were taught to operate off, so my first several weeks in that country was basically looking at a computer scene and looking at these dots and just calling in bombs and artillery strikes on those dots, not knowing exactly what they were, just knowing that we were bombing them.

Becker: When you went to Iraq, you had certain views about the war, today of course people know you around the country, as an organizer of soldiers and marines who are opposing the war, were you a supporter of the war when you went, if so, what changed you?

Prysner: Absolutely, I joined the army because I wanted to serve my country, because I believed that the US military was a force for good in the world, that we helped those in need, that we freed the oppressed. So, I believed that really in my heart and when the Iraq war started, I volunteered to go on the deployment. I wanted to go and I believed whole-heartedly that we were going to help the Iraqi people, and that’s what I wanted to do and I was willing to give my life to that.

Becker: What happened while you were there that led to such a radical transformation?

Prysner: I saw that it was not for the liberation of the Iraqi people at all. I saw that it wasn’t to help the Iraqi people at all, and I saw that I was doing exactly the opposite, that I was just hurting the Iraqi people. Everyday was a catastrophe for them and it was seeing day by day the things that were committed against them, the lives that they had to live under occupation, I realized that it was a complete sham that we were there to help them.

Becker: When you were there, you were there for a year?

Prysner: Yes.

Becker: 12 months. After the initial invasion, in other words the city of Baghdad, the government of Iraq fell by April 9, 2003, what did you do for the next 11 months?

Prysner: I did a variety of things, everything from prisoner interrogation – I did that for many months – I interrogated hundreds and hundreds of detainees, the vast majority of which had done absolutely nothing wrong. I operated out of fire bases, I did home raids, I heard people’s complaints whose homes had been destroyed, whose family members had been killed, who had mutilated themselves by US bombs.

So, it was kind of this direct disposure, this direct relationship with the Iraqi people that I really got to see first hand, what their life was like living under the occupation.

Becker: Well, during that year, that eventful year, we know that George Bush went on the aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 under that banner that said “mission accomplished” and then announced that major combat operations were over and yet the experience of the occupying forces was just the opposite. Real combat kept growing and growing, the resistance was growing.

Did you feel that? Could you see that where you were?

Prysner: Yes and I remember very clearly, when we saw these pictures, the “mission accomplished” banners just a few months after the invasion and we all said great, now we can all go home. And so we were all awaiting our orders to go back, but it was very obvious that we were there to stay. There was no plan to go home and month by month, the resistance just intensified so it did not start as severe resistance in the beginning, it was month by month and it got worse and worse, and more and more intense.

Becker: We are 7 years later and even though the Iraqi government fell again in early April 2003, there is more than 50,000 US troops in Iraq. From your point of view, has the US operation failed in Iraq? Has it succeeded? How do the soldiers feel about it? What do they think they are doing?

Prysner: Well, I would say that it has failed. The goal of the US government was to go in and quickly overthrow the government, and then set up a Kayin State, I mean this is their fantasy of just easily overthrowing the country and that hasn’t happened. I mean, the US soldiers have bogged down in that country, the only way that the violence and resistance were to be quelled was because over a hundred thousand fighters were put on the US payroll. I mean they were paying people not to shoot at the Americans anymore.

Becker: That was when [General David] Petraeus started the so called surge, they put people on the payroll?

Prysner: Absolutely. And quelling, the violence also came at the expense of the huge number of casualties that came during the troops surge where thousands of US soldiers had lost their lives in Iraq, and over a million Iraqis have died in that also, and they haven’t still accomplished their goals after all this, after all this death and destruction.

Iraq is still a very volatile state where the US government and the corporate interest, that really are behind all of this, can’t operate the way they want to in that country and that’s why there’s this quagmire that’s going on, where the US can’t withdraw, because they can’t have their economic interest satisfied at this point.

Becker: We see two wars – seemingly endless wars – now in Iraq and Afghanistan. And you made the point that [General] Petraeus, in doing the surge, which, in the American media it was presented as that country [Iraq] became less violent and somewhat passive, as a consequence of the addition of tens of thousands more US troops. But you’re saying that the real fact was the US started paying the insurgents, do you know how much they were paying them?

Prysner: One hundred dollars a month.

Becker: A few hundred dollars a month in order for them not to shoot at the US troops?

Prysner: Right, and not only that. The one key aspect of the surge – if you talk to any soldier who was a part of the surge and who was part of those operations in that period of time in the war – it was not only that there were fighters that were put on the payroll; but also the level of violence was completely scaled up. People who were part of the surge were basically “kill everyone…everybody go into the neighborhoods where there is resistance and just kill everybody.”

So, what the Iraqi people went through during that time, through those major invasions, through the surge, it was a catastrophe. It was a disaster and it was something that was going to have such a lasting effect in those communities, I mean if it was something that was going to take generations to recover from, the horrors that they were subjected to.

Becker: I want to talk to you also about the soldiers who are coming back. Of course, many did not come back, I do not know their exact number. It is upwards in the of 5,000 young men and women who lost their lives; [We are talking about] American soldiers, not counting the million plus Iraqis.

Tens of thousands have come back with horrible wounds, either physical or psychological. We see record levels of posttraumatic stress. As a matter of fact, it perhaps is the biggest controversy right now in the VA [Veteran Affairs].

Do you feel that Iraqi occupation has been somewhat different in terms of its impacts on the soldiers from what happened in say World War II?

Prysner: In World War II, there was this understood mission, right? You have to defeat the Nazis or you have to defeat Fascism. So, that was something very different. The Iraq war has no mission that soldiers can understand. It is just these kinds of ambiguous ideas of freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism. Things that really hold no weight, things that are just these kinds of fabrications.

So, soldiers fighting in Iraq, soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, they do not know what they are fighting for. They may think and try to rationalize it in some way but there is no clear mission and there is no understanding of what they are doing.

The mission in Afghanistan for every soldier is just to stay alive, or to come out of it whole. That is why it is a very different thing. That is why so many people are coming back with severe trauma, because they are not going to fight for some just cause, not going to fight for something honorable. You are just going to repress a population, to repress people, to shoot innocent people, to torture innocent people who have done nothing to you.

I would say that the vast majority of soldiers do not have an understanding of what these wars are about. And the ones that think they know, it is something that is completely backwards. It has just been slammed into their heads by the chain of command and by the US government.

Becker: Do you think that the Obama administration is aware of this kind of epidemic of discontent or distress amongst the returning soldiers?

Prysner: Yes, and it is something that they fear very much. The commanders and generals know that one thing that really has the power to thwart their plans for empires is a mass movement within the military. Like we saw during the Vietnam War. Where tens of thousands of soldiers refused to take part, refused to go on missions and sabotaged their equipment. Because they knew that it was a colonial war. They knew that it was a war with no mission, with no reason to fight and die endlessly. So people started resisting. So, that potential exists today.

The government goes to great lengths to make soldiers not feel those things and not understand what wars are about and prevent them from turning into the same thing that we saw during the Vietnam War.

Becker: So, the administration knows what is going on and they know how the soldiers are feeling. They know the soldiers feel that in spite the self-rationalization, that it is an ambiguous mission at last and perhaps a colonial-type mission that they cannot explain. They know this and yet they are sending their soldiers back. In fact, they are sending more soldiers to Afghanistan and keeping tens of thousands in Iraq. How is that viewed by the rank-and-file?

Prysner: There are people going to Iraq and Afghanistan now who are on their fourth, fifth and sixth combat tours. That means four, five or six years of people’s lives that are spent in combat and spent somewhere that is horrible. That has a severe impact on their lives.

Right now, all these soldiers who are being sent to Afghanistan are exhausted and do not want to go. I would say the vast majority of the people I talk to, that is their sentiment. They do not see any reason why they should go and die, why they should go take another life, why they should risk losing their legs, losing their arms for something that they do not understand.

Becker: How many are absent without leave, AWOL, or are deserting? Is that a large number?

Prysner: It is. There are thousands who have gone AWOL.

Becker: Right now, I have read reports about the higher suicide rate, that the number of casualties among the US soldiers from suicide is actually higher in some months, recently, than on the battlefield. Is that right?

Prysner: That is absolutely right and this is a very significant thing and this (the suicide rate) is just for active-duty military. This does not count the veterans who get out of the military and then take their own lives once they are out. It is a fact that there are months where there are more active-duty soldiers that take their own lives than those who are killed in combat. This is a very significant thing.

This is because of the criminally inadequate treatment that soldiers get when they come back. If you are still active duty, the military has one thing in mind. They want to deploy you again and they will do whatever they can to deploy you again. No matter how traumatized you are or how affected you are.

If you get out of the military, they do not want to have to pay compensation; they do not want to have to pay disability. So, they do whatever they can to actively deny those PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) numbers.

Becker: I want to talk to you about Afghanistan. Of course, Afghanistan has been largely out of the news. So, you have a war going on and an increasing number of casualties, but it is not really main stream media front page news at all. And so largely, the American people do not see it everyday.

But last week and the last few weeks they have because of the controversy around the Rolling Stone interview with General McChrystal, his firing and his replacement by David Petraeus. From your point of view, does that scandal with McChrystal impact the war? Does it impact the direction of the war? Does it impact the soldiers?

Prysner: It does. I mean it really shows that they are kind of in crisis right now. It is becoming very obvious to the commanders on the ground, to the generals in the Pentagon, to the politicians in the White House that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won. They cannot defeat, not only the Taliban, but the more than a 140 different armed organizations that are resisting for an occupation in that country.

So, there is an understanding that they cannot win that war. So, now there is the finger pointing starting, there is the kind of, you know, people dancing around trying to avoid taking responsibility.

So, what happened with McChrystal was significant because it shows the very volatile situation and it shows that for a general to be speaking with such contempt to his people that outrank him in the chain of command, it shows the state of the conflict right now. That the war cannot be won, and that they are going to be scrambling to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time that the generals and the politicians are trying to avoid taking responsibility; people are dying every single day, last month, June, was the highest number of casualties for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

This is a trend that is going to continue, this year is already on track to be the deadliest year of war, last year doubled the year before, this year is already on track of doubling 2009.

Becker: Are you in touch with the soldiers and their families or the marines and their families who are in Afghanistan, what are they telling you about the actual conditions in Afghanistan – of the war? This is the unvarnished story, not from the headlines.

Prysner: I am in touch with people in Afghanistan, on the front lines, and they are saying that they do not understand why they are there, they do not want to be there anymore, morale is extremely low. There are people who are shooting themselves in the foot to get out of deployments, there are people having psychological breakdowns on the front lines. I mean, the military right now is really at a breaking point, because of repeated deployments and because they are being sent to fight a war that cannot be won, a war that is being lost with no understanding why. No clearly articulated reason why we must fight in Afghanistan. So, we have a situation where there are nearly 100,000 soldiers who are now fighting in Afghanistan with no clear mission and having to endure the daily horrors of being an occupying army.

Becker: So, the Obama administration must know what you know and what the soldiers know? That the war is unwinnable, and yet they are sending more soldiers. What is the goal? They are not trying to win, what are they trying to do?

Prysner: We are trying to avoid the perception of defeat, we are trying to protect the image of the empire, and we are going to kill as many people necessary to do that.

Becker: So, the calculation is that this is a kind of an out-of-the-news war for the most part and so they can keep going and going and going. What is the cost? What is the cost in addition to the soldiers and their lives, which is what you are documenting really well? What is the economic cost?

Prysner: Well, just the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan alone – and this isn’t including the exorbitant defense budget right now – it is over USD $500 million a day that is being spent on these occupations.

At the same time, we are seeing tens of thousands of jobs be lost every month. The increasing number of people going bankrupt is because of hospital bills. We are seeing universities all over the country raising tuition, cutting classes; for students it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a college education, all the while, while working people are having such a difficult time right now economically. We are watching over USD $500 million a day being poured into two quagmires, into two wars that are doing nothing but destroying the lives of thousands and thousands of people.

Becker: Afghanistan in the first year of the war, in 2001, the number of US casualties was 12 and now of course, every week there is that number or more. It is clear to me that the occupation itself in its ninth year has become a catalyst for armed resistance, and as you said, the purpose may just be to avoid defeat, or the perception of defeat by a global empire. But, Afghanistan has some significance from the point of view of its geostrategic location, it is right in South Central Asia, it is close to the former Soviet Republic the US is making military bases. Do you see that as a part of a regional strategy for the US in terms of its projection of its own power, either military or economic?

Prysner: Absolutely. I mean, the United States had long dreamed of having a foothold in Afghanistan, of having bases in Afghanistan. You know what, they really tried to negotiate with the Taliban, to kind of work out business deals where they could pursue economic interests in that country. But 9/11 provided a pretext for an all-out military invasion. And the US thought that the Taliban government would fall easily, and they could easily set up this client state there and that is why in the first year of the war, it was kind of mission accomplished with Afghanistan also.

Becker: CIA Director Leon Panetta went on ABC recently and said that there is no possibility of reconciliation with the Taliban because the Taliban is in essence winning the war, the armed resistance is winning the war. So, they are not in any mood to negotiate. Is it and is it understood that the US goal now is that they want to have a government of national unity that brings the Taliban back in, and do the soldiers know that?

Prysner: Well, the US government cares about one thing, it is whether or not economic interest will be met in Afghanistan. So, if that means the deal with the very same people, we are told we have to fight and kill and die endlessly against – then that is what they are going to do. I mean, the soldiers are realizing that more and more everyday. I am seeing that everyday more and more soldiers are standing up saying that they do not want to take part in this criminal war.

Becker: What can soldiers and their families do in relationship to your own organization?

Prysner: You can go to marchforward.org and read statements and find out what your options are, and I would say to every single soldier in the active-duty military and their families, that you have the absolute right to refuse to take part in these wars. These are wars for the rich and you have the right not to take part in them. Source

There are thousands of stories like this from US Veterans. People should be taking note of them. They were there, they know.

US Wars are for profit, resources and control over other countries.

The US spreading Democracy what a sham…… What a pity the All the American people haven’t figured it out yet.

Who profits from WAR?

America: Arms dealer to the stars! Who’s the number one weapons broker in the world, again? Take a guess

Of course we must not forget the Drug Dealers.

Drug Addiction is also part of war pollution. Because of the NATO and US invasion in Afghanistan, Heroin addiction has grown like wildfire around the world. Millions are now addicted to Heroin.

CIA Drug  Operations a little history in case you didn’t know

Bush – Cheney and drugs

Afghanistan: Troops Guarding the Poppy Fields

War “Pollution” Equals Millions of Deaths

Top Ten Myths About Iraq, 2008

British officer leaked 8,000 Civilians killed in Afghanistan 2009

2.5 million Iraqi women were widowed by Iraq war

Two-Thirds of Boys in Afghan Jails Are Brutalised, Study Finds

UMRC’s Field Team found Afghan civilians with acute symptoms of radiation poisoning, along with chronic symptoms of internal uranium contamination, including congenital problems in newborns.

Cancer and Deformities – The Deadly Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq

NATO bombings: Aftermath takes toll on Serbia, now left with DU Poisoning (Radiation and DU fallout maps included.)

Study finds: Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination

US-NATO Using Military Might To Control World Energy Resources

What I Learned in Afghanistan – About the United States

Why: War in Iraq and Afghanistan

US Recruits Death Squads

Point of interest From September 2009

Has Usama Bin Ladin been dead for seven years – and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?

The Answer to that Question is Yes he is dead

Is Osama bin Laden still alive, Seems the answer is no

Did you know

A Full Israeli  El Al flight took off on 9/11 from JFK to Tel Aviv

The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Fake Al Qaeda, Fake Passports, Fake planes, Fake Hijackers

Who Benefited the most by J.F. Kennedy’s Death?

• (Afghanistan ) A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words
• Abu Ghraib Prisoners
• Afghanistan and Iraq Military Casualties
• Devastation in Iraq
• Gaza : A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
• Images if Iraq Democracy
• Images of Iraq Falluja massacres Made by USA
• Images of Iraq War Crimes
• Iraq Freedom!!!
• Iraq USA did it in Najaf, Baghdad, Kufa 08/2004
• Iraq War Images
• Iraq: USA Terror On Al Falluja ( 7 days = 850 killed more than 1500 wounded )
• Massacre of Gaza and Lebanon
• US Air strike on Iraqi civilians Tall Afar, Falluja, Samarra, Baghdad

US Refuses To Allow Monitoring Of WMD, President Obama rejected inspection protocol for US biological weapons

Cancer and Deformities – The Deadly Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq

No Weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq.

Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, accused US and British intelligence yesterday of paying too much attention to Iraqi defectors who told them that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction, because that was what they wanted to hear.

The former head of the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) has maintained for years that his team of inspectors should have been allowed more time to complete their work in Iraq, which was cut short by the invasion in March 2003. He claimed yesterday that the US administration at the time was “high on military” and thought that “they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable”.

Giving evidence at the Iraq Inquiry he argued that it was “absurd” for the US and British governments to claim that they invaded Iraq to uphold the authority of the UN Security Council when they knew they could not get a majority resolution through the council in favour of war. For entire story go HERE

This just out. Well gee I am just so shocked imagine the US misplacing $9 Billion.  The Americans are very good at losing money. They are also very good at stealing the Americans peoples hard earned money.  Just the day before 9/11 it was announced they lost something like $2.5 Billion, of course with 9/11 and all, no one really noticed  and it wasn’t reported all that much. So they lost another $9 billion that is what the US is good at. I wonder who’s pockets were lined this time? Considering the fact there were no weapons of mass destruction the US should be footing the bill for all reconstruction. Not the Iraqi’s.

The US defence department is unable to account for almost $9bn taken from Iraqi oil revenues for use in reconstruction, according to an official audit released yesterday.

Recent

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should be Terminated

Mental illness rising among US troops

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

Mental illness rising among US troops

July 25 2010

America’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are taking a toll on US soldiers, as the latest statistics show one out of every nine American soldiers leaves the army on a medical discharge due to a mental disorder.

“We have 100,000 troops and a third of them suffer some sort of mental health disease and half of those suffer multiple health disease,” Paul Martin from Peace Action told Press TV’s correspondent.

The army alone saw a 64 percent increase in those forced out due to mental illness between 2005 and 2009, the numbers equal to one in nine of all medical discharges.

According to army statistics, last year alone 1,224 soldiers suffering from mental illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, received a medical discharge.

According to Mental health experts there is a growing emotional toll on the US military which has been fighting for seven years in Iraq and nine years in Afghanistan, and there is a clear relationship between multiple deployments and increased symptoms of anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Some experts say age is also a factor.

“We are talking young people — 18 to 24-year-olds, who are seeing the horrors of war,” Martin said.

Analysts are concerned that with budget cuts looming, military medical programs will be the first on the chopping block.

The soldiers who are discharged for having both a mental and physical disability increased by 174% during the last 5 years from a little under 1,400 in 2005, to more than 3,800 in 2009, according to army statistics.

The suicide rate among US soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan has escalated to a record high, with an average of one suicide per day in June.

According to US Army statistics, a total of 32 soldiers took their own lives last month, making it the worst month on record for Army suicides. Twenty-one were on active duty, with the rest being among National Guards or Army Reserves in an inactive status, CNN reported earlier in July. Source

Related

Soldiers, Mental illness, Drugs and Suicide

Why: War in Iraq and Afghanistan

Traumatic brain injuries the signature wound of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq

Silence on Canadian coalition crisis in U.S. media What a Shocker, LOL

Did Contractor Expose Troops To Toxin?

Recent

US occupation not for “liberation of Iraqis

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

Republicans in the US House of Representatives want Israel to attack Iran

July 25 2010

Republicans in the US House of Representatives have introduced a measure that would green-light a possible Israeli bombing campaign against Iran.

Resolution 1553 provides explicit support for military strikes against Iran, stating that Congress backs Israel’s use of ‘all means necessary’ against Iran, “including the use of military force,” BBC Persian reported.

The introduction of the measure coincides with a pattern of renewed calls for military strikes that have escalated since President Obama signed Congressional Iran sanctions into law.

Neoconservatives who were instrumental in orchestrating the Iraq War, such as Bill Kristol and Reuel Marc Gerecht, have led the stepped up calls for military action.

Hawkish former Bush administration official John Bolton recently laid out the game plan to prod Israel into attacking Iran, arguing that outsiders can “create broad support” for a strike by framing it as an issue of Israel’s right to self-defense.

Supporters for military strikes, Bolton says, should “defend the specific tactic of pre-emptive attacks” against Iran.

He said that Congress can ‘make it clear’ that it supports such strikes and that ‘having visible congressional support in place at the outset will reassure’ Israel.

In spite of support from the neocons, top US military leaders have warned of the many dangers of military strikes against Iran.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has argued “Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need. In fact, I believe it would be disastrous on a number of levels.”

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has expressed his own serious reservations about an attack on Iran.

The US, which is already providing billions of dollars worth of arms to Israel every year, describes Tel Aviv’s military edge in the region as being in America’s interest.  Source

Related

The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

US violates UN law by threatening Iran

U.S. Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged

Now if history serves me correctly the US encouraged Iraq to attack Iran many years ago. Things got out of control and the US then attacked Iraq more then once I might add. One should never encourage a war.  Those Republicans and anyone who supports Resolution 1553 should be given the boot out of the US Government.

Israel is a rogue state as is and now to encourage them to start yet another war is just pure insanity.

Of course many Republicans invest in weapons making companies and will make a tidy profit from this or any other war.

I bet they also get tons of money at election time from Israeli supporters as well to do Israels bidding as many US politicians do. They are not serving the American Peoples interest, they are serving Israels interests and should be tried for treason.

The Israeli Lobby should be run out of every country around the world. They just promote war against innocent people.

Iran is no threat to anyone. They do not start wars, Israel on the other hand is always finding some lame excuse to kill people and destroy anything in their path.  History speaks for itself.  The US does Israels bidding and goes to war to appease them.

Afghanistan had nothing to do with 911 nor did those in Iraq.  Those wars were on the behalf of Israeli interest and started by Israeli supporters. 911 was just an excuse and a very poor one. The public was fed lies upon lies repeatedly. When on earth will the world at large wake up and see the truth of what is happening? Americans have been hoodwinked for years. How blind, deaf, dumb and foolish are they? Obviously they cannot see the light, they just continue to believe in the lies. How sad for them.

All aid to Israel should be cut off.

No weapons of any kind should be sold to them.

If anyone should be sanctioned it should be Israel.

If Americans do not wake up soon, they will be footing the bill for yet another manufactured war, based on lies, greed and power hungry thugs..

Israel just wants more land, water or other natural resources and they will steal it any way they can, as we well know.

They want Gazans Natural Gas they have wanted it for years. They don’t care who dies or who they hurt, they wants the Gas pure and simple. They want the land and any other resources they can steal. If anyone has failed to notice the land and resource theft, not just from those in Gaza but also in the West Bank and the surrounding countries as well, then you need to get educated.

Gaza War ?: Natural Gas valued at over $4 billion MAYBE?

Israel is a den of thieves.

That has been proven repeatedly through out their history. That is what they do, that is all they do and they will kill anyone to get what they want.

Wake up people. Take off the rose colored glasses. They are messing with the future of generations to come. Your children and your grand children and when they come for your kids or grand kids what will you say “Gee I guess we should have stopped them”.

Well the future is ours to secure for future generations, so get to work and stop them before they try to take over the world.

No more support, no more weapons of mass destruction, no more money, no more tolerating their crimes against innocent victims.

Israel will start another world war if they are not stopped.

The US is helping them.

Americans wake up.

Scream at your politicians. Say NO to more WAR.

Refuse to pay for the murder of innocent people.

A Jewish Defector Warns America

‘Shocking the World believes same Iraq-style lies about Iran’

344 US House of Representatives voted to condemn the Goldstone report on Israel /Gaza War

Americans should all hang their heads in shame, their representatives are supporting criminals.

Sayanim — Israeli Operatives in the U.S.

By Jeff Gates

Americans know that something fundamental is amiss. They sense—rightly—that they are being misled no matter which political party does the leading.

A long misinformed public lacks the tools to grasp how they are being deceived. Without those tools, Americans will continue to be frustrated at being played for the fool.

When the “con” is clearly seen, “the mark” (that’s us) will see that all roads lead to the same duplicitous source: Israel and its operatives. The secret to Israel’s force-multiplier in the U.S. is its use of agents, assets and sayanim (Hebrew for volunteers).

When Israeli-American Jonathan Pollard was arrested for spying in 1986, Tel Aviv assured us that he was not an Israeli agent but part of a “rogue” operation. That was a lie.

Only 12 years later did Tel Aviv concede that he was an Israeli spy the entire time he was stealing U.S. military secrets. That espionage—by a purported ally—damaged our national security more than any operation in U.S. history.

In short, Israel played us for the fool.

From 1981-1985, this U.S. Navy intelligence analyst provided Israel with 360 cubic feet of classified military documents on Soviet arms shipments, Pakistani nuclear weapons, Libyan air defense systems and other intelligence sought by Tel Aviv to advance its geopolitical agenda.

Agents differ from assets and sayanim.  Agents possess the requisite mental state to be convicted of treason, a capital crime. Under U.S. law, that internal state is what distinguishes premeditated murder from a lesser crime such as involuntary manslaughter. Though there’s a death in either case, the legal liabilities are different—for a reason.

Intent is the factor that determines personal culpability. That distinction traces its roots to a widely shared belief in free will as a key component that distinguishes humans from animals.

Agents operate with premeditation and “extreme malice” or what the law describes as an “evil mind.” Though that describes the mental state of Jonathan Pollard, Israeli leaders assured us otherwise—another example of an evil mind as the U.S. was played for the fool.

Played for the Fool, Again

Pollard took from his office more than one million documents for copying by his Israeli handler. When those classified materials were transferred to the Soviets, reportedly in exchange for the emigration of Russian Jews, this spy operation shifted the entire dynamics of the Cold War.

To put a price tag on this espionage, imagine $20 trillion in U.S. Cold War defense outlays from 1948-1989 (in 2010 dollars). The bulk of that investment in national security was negated by a spy working for a nation that pretended throughout to be a U.S. ally.

Pollard was sentenced to life in prison. Israel suffered no consequences. None. Zero. Nada. Not then. Not now. Then as now, we were played for the fool.

At trial, Pollard claimed he wasn’t stealing from the U.S.; he was stealing secrets for Israel—with whom the U.S. has long had a “special relationship.” He thought we should have shared our military secrets with them. That’s chutzpah. That also confirms we were played for the fool.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how seamlessly we segued from a global Cold War to a global War on Terrorism. In retrospect, the false intelligence used to induce our invasion of Iraq was traceable to Israelis, pro-Israelis or Israeli assets such as John McCain (see below).

Even while in prison, Pollard’s iconic status among Israelis played a strategic role. Was it just coincidence that Tel Aviv announced a $1 million grant to their master spy less than two weeks before 911? Is that how Israel signaled its operatives in the U.S.?

Did that grant have any relationship to the “dancing Israelis” who were found filming and celebrating that mass murder as both jets smashed into the World Trade Center?

Absent that provocation, would we now find ourselves at war in the Middle East? Surely no one still believes that America’s interests are being advanced in a quagmire that has now become the longest war in U.S. history.

“I know what America is,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a group of Israelis in 2001, apparently not knowing his words were being recorded. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”

Let’s face it: the U.S. was again played for the fool.

With oversight by Israeli case officers (katsas), Israeli operations proceed in the U.S. by using agents, assets and volunteers (sayanim). Let’s take a closer look at each.

The Sayanim System

Sayanim (singular sayan) are shielded from conventional legal culpability by being told only enough to perform their narrow role. Though their help may be essential to the success of an Israeli operation, these volunteers (sayanim also means helpers) could pass a polygraph test because their recruiters ensure they remain ignorant of the overall goals of an operation.

In other words, a sayan can operate as an accomplice but still not be legally liable due to a lack of the requisite intent regarding the broader goals—of which they are purposely kept ignorant. Does that intentional “ignorance” absolve them of liability under U.S. law? So far, yes.

Much like military reservists, sayanim are activated when needed to support an operation. By agreeing to be available to help Israel, they provide an on-call undercover corps and force-multiplier that can be deployed on short notice.

How are sayanim called to action? To date, there’s been no attempt by U.S. officials to clarify that key point. This may explain why Pollard was again in the news on July 13^th with a high-profile Israeli commemoration of his 9000^th day of incarceration.

To show solidarity with this Israeli-American traitor, the lights encircling Jerusalem were darkened while an appeal was projected onto the walls of the Old City urging that President Obama order Pollard’s release from federal prison.

Pollard has long been a rallying point for Jewish nationalists, Zionist extremists and ultra-orthodox ideologues. In short, just the sort of people who would be likely recruits as sayanim. The news coverage given this Day of Adoration may help explain how Israel signals its helpers that an operation is underway and in need of their help.

Are pro-Israelis once again playing Americans for the fool?

When not aiding an ongoing operation, sayanim gather and report intelligence useful to Israel. This volunteer corps is deeply imbedded in legislative bodies, particularly in the U.S.

Thus far, this Israeli operation has advanced with legal impunity as the Israel lobby—though acting as a foreign agent—continues even now to pose as a “domestic” operation.

Morris Amitay, former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, explains how this invisible cadre aids the Israel lobby in advancing its geopolitical agenda:

“There are a lot of guys at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill]…who happen to be Jewish, who are willing…to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness…These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators…You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.”

What sayanim are not told by their katsas is that an Israeli operation may endanger not only Israel but also the broader Jewish community when these operations are linked to extremism, terrorism, organized crime, espionage and treason. Though sayanim “must be 100 percent Jewish,” Ostrovsky reports in By Way of Deception (1990):

“…the Mossad does not seem to care how devastating it could be to the status of the Jewish people in the Diaspora if it was known. The answer you get if you ask is: “So what’s the worst that could happen to those Jews? They’d all come to Israel. Great!” [Mossad is the intelligence and foreign operations directorate for Israel.]

Assets, Agents and Sayanim

Assets are people profiled in sufficient depth that they can be relied upon to perform consistent with their profile. Such people typically lack the state of mind required for criminal culpability because they lack the requisite intent to commit a crime.

Nevertheless, assets are critical to the success of Israeli operations in the U.S. They help simply by pursuing their profiled personal needs—typically for recognition, influence, money, sex, drugs or the greatest drug of all: ideology.

Thus the mission-critical task fulfilled by political assets that the Israel lobby “produces” for long-term service in the Congress—while appearing to represent their U.S. constituents.

Put a profiled asset in a pre-staged time, place and circumstance—over which the Israel lobby can exert considerable influence—and Israeli psy-ops specialists can be confident that, within an acceptable range of probabilities, an asset will act consistent with his or her profile.

Democrat or Republican is irrelevant; the strategic point remains the same: to ensure that lawmakers perform consistent with Israel’s interests. With the help of McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform,” the Israel lobby attained virtual control over the U.S. Congress.

The performance of assets in the political sphere can be anticipated with sufficient confidence that outcomes become foreseeable—within an acceptable range of probabilities. How difficult was it to predict the outcome when Bill Clinton, a classic asset, encountered White House intern Monica Lewinsky?

Senator John McCain has long been a predictable asset. His political career traces its origins to organized crime from the 1920s. It was organized crime that first drew him to Arizona to run for Congress four years before the 1986 retirement of Senator Barry Goldwater.

By marketing his “brand” as a Vietnam-era prisoner of war, he became a reliable spokesman for Tel Aviv while being portrayed as a “war hero.” No media outlet dares mention that Colonel Ted Guy, McCain’s commanding officer while a POW, sought his indictment for treason for his many broadcasts for the North Vietnamese that assured the death of many U.S. airmen.

As a typical asset, it came as no surprise to see McCain and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a self-professed Zionist, used to market the phony intelligence that took us to war in Iraq. McCain’s ongoing alliance with transnational organized crime spans three decades.

His 1980’s advocacy for S&L crook Charles Keating of “The Keating 5” finds a counterpart in his recent meetings with Russian-Israeli mobster Oleg Deripaska who at age 40 held $40 billion in wealth defrauded from his fellow Russians.

McCain conceded earlier this month in a town hall meeting in Tempe, Arizona that he met in a small dinner in Switzerland with mega-thief Deripaska and Lord Rothschild V.

For assets such as McCain to be indicted for treason, the American public must grasp the critical role that such pliable personalities play in political manipulations. McCain is a “poster boy” for how assets are deployed to shape decisions such as those that took our military to war. In the Information Age, if that’s not treason, what is?

The predictability of a politician’s conduct confirms his or her qualifications as an asset. They are routinely developed and “produced” over lengthy periods of time and then—as with John McCain—maintained in key positions to influence decision-making as key junctures.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was candid in his assessment four weeks after 911. He may have been thinking about John McCain when he made this revealing comment:

“I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” [October 3, 2001]

Indictments for Treason

Are assets culpable? Do they have the requisite intent to indict them for treason? Does John McCain possess an evil mind? Did he betray this nation of his own free will or is he typical of those assets with personalities so weak and malleable that they can easily be manipulated?

As federal grand juries are impaneled to identify and indict participants in this trans-generational operation, how many sayanim should the Federal Bureau of Investigation expect to uncover in the U.S.? No one knows because this subtle form of treason is not yet well understood.

Victor Ostrovksy, a former Mossad katsa (case officer) wrote in 1990 that the Mossad had 7,000 sayanim in London alone. In London’s 1990 population of 6.8 million, Israel’s all-volunteer corps represented one-tenth of one percent of the residents of that capital city.

If Washington, DC is ten times more critical to Israel’s geopolitical goals (an understatement), does that mean the FBI should expect to find ten times more sayanim per capita in Washington?

What about sayanim in Manhattan, Miami, Beverly Hills, Atlanta, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Toledo?

No one knows. And Tel Aviv is unlikely to volunteer the information. This we know for certain: America has been played for the fool. And so has our military.

This duplicity dates back well before British Foreign Secretary Alfred Balfour wrote to an earlier Lord Rothschild in 1917 citing UK approval for a “Jewish homeland.” In practical effect, that “homeland” now ensures non-extradition for senior operatives in transnational organized crime.

To date, America has blinded itself even to the possibility of such a trans-generational operation inside our borders and imbedded inside our government. Instead the toxic charge of “anti-Semitism” is routinely hurled at those chronicling the “how” component of this systemic treason.

Making this treason transparent is essential to restore U.S. national security. That transparency may initially appear unfair to the many moderate and secular Jews who join others appalled at this systemic corruption of the U.S. political system.

Yet they are also concerned that somehow they may be portrayed as guilty by association due to a shared faith tradition. That would be not only unjust to them but also ineffective in identifying and indicting those complicit.

This much is certain: a Democrat as president offers no real alternative to a Republican on those issues affecting U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Today’s corruption predates the duplicity in 1948 that induced Harry Truman to extend recognition to this extremist enclave as a legitimate nation state. Our troubles date from then.

That fateful decision must be revisited in light of what can now be proven about the “how” of this ongoing duplicity—unless Americans want to continue to be played for the fool. Source

Related

Israel threatens Syria with war

Full Israeli  El Al flight took off on 9/11 from JFK to Tel Aviv

“We will have to kill them all”: Israeli Effie Eitam

Who Benefited the most by J.F. Kennedy’s Death?

Recent

Mental illness rising among US troops

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

Gaza Flotilla: Lawyers from 60 Countries to Sue Israel

JAKARTA,
July 12, 2010

Lawyers from 60 countries, including Indonesia, will gather in Istanbul, Turkey, from July 15-16, to prepare a legal suit against Israel for its attack on the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31, Antara news agency reported.

“There are a number of lawyers from 60 countries who will take legal steps to sue the attackers of Mavi Marmara,” Mahendradatta, patron chief of the Indonesian Muslims’ Lawyer Team (TPM) said here, Monday.
Mahendradatta said he would represent six Indonesians who became victims of the Israeli soldiers’ attack, where two Indonesians namely Surya Fachrizal and Oktavianto were injured.
The lawyers, among others from Turkey, Britain and other European countries, will sue Israel in international legal forum as well as bilateral forums.
TPM, he said would consistently fight the Israeli arrogance.
Meanwhile, Jose Rizal Jurnalis, presidium chairman of MER-C (Medical Emergency Rescue – Committee) Indonesia hoped that the legal suit against Israel could be brought to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Source

Netanyahu to appear before inquiry

July 13 2010

MATTHEW KALMAN in Jerusalem

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will testify next month before the government-appointed inquiry into the raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that left nine civilians dead, it was confirmed today.

Committee spokesman Ofer Lefler said Mr Netanyahu’s appearance on August 9th will be followed the next day by testimony from defence minister Ehud Barak.

Chief of Staff Lieutenant- General Gabi Ashkenazi will testify on August 11th.

All three appearances will be open to the public, Mr Lefler said.

Peace campaigners in Israel claimed victory yesterday in a legal tussle with the Israeli government to increase the powers of the commission

A compromise decision of the Israeli supreme court opened the door for the Turkel Commission, which includes David Trimble as one of two international observers, to subpoena soldiers and military commanders – a move the Israeli government had fought to prevent.

Meanwhile, the military’s own operational inquiry into the pre-dawn commando raid on the Mavi Marmara on May 31st levelled scathing criticism at the higher echelons of the Israeli navy, citing a series of intelligence and planning failures that led to the deaths of the vessel’s passengers and international embarrassment for Israel.

As a direct result, Israel has been forced to ease its blockade on the Gaza Strip after a four-year siege failed in its declared aims of bringing down the Hamas government and securing the release of captured soldier Gilad Shalit.

The “Public Commission to Examine the Maritime Incident of 31 May 2010” was created under the chairmanship of retired Supreme Court justice Yaakov Turkel in June, but no sooner had hearings begun than Turkel demanded his powers be increased. At the same time, the Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) movement petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the commission either be reconstituted as a full state commission of inquiry or scrapped.

On July 4th, the Israeli government bowed to Judge Turkel’s demands and reconstituted his inquiry into a government inquiry commission, which under Israeli law has powers to subpoena witnesses and compel them to testify under oath. But it excluded military personnel.

Veteran Israeli peace campaigner Uri Avnery told The Irish Times the government’s decision was illegal, since the newly empowered commission had the right under law to summon any witness, including soldiers. He said yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing was “a double victory” for Gush Shalom.

“It was the first time in the history of Israel that the court agreed to intervene in a matter concerning boards of inquiry. There have been many petitions before and they all have been refused,” said Mr Avnery.

“Second, the court actually said that if Turkel wants to interrogate soldiers he can do so. If the government does not accede to this demand, then we all go to the court again and the court will do what it deems fit. There’s a strong hint that then they will compel the government to agree,” he said.

The government had argued that the parallel military inquiry that reported yesterday made it redundant for Judge Turkel’s commission to also question soldiers, but they agreed to the compromise suggested by the court.

The findings of the military inquiry headed by reserve Brig Gen Giora Eiland appeared to raise more questions than they answered.

“The team concluded that not all possible intelligence-gathering methods were fully implemented and that the co-ordination between navy intelligence and the Israel defence intelligence was insufficient,” the committee said in a statement.

“The anticipated level of violence used against the forces was underestimated . . . The operation relied excessively on a single course of action, albeit a probable one, while no alternative courses of action were prepared for the event of more dangerous scenarios.”  Source

More information on the Gaza Flotilla

Related

Gaza Freedom Flotilla Eyewitness Accounts

Israel attacks Gaza Flotilla in International Waters

Recent

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

Hospitals in Haiti to be shut down due to lack of funds

By Dr. Sanjay Gupt

July 12 2010

It was hard to know what to expect a half-year after the Haiti earthquakes. Driving through the town of Port Au Prince a few days ago, rubble seemed to have been merely swept off the streets, and into alleyways. Debris and garbage had simply shifted around the city, more out of sight, but still present. It was like a college kid, knowing his parents were coming to visit, sweeping things under the rug and throwing things into closets. Things were frighteningly familiar.

I looked out the window, expecting to see the most awful and indelible images that I remembered during the first days after the earthquake. The bodies stacked high, in front of homes with parents searching frantically for a place for their dead children. At that time, children were seen everywhere, doing the same for their deceased parents. Thankfully, those images are for the most part gone.

In medicine, we think of things in the acute phase: stop the bleeding. The intermediate phase: recovery and follow up. And, in the chronic phase, it is about rehabilitation and building up. The acute phase is coming to an end, but without adequate resources and money, the intermediate phase will never happen. Talking to large relief organizations, it seems they are planning for the long-term chronic rehabilitation of the country, which may explain why only a small percentage of the money donated has actually been put to use. (see the breakdown here by organization). The concern, though, is that rehabilitation cannot happen, unless the resources are there to let the patients, and the country adequately recover.

For a while, there was a venting of compassion. At General hospital, the largest public hospital in Haiti, there was at one point too many doctors and too many supplies. People saw the need, and they opened their pocket books and booked their flights. I was often asked, “what can I do to help?” I said “wait 6 months, because too many people will forget, yet the need will still be there.” When I visited General hospital yesterday, there was hardly anything happening there. The operating tables that were donated looked desolate, and the rooms were empty. A handful of diligent Haitian nurses, who haven’t been paid in months, were trying to do the best they could with hardly any resources.

The largest private hospital in the city, which serviced the small percentage of Haitians that could pay for their health care, has chains on the doors and is shut down for business. Six months later, the need is still here, and in many ways, things are worse than ever.

It is true that clean water now exists in many places, and the predicted widespread outbreak of disease hasn’t happened. There are food distribution stations in many of the larger camps, and even schools that are starting up this summer. It is also true that many amputees are now walking around the rough roads of Port Au Prince with newly obtained prosthetic legs. But, too much has remained the same.

I saw a 6 month old girl, born just before the earthquake, who lay dying at Bernard Mevs hospital. She developed an infection, that untreated, turned into meningitis. Her head became large, as fluid had started to build up inside her brain, a condition known as hydrocephalus. She didn’t receive antibiotics in time, and now she was beyond treatment. The same stupid story. Six months later. Needless deaths, despite the generosity of millions all over the world. Source

Haiti: Key data on earthquake emergency relief published by MSF

Living conditions remain dire for thousands of Haitians

Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Published 08 July 2010

Six months after the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, the international medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has published a report describing the organization’s largest ever emergency response. The report also describes the dire living conditions of Haitians today and provides an explanation of MSF’s commitment in years to come.

MSF’s medical work in Haiti has evolved during the past six months, from an emergency response to a wider range of medical and relief activities. “Haitians were the first to respond to this disaster and we have reinforced their effort with a massive aid intervention. Today, medical provision for Haitians has improved, and is certainly more accessible than before the earthquake, allowing poor people to receive proper health care,” explains MSF Head of Mission Stefano Zannini, who was already in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake killed and/or injured hundreds of thousands and left over a million people without shelter.

However, the situation for many Haitians is still hugely precarious, while frustration grows among people who are disappointed with the pace of rehabilitation. “There is a staggering gap between the enthusiasm and promises for aiding the victims of the earthquake in the early weeks, and the dire reality on the ground after half a year,” adds Zannini.

MSF’s report publishes figures on the scale of its relief intervention. Up to May 31, in the first 138 days following the disaster, MSF staff treated more than 173,000 people and performed over 11,000 surgical procedures. More than 81,000 Haitians received support to help them cope with their psychological trauma. MSF brought in almost 27,000 tents and distributed more than 35,000 relief kits.

In the report, MSF describes some of the choices which had to be made in the first few weeks following the earthquake. For example, the extremely high number of injuries forced teams to focus almost exclusively on the stabilisation of patients and emergency surgery at the expense of other crucial activities. Finding locations for temporary medical facilities was done in haste as there was little time for more in-depth assessments.

An extraordinary number of foreign aid workers had to be brought into the country quickly; two months after the earthquake MSF had over 350 international staff in Haiti, since many Haitian health workers were also victims of the earthquake. This put a huge strain on MSF’s human resources and management capacity. MSF was eventually able to reduce the number of foreign workers, as more Haitians were hired to work in the organization’s facilities. By the end of May, 93 percent of MSF staff-members on the ground were Haitians.

MSF also reports that, up to May 31, around C$120 million was received in donations from the public earmarked for Haiti relief. The organization spent $70 million by that same date, including more than $14 million on surgery, $5 million on maternal health (MSF helped deliver 3,700 babies) and over $11 million on shelter. MSF foresees that, by the end of the year, it will have spent around $118 million on assistance to the Haitian population.

Although there are uncertainties around the speed of reconstruction and the extent to which other organizations will still provide health care, MSF commits to continue working for the victims of the earthquake in years to come.

“Health care was already fragile in Haiti before January 12,” says Dr. Unni Karunakara, the International President of MSF. “The earthquake destroyed much of the medical services that were available. It will take many years before the country is back on its feet. MSF is determined to play our part in rebuilding health care for Haitians and will dedicate our staff and means to this task as required.”

Source

Venezuela’s Chavez Forgives Haiti’s Debt

Haiti: The Miracle and the Nightmare

Could the Earthquake in Haiti be man made, the answer is Yes