Headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the U.N. report found that evidence indicates both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead”, which began on December 27, 2008.

The report recommended that allegations of war crimes by both parties be investigated.

The current text of the proposed Congressional resolution, H. Res. 867, contains numerous factual inaccuracies, beginning with the assertion that the U.N. inquiry had “pre-judged” its findings and was “one-sidedly” mandated to “investigate all violations of international human rights law and International Humanitarian Law by … Israel, against the Palestinian people … particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression”.

The actual mandate adopted on April 3 was “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The quoted text is not from the April 3 mandate, but from U.N. General Assembly resolution S-9/1 on January 12, 2009, which resulted in the later appointment of the mission by the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Also, omitted in the draft resolution’s reproduction of the text are the words “occupying Power” before “Israel”. Under international law, the occupying power is in fact obligated to investigate allegations of war crimes and violations of human rights.

The draft U.S. resolution states that the Goldstone report “makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks, which numbered in the thousands and spanned a period of eight years, by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel, that necessitated Israel’s defensive measures”.

But this criticism itself ignores the fact that even if Israel’s military operations were justifiable as “defensive measures”, Israel would still be legally obligated to conduct its operations in accordance with international law, and to conduct investigations into alleged war crimes conducted by its own forces.

The draft resolution also makes no mention of the relentless siege of Gaza by Israel, or the fact that Hamas had been strictly observing a cease-fire agreed to in June, only firing rockets after Israel had first violated that truce with repeated attacks against Gazans, a continuation of the crippling siege, and an airstrike and invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces on November 4 that ultimately resulted in the complete breakdown of the truce.

It also makes no mention of the fact that the Goldstone report contains a section dedicated to examining the impact of rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants on southern Israel, or that mission’s efforts to do so were impeded by Israel’s refusal to cooperate.

The draft resolution states that the U.N. mission “included a member who, before joining the mission, had already declared Israel guilty of committing atrocities in Operation Cast Lead by signing a public letter on January 11, 2009, published in the Sunday Times, that called Israel’s actions ‘war crimes’”.

That letter to the Sunday Times also stated, “We condemn the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings which are also contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes.”

But criticism of the Goldstone report on the similar basis that one of its members had beforehand declared Hamas guilty of war crimes is lacking in the draft resolution.

It calls the Goldstone report’s findings “that the Israeli military had deliberately attacked civilians during Operation Cast Lead” “unsubstantiated”. In fact, the 575 page report provides extensive documentation for its findings.

The draft resolution states that “the authors of the report, in the body of the report itself, admit that ‘we did not deal with the issues … regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and second-guessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers ‘ in the fog of war.’”

This is an outright fabrication. Those words do not in fact appear in the body of the actual report.

Those words actually come from an alleged e-mail from Richard Goldstone in which he explained why the U.N. report did not rely on a Colonel Kemp for its inquiry. The full text of the statement from that e-mail, replacing the part omitted in the draft resolution, reads “we did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas…” (emphasis added).

The draft resolution states that Richard Goldstone had been quoted in the October 16 edition of the Jewish daily Forward as saying, “If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven”.

But omitted is the further context of that remark in the same article, which added, “He recalled his work as chief prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia in 1994. When he began working, Goldstone was presented with a report commissioned by the U.N. Security Council based on what he said was a fact-finding mission similar to his own in Gaza.

“’We couldn’t use that report as evidence at all,’ Goldstone said. ‘But it was a useful roadmap for our investigators, for me as chief prosecutor, to decide where we should investigate. And that’s the purpose of this sort of report.”

The draft resolution asserts that the Goldstone report “in effect, denied the State of Israel the right to self-defense”, but offers no supporting evidence for this.

The Goldstone report found that “While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self-defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

The draft resolution states that “the report usually considered public statements made by Israeli officials not to be credible, while frequently giving uncritical credence to statements taken from what it called the ‘Gaza authorities’, i.e. the Gaza leadership of Hamas”, but offers no examples from the report.

The report does, in fact, question the credibility of Israeli officials. It notes in one instance that “it considers the credibility of Israel’s position damaged by the series of inconsistencies, contradictions and factual inaccuracies in the statements justifying the attack.”

In another example illustrating Israel’s lack of credibility, it “acknowledges that significant efforts [were] made by Israel to issue warnings”, but that “The credibility of instructions to move to city centres for safety was also diminished by the fact that the city centres themselves had been the subject of intense attacks”.

The Goldstone report also observed, “By refusing to cooperate with the Mission, the Government of Israel prevented it from meeting Israeli Government officials, but also from travelling to Israel to meet Israeli victims and to the West Bank to meet Palestinian Authority representatives and Palestinian victims.”

The U.N. report also noted that “In establishing its findings, the Mission sought to rely primarily and whenever possible on information it gathered first-hand. Information produced by others, including reports, affidavits and media reports, was used primarily as corroboration.”

The draft resolution asserts that “notwithstanding a great body of evidence that Hamas and other violent Islamist groups committed war crimes by using civilians and civilian institutions, such as mosques, schools, and hospitals, as shields, the report repeatedly downplayed or cast doubt upon that claim”.

The “great body of evidence” is an apparent reference to remarks from Israeli officials found to be demonstrably lacking in credibility, which were commonly simply repeated by U.S. officials and the mainstream media.

The U.N. mission did examine “whether and to what extent the Palestinian armed groups violated their obligation to exercise care and take all feasible precaution to protect the civilian population in Gaza” and found that “Palestinian armed groups were present in urban areas during the military operations and launched rockets from urban areas”.

But it “found no evidence, however, to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or that they forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.”

While there is no evidence that Hamas deliberately used civilians as human shields, the Goldstone report “investigated four incidents in which the Israeli armed forces coerced Palestinian civilian men at gunpoint to take part in house searches during the military operations” and concluded “that this practice amounts to the Use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and is therefore prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

The draft resolution, besides calling upon the White House and State Department to reject the Goldstone report and its recommendations, also “reaffirms its support for the democratic, Jewish State of Israel, for Israel’s security and right to self-defense, and, specifically for Israel’s right to defend its citizens from violent militant groups and their state sponsors.”

It makes no similar mention of the right of Palestinians to security and self-defense from Israel and its U.S. sponsor.

Human rights groups, including the Israeli organization B’Tselem, have called upon the international community to implement its recommendation that suspected violations of international law be investigated.

In one prominent example, on June 7, five days before Iran’s presidential election, the website Tehran Bureau reported:

In an open letter, a group of employees of Iran’s Interior Ministry (which supervises the elections) warned the nation that a hard-line ayatollah, who supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has issued a Fatwa authorizing changing votes in the incumbent’s favor.

According to Tehran Bureau, the letter stated:

After several polls taken by the government in May that indicated a rapid loss of support for the President, an ayatollah, who used to speak about political philosophy in Tehran’s public Friday prayers, held a confidential meeting with the elections’ supervisors. Quoting the Bagharah Soureh, verse 249, of the holy Quran, to justify vote fraud, he stated that,

“If someone is elected the president and hurts the Islamic values that have been spread [by Mr. Ahmadinejad] to Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela, and other places, it is against Islam to vote for that person. We should not vote for that person, and also warn people about that person. It is your religious duty as the supervisors of the elections to do so.”

According to Tehran Bureau’s translation, the letter said,

“After the meeting the elections supervisors, who had become happy and energetic for having obtained the religious fatwa to use any trick for changing the votes, began immediately to develop plans for it.”

Tehran Bureau adds that despite this alleged plot,

The letter ends by saying that a huge turnout by the people will nullify these unlawful attempts to rig the elections, and will save the nation from another four years of Mr. Ahmadinejad governance.

No author attribution is given for this article at Tehran Bureau. The site provided the text of the letter in Persian. But they offer nothing in the way of verification of its authenticity, and the letter itself is preceded by a brief introductory note. Similarly, no author for this introduction is given.

Did someone at Tehran Bureau write the introduction in Farsi? Or did they merely pass along the introductory note along with the text of the letter from another source? Why is the author’s name not given? Why is no source given? They offer not even the slightest hint of how they came by this letter. They say this is an “open letter”, so what, then, would be the problem with naming the source? Did these employees of the Interior Ministry who allegedly wrote the letter post it on a website somewhere? Did they publish it in a newspaper? Did they e-mail it directly to Tehran Bureau? Or did it perhaps originate from an opposition group, such as, perhaps, the campaign office of Mir Hossein Mousavi?

What’s more, if an ayatollah issued a “fatwa”, an opinion on matters relating to Islamic law, ordering the election to be rigged to result in a win for Ahmadinejad, why haven’t we heard about this elsewhere? While the claim has been widely circulated in alternative media and on blogs, the mainstream media has been silent on this one.

So who issued this “fatwa”? The letter as presented by Tehran Bureau simply says that it was “an ayatollah, who used to speak about political philosophy in Tehran’s public Friday prayers”. Tehran Bureau inserts its own speculation as to who this “ayatollah” is:

The reference to the “political philosophy preaching” person is clearly pointing to Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who used to do the preaching in Tehran’s Friday prayers. He is a reactionary cleric and the spiritual leader of the President and the hard-liners in the Basij militia and the armed forces.

From this report, the claim that Ayatollah Yazdi issued a fatwa commanding that the election be rigged to give Ahmadinejad a win would be circulated around the internet, asserted as fact, despite the total lack of verification or corroboration.

Tehran Bureau

Who is Tehran Bureau? Originally, it was a blog hosted by Blogspot.com. Tehran Bureau was announced in a press release on February 26 – little more four months prior to the election. The press release stated:

Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, M.S. ’05, M.A. ’06, has launched Tehran Bureau, an online news magazine. The blog-style site aims to separate fact from misinformation about Iran by having specialized, bilingual journalists from around the world report on the country.

There’s a little more about others involved:

At present, Niknejad divides her time between New York City and Boston. Fariba Pajooh is the chief correspondent in Tehran, while Jason Rezaian will cover the Iranian presidential campaign from the capital city. Leila Darabi ‘06 will contribute reporting from New York City. Other reporters are based in Isfahan in Iran, Dubai, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Florence and Berlin. Thor Neureiter will develop video for the Web site. Most of Tehran Bureau’s staff is bilingual.

And a little more about Niknejad:

Niknejad, who was born in Iran and lived there until age 17, is a lawyer-turned-journalist. As an M.S. student at the Journalism School, she specialized in newspaper reporting. The following year, Niknejad earned an M.A. in journalism with a focus on politics.

She has reported for the Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, California Lawyer and PBS/Frontline. Most recently, she was a staff reporter for the new English-language newspaper The National in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Niknejad is a syndicated columnist with Agence Global and a freelance producer and consultant on Iran to ABC News.

The press release concludes with this interesting statement (emphasis added): “A recurrent theme in Tehran Bureau’s coverage this year will be revolution and exile.”

The blog still exists in part. But the only content remaining there is the text of the “fatwa” letter.

Curiously, the domain TehranBureau.com is owned not by Niknejad, but by Jason Rezaian. Even more curiously, that domain name was created on June 12, 2008 – exactly one year to the day before Iran’s presidential election, and months before Niknejad says she set up Tehran Bureau in 2008, which was several months before she actually announced the launch of Tehran Bureau on Blogspot, which was prior to its actual move to TehranBureau.com.

And yet, despite having had the name registered for a year before the election, there’s no indication the domain was actually in use before Niknejad’s Tehran Bureau came along. The site is new enough that it doesn’t show up in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and Alexa shows little to no traffic to that domain until April, with a sharp spike in June as a result of their coverage of the election.

“Not an opposition news organization”

Tehran Bureau’s About page states:

Tehran Bureau is an independent news organization. It is not affiliated with or funded by any government, religious organization, political party, lobby or interest group. Yet it’s reporting has been most favorable to Mousavi. A prominent theme is that the election was stolen; a theme of which the alleged “fatwa” letter is but one example. Either in spite or because of this, Niknejad and Tehran Bureau have gotten some prominent and positive media attention.

In a June 17 op-ed in the Guardian entitled “Diaspora Iranians spreading the message”, David Mattin speaks of “the ‘green wave’ that was sweeping” Iran, which, the author and his friends “thought” would “install Mir Hossein Mousavi as president”. He adds towards the end:

For diaspora Iranians, then, the answer may lie in projects such as the brilliant Tehran Bureau, a news website that connects journalists, bloggers and photographers in Iran with those in the diaspora, set up by American-Iranian journalist Kelly Golnoush Niknejad.

So Tehran Bureau is considered an “answer” for Iranians who support Mousavi and the “green” revolution, the color Mousavi chose to represent his reformist party for the campaign.

The Associated Press called Tehran bureau “a must-read for many who closely followed the disputed re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

NPR called Tehran Bureau “one of the most reliable sources for news” on Iran while “the government of Iran cracks down on journalists there”. Noting the site’s success, NPR notes, “Tehran Bureau gets quoted now in the New York Times and has become well-known and respected.”

In an interview with NPR, Niknejad explained that she “just started posting” information “as fast as I could.” “The information was raw,” she said, and she “didn’t have time to sculpt it into stories”, so she would “just copy and paste to put out information.”

This method of copying and pasting information was similarly used by prominent commentators Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic’s “Daily Dish” and Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, both of whom were live-blogging events following the election and both of whom relied heavily on anonymous or unknown sources, such as Twitter users. The overriding theme of both Sullivan’s and Pitney’s blogs was the fraudulent nature of the election and the brutal response by the government attempting to silence those protesting the vote. Their respective blogs became rumor mills, flooded with completely unverifiable information, but always favorable to Mousavi and his supporters.

NPR notes that “Niknejad also knows her site is big enough now to be noticed by the Iranian government. She publishes most reports without bylines.” As noted previously, the piece on the “open letter” was published without author attribution. So here, despite being characterized as “one of the most reliable sources for news” by the mainstream media, we have an acknowledgment that Tehran Bureau would simply “copy and paste” information about events in Iran without attribution or sourcing.

A June 20 piece in the Boston Globe called Tehran Bureau “a go-to source” for news on Iran. It notes that the site is “edited from Niknejad’s parents’ living room in Newton”, a Boston suburb, and quotes Niknejad saying, “Everybody thinks this is some kind of extensive bureau, but it’s just me”.

But it’s not “just” Niknejad. As we’ve seen, the site is actually owned by someone else, who registered the domain months before Niknejad launched her blog, which then was only later moved to the domain owned by Jason Rezaian.

The Boston Globe article quotes Niknejad saying, “Tehran Bureau is not an opposition news organization.” The article explains:

The English-language site has generated a lot of attention over the past few weeks as tensions escalated over allegations of electoral fraud by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. When demonstrators were shot and communication with the West was curtailed in a government clampdown, Tehran Bureau’s stream of news alerts and Twitter feeds became a valued source of information cited by The New York Times and other Western news organizations.

The Globe offers some further information about Niknejad:

Niknejad’s family emigrated from Iran to San Diego when she was 17, after living through the Iranian Revolution and the first stage of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. She went on to study law, and then got two master’s degrees from the Columbia Journalism School. Her parents moved to the Boston area seven years ago. She has not returned to Iran since she left in 1984, but she found herself pulled constantly toward her native land, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. This past September, she returned to Boston from nearly a year of reporting for an English-language newspaper in Dubai – a major Persian Gulf listening post for events in Iran – and resolved to launch a blog.

The “listening post” of Dubai

Dubai certainly is a “major Persian Gulf listening post for events in Iran”. The State Department called Dubai a “natural location” for a regional office due to its “proximity to Iran and access to an Iranian diaspora.”

That was in a State Department cable discussing the creation of the Office of Iranian Affairs (OIA) under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The OIA sought to “reach out to the Iranian people” and recruit more Iran experts and Persian-speaking officers into the Foreign Service, the Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), and other branches of the State Department.

According to the cable, the Dubai office of the OIA would be modeled on the listening station in the Latvian capital of Riga to gather information on the Soviet Union during the 1920s.

The Iranian media has called the OIA the “regime-change office”. A State Department official based in Dubai denied that, saying “It is not some recruiting office and is not organizing the next revolution in Iran.”

As British writer Claud Cockburn famously said, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”

The leaked State Department cable said that the Deputy Director of the Dubai station would be responsible for seeking “ways to use USG programs and funding to support Iranian political and civic organizations” and “to alert Washington on [the] need to issue statements on behalf of Iranian dissidents.”

And a State Department senior official told CNN that the purpose of the OIA was “to facilitate a change in Iranian policies and actions”.

The OIA was established in 2006 under funding from Congress allocated “to mount the biggest ever propaganda campaign against the Tehran government,” in the words of the Guardian. The Christian Science Monitor reported candidly that the “implicit goal” of the funding was “regime change from within”.

The Obama administration has continued support for Iranian dissident groups through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been soliciting applications for $20 million in grants to “promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Iran” even while President Obama insists that the U.S. “is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs”.

In a report on the funding, USA Today observed that “The State Department and USAID decline to name Iran-related grant recipients for security reasons.” In other words, the Obama administration doesn’t want the strings attached to Iranian dissident groups to be seen, a policy much more in line of critics of the Bush administration’s overt financing for the promotion of regime change.

It’s reasonable to assume that the UAE remains a central hub for U.S. efforts to further the U.S. policy of regime change, enshrined in law under the guise of the Iran Freedom Support Act, which authorizes the President “to provide financial and political assistance (including the award of grants) to foreign and domestic individuals, organizations, and entities working for the purpose of supporting and promoting democracy for Iran.”

In another example, the State Department subcontracted an initiative to develop a news website to provide information to Iranians through new media and to recruit Iranian journalists to contribute to the effort to “promote democracy”, the usual euphemism.

Obama’s “hands-off” approach has been looked upon much more favorably than Bush’s overt support for Iranian groups seeking regime change by the leadership of opposition groups themselves. Niknejad has herself been a critic of the Bush administration’s overt strategy for regime change.

Niknejad has written elsewhere that she was “the diplomatic affairs correspondent for a new English-language newspaper” in the capital of the UAE.

In what has been called a cold war between Iran and the United States, the UAE has emerged as a Vienna of sorts – a place where America’s Iran-watchers can mingle with thousands of Iranians. One hub for this is the expanded Iran Desk at the U.S. consulate in Dubai, the more cosmopolitan UAE city-state up the coast from the capital. If Iranians are suspicious of journalists, it’s partly because our reporting jobs can seem like the perfect cover to gather intelligence.

As they often are. She criticized the Congressional funding for the OIA, however, saying:

Things got worse the following year, when the Bush administration asked Congress for tens of millions of dollars to secretly fund NGOs and activists to destabilize the Iranian government. It stoked government paranoia and became an effective tool in the hands of officials who have used it to stifle dissent and spread fear.

The objection, in this widely shared criticism of the Bush administration, generally isn’t that the U.S. is engaging in such activities, just that by doing so in such a blatant and open manner it actually undermined the efforts of Iranian dissident and opposition groups struggling to accomplish a change of government in Iran. In other words, the U.S. shouldn’t be perceived as interfering in Iranian affairs. The implied corollary is that if the U.S. is going to interfere, it should do so in a manner that allows it a measure of plausible deniability – something the U.S. didn’t have under Bush.

Niknejad offered a little more information on the English-language newspaper she was writing for:

At that time, the circumstances in the UAE were stacked against me. The paper I was writing for had no name and was still months away from being published. As we started dry runs, I wrote stories on deadline for a paper with no name that no one outside the newsroom saw.

As noted in the press release announcing the launch of Tehran Bureau, the paper she was referring to is The National out of Abu Dhabi, owned by the Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC). According to the ADMC website:

Abu Dhabi Media Company is a vertically integrated media company created in 2007 as a public joint stock company from the assets of Emirates Media Incorporated…. The company is headquartered in Abu Dhabi with offices in Cairo, Dubai and Washington D.C.

Emirates Media Incorporated (EMI) was established in 1999 by the government of the UAE under the Ministry of Information and Culture. Financing for EMI includes funding includes grants. The Minister of Information Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayid described it by saying, “the Government has relinquished formal control over the country’s largest media group. Emirates Media Incorporated now enjoys editorial and administrative independence. It remains somewhat dependent, however, on government funding, while ownership is still officially vested in the government.”

In 2006, EMI worked with the BBC World Service to set up Radio Al Mirbad to broadcast information covering southern Iraq while it was still occupied by the British military. The BBC’s Persian service, of course, has been accused by Iran of fomenting unrest such as by encouraging protests to dispute the election results.

“We stand with them and support them”

On one hand, Niknejad says Tehran Bureau is “not an opposition news organization”. On the other hand, a principle source for her reporting on events in Iran is a member of the Mousavi election campaign, a fact she revealed during an event coordinated to teach people how to show “solidarity” with pro-Mousavi Iranians.

Niknejad is a member of The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA). On June 23, AMEJA held a teach-in to discuss the ongoing events in Iran following the election. The teach-in was webcast on the Voices from Iran website, which was created the day prior to the event and which has little content other than an embedded video of webcast, hosted on USTREAM.

During the event, the terms “pro-Mousavi” and “pro-democracy” were curiously used synonymously, despite an admission at the beginning that calling Mousavi’s campaign “pro-democracy” was perhaps “wishful thinking”.

The first speaker at the event was Arang Keshavarzian, Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He spoke on how the protests that erupted following the election were “not spontaneous”, but rather organized by the young volunteers who gravitated to Mousavi’s campaign and had learned how to organize and distribute information prior to the election. Various organizations were also involved, such as women’s organizations, journalist organizations, youth organizations, and others. The protests, he said, were an “outgrowth” of the campaigning in early June.

One prominent organization campaigning for women’s rights in Iran is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation (ABF) in Washington D.C., a recipient of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is mandated financing under U.S. law from the Congress, despite its pretense of being a “non-governmental organization”.

Another group that has received substantial funding from NED is the National Iranian American Council, which has been granted money in part to carry out a “media training workshop” to train participants in public relations and otherwise support groups both within and outside Iran.

Interestingly, Keshavarzian also listed “election irregularities” included in the “fatwa”, including the charge that mobile polling stations the printing of a large number of extra ballots were suspicious activities. He also stated that Mousavi’s campaign headquarters had been attacked, and that all these things were evidence of fraud. Every one of these claims can be traced to Tehran Bureau.

Even more interestingly, he said that the Mousavi campaign had showed great foresight in their pre-election efforts. “Their narrative that they constructed prior to the election fit in nicely into the events after the election”, he said. Presumably, this includes the narrative that the election would be stolen that he had just outlined from information that had appeared before the election took place, such as the “fatwa” letter.

As Paul Craig Roberts has observed, “Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote.”

When Iran declared the results of the election early, the charge was made that “the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted”.

Another speaker, journalist Kouross Esmaeli, also a member of AMEJA, addressed the question of how to show “solidarity” with Mousavi’s supporters protesting in the streets. “We stand with them and support them,” he said. But he also urged caution against the perception of U.S. interference and said that any connection of the protests with U.S. “imperialism” would taint them and serve only to undermine them.

Perhaps the most interesting comments, though, came from Niknejad. She explained more about her reporting of events in Iran and her sources from which she would “copy and paste” onto Tehran Bureau. She explained that she used Facebook and other social networking sites for information, until the Iranian government shut such websites down. Then “it was very difficult for us”, she said, to get information.

But she did mention one source that was able to continue to provide information. “I was connected to someone that I know very well”, she explained, “and that I trust very much, who works – who happens to work – at the Mousavi campaign. So we were getting, you know, almost like minute by minute updates on what was going on there.”

Among the information received from the source at the Mousavi campaign was that the campaign headquarters was “stormed by militia” (evidence of election funny-business, remember, from the previous speaker), of which Niknejad emphasized, “I knew it was coming from a very credible source”.

Niknejad also explained how, based on the information this source who “happens” to work for the Mousavi campaign (purely a coincidence), it looked like “Mousavi was winning” early on. This just “happens” to fit perfectly with the “narrative” constructed by the Mousavi campaign early on to be used following the election in order to try to discredit the election and to call for its result to be nullified (surely another strange coincidence).

Niknejad also rightly observed how the information Tehran Bureau would “copy and paste” from sources such as someone working for Mousavi’s campaign was picked up off of Twitter and posted on other blogs, making “Tehran Bureau a source of information” about the election and subsequent events.

Niknejad also claimed that Tehran Bureau was “hacked”, the implication being that it was targeted by the Iranian regime. She explained that when she tried to log on and do other things with the site, it became very slow.

There’s a much simpler explanation for this, which is the enormous increase in bandwidth the new site was faced with (visible in a dramatic spike on Alexa) very suddenly at the time of the election. This alternative explanation would also fit with what she said next, that they had a company called MidPhase that put the website back up. In other words, Tehran Bureau changed hosting plans – no doubt to a plan on a new server that included more bandwidth allocation.

But the claim that the website was “hacked” by the Iranian government fits in much more nicely with the constructed “narrative”.

Another interesting point was made during the question and answer session. One of the panelists warned, without so much as a hint of recognition of the irony, to be wary because there is a lot of “misinformation” coming out on Facebook and Twitter – from the Iranian regime. We have to find sources that we trust, therefore, the panelist continued, like Tehran Bureau, which gets its information from trusted sources like members of Mousavi’s election campaign. Again, there was no indication whatsoever that the speaker was aware of the irony.

The differentiating variable becomes clear: information sympathetic towards the Iranian regime is deemed not credible while information sympathetic towards Mousavi and his reformist supporters is considered trusted. This is simply a matter of faith.

The ‘Fatwa’ letter and ‘talk of a ‘green revolution’

The Guardian on June 8, a day after Tehran Bureau had posted the “open letter” claim, reported another useful part of the “narrative” constructed prior to the election: “Experts agree the higher the turnout the greater the chance that Mousavi will unseat Ahmadinejad, possibly in a second round run-off. Iran’s interior ministry said it was hoping for a record turnout among the country’s 46 million voters.”

So if it turns out there is a high turnout and Ahmadinejad wins, it must therefore be a dubious result, if we trust the unknown “Experts”. This part of the “narrative” is eerily similar to the assertion in the “fatwa” letter itself that a high turnout could serve to counteract the regime’s alleged attempts to fix the election. And the Guardian report refers to that letter in the very next sentence: “But there was no response to a report that ministry employees were instructed to rig the election results on the basis of a fatwa – religious edict – from a pro-Ahmadinejad ayatollah.”

Tehran Bureau is the named source of this “report”.

On June 9, still three days before the election, the website Rooz ran an article on the “fatwa” entitled “Mesbah Yazdi’s Decree to Rig Votes”. The website is published by a self-described “reformist journalist” as a part of the Iran Gooya media group.

Rooz has prominent ad links to WashingtonTV, a “Washington, D.C.-based news site” offered in both English and Persian. Curiously, that website was launched in early May, barely a month before the Iranian presidential election. And that site’s “About” page interestingly states:

With the approach of Iran’s tenth presidential election, to be held on 12 June 2009, the site is also devoting a special section to daily updates of news and events on the election.

It also states that “WashingtonTV has writers and contributors in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including contributions by citizen journalists from inside Iran.” The website is registered by Proxy, Inc. through GoDaddy.com, Inc. This is a means of protecting the privacy of the registrant.

Why would a legitimate news organization want to hide its organizational information? If you do a WHOIS lookup of the New York Times website, for example, you’ll see that it is registered to “New York Times Digital, 620 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10018, US”. There are administrative and technical contacts. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, etc., are all registered to their respective news corporations, with organization street addresses and contact phone numbers and e-mail address.

There is some contact information available on the WashingtonTV website. The phone numbers are all area code 202, Washington, D.C. In fact, they’re all the same number, 470-3030. The News Desk, Video Production Lab, Advertising Department, Editors, and more are all the same phone number, with only three different extensions between them.

There is also a mailing address given. However, it’s to a P.O. box with ZIP code 20043-4151. A lookup of ZIP code 20043 on the U.S. Postal Service website reveals that this ZIP code is a “Special Case”. What are special cases? They include cases where “The ZIP CodeTM is used for a specific company or organization.” It could also be a military ZIP Code: “Military – This is a military specific ZIP code for an APO/FPO (Air/Army Post Office or Fleet Post Office) or a domestic military installation.” Or it could be: “PO Box Only – This ZIP Code is for a specific PO Box.”

In other words, this ZIP Code doesn’t exist, except for by use by a single organization, the U.S. military, or a single P.O. Box – or a perfect cover, perhaps, for an intelligence black propaganda or PSYOPS operation.

Rooz is also registered through a proxy. While there are numerous proxy services available (many servers provide them), it happens to also be by Proxy, Inc. through GoDaddy.com.

As already noted, Rooz’s “About” page states, confusingly, that it is published by “an independent and reformist journalist”, but also states that the “Publisher” is “Iran Gooya media group, registered in France on January 21, 2005”.

Gooya is a website that has come up repeatedly in my investigations into numerous claims that have been made throughout the events that followed the election. The site’s homepage has prominent ads for BBC Persian, the Voice of America Persian News Network, and Radio Farda.

The VOA and Radio Farda are operated out of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and are prohibited from broadcasting into the U.S. because it would violate the Smith-Mundt Act, which forbids USIA (the Ministry of Propaganda, if we drop the Orwellian euphemism) from being used “to influence public opinion”.

Gooya is similarly registered through the same proxy as Rooz. Its news website similarly features ads for BBC Persian, the VOA Persian, and Radio Farda.

Returning to the alleged “fatwa” letter, Rooz reported:

Following the discovery of a “Fatwa” (”religious decree”) issued by ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi which sanctions cheating in Friday’s presidential election and was published in an open letter written by a group of Ministry of Interior employees, the heads of the Election Supervision Committees established by reformist candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi sent a letter to the head of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Jannati, warning about the possibility of manipulating election results.

This article states that the alleged letter “has been signed by a number of Ministry of Interior employees”. Interestingly, the text of the letter at Tehran Bureau had no signatures. Rooz adds: “The letter does not reveal the identity of the seminary school professor, but describes the qualities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s spiritual guide, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi.”

According to the translation of the letter, the “fatwa” supposedly issued by Yazdi stated:

If someone is elected president whereby Islamic principles that are currently on the rise in Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela and other parts of the world, start diminishing, it is Haraam [forbidden by Islam] to vote for that person. We shouldn’t vote for that person and we should inform the people not to vote for him either, or else. For you, as administrators of the election, everything is permitted to this end.

The “fatwa” also appeared in an article in Newsmax by Kenneth Timmerman. Writing a day before the election, Timmerman followed the “narrative”: “As the wildest campaign of the past 30 years winds down, Iranians are worried that their votes won’t decide the result of the election Friday. Instead, they fear, the unelected officials at Iran’s Interior Ministry in charge of counting those votes will sway the outcome.”

Timmerman provides some further insightful information about the “fatwa” letter:

Supporters of “reformist” candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, with the backing of the Persian Service of Voice of America, claim to have discovered a secret “fatwa” or religious ruling issued by a radical cleric close to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They contend that it encourages bureaucrats at the Interior Ministry to do “whatever it takes” to get their man elected…. The “fatwa” was revealed in an open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei from a pro-Mousavi group of Interior Ministry officials, who asked him to intervene to keep the election fair.

Thus, if Timmerman is correct, the “open letter” was an example of a “copy and paste” job by Tehran Bureau of information propagated by the Mousavi campaign and the VOA.

Timmerman also reported that while there was a movement among opposition groups both in Iran and the U.S. (and elsewhere) to boycott the election, the VOA had “urged Iranians to go to the polls no matter what” in coverage slanted towards Mousavi:

Well-respected parties, including the Iran Nation’s Party, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, Marze Por Gohar (Glorious Frontiers), and others have called for a boycott. But in recent weeks, editors and supervisors at the Voice of America’s Persian Service have banned them from the airwaves.

“It would be one thing if they just closed their eyes,” Roozbeh Farahanipour, a spokesman for Marze Por Gohar, told Newsmax. “But it’s as if the State Department and Voice of America had become campaign advisers to Mousavi.”

Some Iranians believe that has happened.

Saeed Behbehani, the owner of Mihan TV in suburban Washington, D.C., says he recently spoke with a well-known Iranian-American businessman who boasts of his ties to the State Department and who just returned from a trip to Dubai. The businessman said he met with Mousavi’s campaign manager, Mehdi Khazali.

“The day after they met, VOA put Khazali on the air,” Behbehani said.

Some of the VOA broadcasters themselves are upset at how slanted the U.S.-taxpayer funded network has become.

Timmerman also had this prescient comment (again, recall this was one day prior to the election): “And then, there’s the talk of a “green revolution” in Tehran, named for the omnipresent green scarves and banners that fill the air at Mousavi campaign events.”

The “green revolution” as it has since come to be called, refers to protestors who support Mousavi and charge that Ahmadinejad’s win was the result of electoral fraud. Why would there be talk of a “green revolution” before the election results were announced? Unless, of course, it was all part of the “narrative”, planned beforehand to lead to the protests – which were “not spontaneous”, we may recall – in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime.

Timmerman continues with a perhaps even more extraordinary acknowledgment about the role of the NED (emphasis added):

The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting “color” revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.

Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.

And Kenneth Timmerman, as Daniel McAdams has pointed out, is perhaps in as good a position as anyone to know. He’s the President and CEO of The Foundation for Democracy, “established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.” He’s also the author of the book Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

The claim of the “fatwa” was picked up by Jeremy J. Stone and repeated in the Huffington Post in a piece entitled “How the Iranian Election Was Stolen”. Stone touts the report from Tehran Bureau as evidence for his assertion that the election was stolen:

According to an open letter of early June by a group of employees who work on elections in the Interior Ministry — after May polls showed that Ahmadinejad would lose the election – [Iranian Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah] Yazdi gave the Interior Ministry employees a Fatwa, a religious degree, authorizing the changing of votes.

Muhammad Sahimi likewise repeated the claim at Antiwar, stating matter-of-factly that the results of the election had been “rigged” and describing it as an “election coup”. The men behind this “coup” have as their “spiritual leader” Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the person who allegedly issued the “fatwa” for the elections to be rigged. Sahimi states without qualification (and without a source) that: “Two weeks before the elections Mesbah issued a secret fatwa – which was leaked by some in the Interior Ministry – authorizing the use of any means to reelect Ahmadinejad, hence giving the green light for rigging the elections.”

This is the only piece of evidence in the entire article to support the assertion that the election was “rigged”.

“As loony and baseless as possible”

The Iranian regime, of course, has claimed that the U.S., Britain, and Israel are behind the claims of a fraudulent election. “Americans and Zionists sought to destabilize Iran”, asserted Intelligence Minister Mohseni Ejei, rejecting allegations of vote rigging.

While remarks from Iranian government officials are certainly not evidence for it, it nevertheless certainly remains a perfectly plausible explanation, despite a strong tendency by commentators in the U.S. media, both mainstream and alternative, corporate news and blogs, not only to dismiss the possibility, but to portray the very suggestion as an absurdity.

Noted journalist Fareed Zakaria explained this phenomenon quite candidly. He begins with an acknowledgment:

And it is worth remembering that the United States still funds guerrilla outfits and opposition groups that are trying to topple the Islamic Republic. Most of these are tiny groups with no chance of success, funded largely to appease right-wing members of Congress. But the Tehran government is able to portray this as an ongoing anti-Iranian campaign.

Notice his use of the word “portray”. The Iranian regime “is able to portray” an ongoing anti-government campaign “as an ongoing anti-Iranian campaign.” Again, the issue isn’t what the facts are, but what the perceptions are. Zakaria then praises President Obama’s response to events in Iran, saying, “In this context, President Obama has been right to tread cautiously — for the most part — to extend his moral support to Iranian protesters but not get politically involved.”

Remember, it’s not that funding “guerilla outfits and opposition groups that are trying to topple the Islamic Republic” isn’t being “politically involved”. It’s simply that Obama has wisely, and not without success, created the perception of being politically detached. With this as his framework, Zakaria concludes:

Ahmadinejad is also a politician with considerable mass appeal. He knows that accusing the United States and Britain of interference works in some quarters. Our effort should be to make sure that those accusations seem as loony and baseless as possible. Were President Obama to get out in front, vociferously supporting the protests, he would be helping Ahmadinejad’s strategy, not America’s.

So, accusations that the U.S. is interfering in Iran are true. But acknowledging that would be strategically unwise. “Our effort” – and by “our” Zakaria presumably includes journalists like himself – should not be to report the truth (drawing the obvious corollary), but to work to discredit anyone who observes that the long arm of the U.S. has certainly not been withdrawn from Iranian affairs.

There is a vast amount of unverified or, in some cases, verifiably false information floating around, often originating from sources with a clear bias. Tehran Bureau’s use as a primary source someone who is a member of the Mousavi campaign is just one notable example. Information from such sources is then spread around the internet, sometimes with viral effect, without attribution or sourcing and with a completely uncritical eye. This is often on account of the commentator’s own bias, such as the assumption of the teach-in Niknejad participated in that we should express “solidarity” with the “pro-democracy” – that is to say, the “pro-Mousavi” – movement.

Our effort should not be to take sides in an election campaign in a foreign sovereign nation, but rather to make the best effort to be objective and, far from reporting only that information which suits our own personal political ideology, to discern from the available information in an effort to learn the truth.

Regrettably, numerous commentators on recent events in Iran obviously disagree, preferring instead the creed of Fareed Zakaria.

But setting aside the platitudes that comprised most of Clinton’s speech and looking closely at her remarks that actually spoke meaningfully towards U.S. policy under the Obama, a different picture emerges, one not of a change of course from Bush but rather of near perfect continuity between the two administrations.

Obama’s foreign policy parallels Bush’s. The train may have switched tracks, but it’s still headed in the same direction.

Take, for starters, the framework Clinton established early on in her speech. “Liberty, democracy, justice and opportunity underlie our priorities”, she said. “Some accuse us of using these ideals to justify actions that contradict their very meaning. Others say we are too often condescending and imperialistic, seeking only to expand our power at the expense of others. And yes, these perceptions have fed anti-Americanism, but they do not reflect who we are.”

See, U.S. foreign policy doesn’t really contradict enlightened rhetoric and declarations of benevolent intent from policy makers. The U.S. isn’t really condescending or imperialistic. It doesn’t really seek only to expand its power at the expense of others. No, these are merely “perceptions”, and false ones. The obvious corollary is that we musn’t change our policies, only work to correct these warped perceptions that cause people to unjustly oppose U.S. actions.

It hardly needs to be said that there’s nothing new about that formula.
The multilateralism touted by Obama is different from Bush’s unilateralism, but only slightly. The difference is that Bush openly declared that if you aren’t with us, you’re against us. Obama’s team is being more nuanced and diplomatic in talking about building the “architecture of global cooperation.”

But in the end, it’s still about furthering U.S. interests as percieved by Washington and the corporate oligarchy. Cooperation and multilateralism, as it was under Bush, is fine, so long as it serves our “interests” as defined by that minority segment of the population. Obama’s strategy is quite different in terms of rhetoric about diplomacy, but the actual policy goal goals are indistinguishable from previous administrations.

One means by which policy goals are accomplished is through NATO, a matter that Clinton addressed. She observed that NATO was designed for the Cold War. But rather than becoming obsolete with the end of the Cold War, even now, two decades later, NATO must instead be restructured “to update its strategic concept so that it is as effective in this century as it was in the last.”

This is precisely the same policy as previous administrations.
Or take Clinton’s remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She says the Obama administration “wasted no time in starting an intensive effort on day one to realize the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace and security in two states.”

President Bush said exactly the same thing in not dissimilar language, only to implement an actual policy that fully supported Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, including it’s 23-day full-scale military assault on Gaza beginning December 27.

U.S. policy under Obama hasn’t altered that framework one iota. The House of Representatives, for example, just approved Obama’s foreign aid budget that rewards Israel for it’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and other violations of international law with an additional $2.2 billion, on top of $555 million already allocated earlier this year.

Still, we are supposed to believe that the Obama administration is doing something “to ease the living conditions of Palestinians, and create circumstances that can lead to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.” Clinton offers no evidence that the U.S. has done anything more than spout rhetoric about this, rendered meaningless by the U.S.’s actual actions.

Bush and Obama alike have paid lip service to the rights and aspirations of the Palestinians, but the actual facts about U.S. foreign policy point to an opposite conclusion from the one Clinton would have the public believe.

Clinton’s remarks on Iran similarly reflect perfect continuity from the Bush administration framework, asserting “the Iranian march toward a nuclear weapon” as fact, despite the complete lack of evidence to support the claim, and even the conclusion of the U.S.’s own intelligence community to the contrary.

The Obama administration has made it’s position clear. It is willing to engage in “diplomacy” with Iran. The proposed “dialogue” and offer “to engage Iran” would entail “giving its leaders a clear choice: whether to join the international community as a responsible member” by acquiescing to U.S. demands to halt uranium enrichment, “or to continue down a path to further isolation” by refusing to accept the U.S. ultimatum.

This policy doesn’t differ from Bush’s one jot or one tittle, except inasmuch as it is an escalation of the Bush policy. “We remain ready to engage with Iran,” Clinton reminds us, “but the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.”

As Clinton has explained earlier, sanctions even more stringent than those imposed under Bush, “crippling sanctions” in her words, will follow. Iran must be punished for refusing to bow to the will of Washington, and if there’s a change, it’s that Obama is even more eager than Bush to inflict it.

The policy formula for Afghanistan and Pakistan is familiar enough: “In Afghanistan and Pakistan, our goal is to disrupt, dismantle, and ultimately defeat al-Qaida and its extremist allies, and to prevent their return to either country.” This warrants little comment, other than the observation that Obama hasn’t only continued Bush’s policy here, but escalated it by “sending an additional 17,000 troops and 4,000 military trainers to Afghanistan.”

Or take Iraq, where the Obama administration is “developing a long-term economic and political relationship … as outlined by the US-Iraq Strategic Framework Agreement” that was implemented under the Bush administration. No comment is required here.

And what about U.S. policy towards “enemy combatants”? Clinton asserted, “We renewed our own values by prohibiting torture” — but torture has always been prohibited under U.S. law. Obama’s Executive Order didn’t do anything new, it merely reiterated already existing prohibitions.

Clinton said the administration is “beginning to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.” What she meant is that they’ve begun the process of beginning the process to close “Gitmo.” It’s a long ways from actually closing, and there’s plenty of opposition and other obstacles to overcome before this can happen, assuming the administration is sincere in its stated desire to shut Gitmo down.

There’s little reason to doubt their sincerity; shutting down Gitmo would be a useful way to do away with what has become a symbol for the unjustness of U.S. detention policy while doing little or nothing to actually alter that policy.

Obama, for instance, has not challenged, but accepted and reinforced the assumption of Executive power employed under the Bush administration under which detainees were captured and imprisoned in Gitmo in the first place.

On policy issue after policy issue, the continual torrrent of media commentary to the contrary aside, the Obama administration represents a continuation of the existing power establishment and goals and means of furthering U.S. strategic interests as defined by that very narrow and entirely self-interested segment of American society.

The CFR itself is among the prominent means by which these narrow interests perpetuate themselves. Clinton, herself a member, made some telling offhand remarks before beginning her scripted speech. Remarking on the CFR’s new headquarters in Washington, D.C., she said, “I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to I guess the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”

And so it goes, business as usual.

Obama criticized the Bush administration’s use of the commissions, however, and announced that his administration would make several changes. “We will no longer permit the use … as evidence statements that have been obtained using cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods,” he said.

“We will no longer place the burden to prove that hearsay is unreliable on the opponent of the hearsay. And we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel, and more protections if they refuse to testify.”

Obama’s plan is to use military commissions to try detainees held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which he has ordered closed by the end of the year.

The first problem with Obama’s continuation of Bush’s policy, albeit a “kinder, gentler” version of it, to borrow Glenn Greenwald’s tongue-in-cheek description, is that “the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves”, as Greenwald observed last week.

“The controversy … was grounded in the argument that there was absolutely no reason other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.”

One thing Obama isn’t changing is the fact that the detainees are considered “unlawful enemy combatants” under the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Under the Act, and “unlawful enemy combatant” means anyone who has “engaged in hostilities” against the U.S., “including a person who is part of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or associated forces.” That pretty much includes anyone who has exercised his right to take up arms against the foreign invading and occupying U.S. forces in Afghanistan — a right protected under the U.N. Charter, which recognizes “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense” against armed attack.

A “lawful enemy combatant”, by contrast, is a member of a regular, uniformed army, under the military commissions.

To understand the significance of this distinction and its application under the military commissions, by this logic, un-uniformed members of the state militias fighting the British Redcoats during the American Revolutionary War must be considered to have been “unlawful enemy combatants” — a determination the officers of King George’s army would no doubt have agreed with.

Furthermore, if we apply the standard, we must reject the notion that the colonists had any kind of inherent right of individual or collective self-defense against the British forces attempting to enforce the King’s rule in the colonies.

If we are unwilling to accept such conclusions, then the alternative must be that we reject the standard applied under the military commissions.

One might object to this on the basis of it drawing a comparison between American revolutionary militia men and members of al Qaeda and the Taliban, but, all else aside, this objection ignores the fact that under the military commissions, one is defined as a member of “al Qaeda” or the “Taliban” simply by virtue of the fact that one has taken up arms against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Moreover, individuals being held in prisons such as the facilities at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not necessarily even among those who have exercised their right to take up arms against a foreign military occupation.

One of the methods by which the U.S. captured such individuals was by handing out thousands of dollars in cash rewards to people who would turn in members of “al Qaeda” or the “Taliban.”

One doesn’t have to be a genius to see the flaw in this plan. Obviously, cash, particularly in the amount given by the U.S. in as poor a country as Afghanistan, is a pretty tempting incentive to turn over someone’s name to the U.S. as being among the “enemy”, whether they actually are or not. We don’t know which of the detainees were actually participating in hostilities and which of those simply had the bad luck of being in the wrong place in the wrong time and maybe being guilty of making one of their neighbors angry enough to seek revenge by giving their names to the U.S.

Or they may not have been guilty of even that, but rather just turned over by strangers who had no other reason for doing so other than wanting to receive $5,000 in cold, hard cash.

Under the military commissions, “hearsay evidence” is explicitly admissible so long as the accused can’t demonstrate “that the evidence is unreliable or lacking in probative value.”

In other words, the burden of proof is on the accused, rather than the accuser.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 states explicitly, “A statement obtained by use of torture shall not be admissible in a military commission.”

But the Bush administration got around that clause simply by defining torture as not-torture. Torture was simply redefined as some kind of legitimate “interrogation method,” albeit an admittedly “harsh” one.

And evidence obtained from “harsh interrogation methods” isn’t excluded under the military commissions.

Under the military commissions, “Evidence shall be admissible if the military judge determines that the evidence would have probative value to a reasonable person.”

How “probative value” and “reasonable” are defined is apparently left up to the military judge who makes the determination of what evidence is admissible.

Also, statements of detainees “shall not be excluded from trial by military commission on grounds of alleged coercion or compulsory self-incrimination” so long as the “coercion” doesn’t amount to “torture.”

But evidence obtained through “cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods” is allowed, so long as “the military judge of the military commission determines that there is sufficient basis to find that the evidence is what it is claimed to be.”

So if by such means a confession is extracted out of a detainee, all that needs to happen for that coerced confession to be admissible is for the judge to say there is a sufficient basis that the confession is a true confession. Now Obama has announced that hearsay will no longer be admissible as evidence under the military commissions.

But that’s unlikely to be of any great comfort for anyone who has already lost years of his life wasting away in a U.S. military prison facility based solely on just such hearsay.

Other “evidence,” including confessions coerced under what Obama euphemistically calls “cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods,” which in some cases amounts to torture, are also to be thrown out under Obama’s revised military commissions.

So Obama is lowering the bar a little bit, saying that interrogation methods need not rise to the level of “torture” to be excluded as evidence, only to the level of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods.” But the Obama administration may still define such interrogation methods any way they see fit, just as the Bush administration defined “torture” in a way that allowed detainees to be beaten, threatened with harm or death, placed in painful stress positions, or given a bit of the old “water torture.”

So another thing Obama isn’t changing about the military commissions is the Executive’s claim to be able to interpret or define the law.

In other words, Obama isn’t changing Bush’s claim to authoritarian powers anathema to the U.S. Constitution and the republican form of government it establishes, with three branches, each serving as a check and balance against the others.

To sum up, Obama won’t change the fact that under the military commissions, the U.S. has declared to the world that it has the right to invade and occupy a foreign sovereign nation, that it rejects the right of the native inhabitants of that nation to exercise “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense”, that it may deem any person of that nation as an “unlawful enemy combatant” without any evidence whatsoever that the individual was actually even engaged in hostilities, and that it may imprison such individuals for an undetermined length of time without granting them so much as the right to appeal their detention in the Federal court system.

And Obama’s proposed revisions to the military commissions pretty much exemplify his administration’s rather limited conception of what “change” means for the foreign policy of the United States.

The Seijl 2 missile has a range of about 1,200 miles, and thus would be capable of hitting Israel, but Iran’s President Ahmadinejad announced in a speech following what he deemed a successful test that the missile’s purpose was to protect Iran from the threat of aggression.

Still, media accounts in the U.S. and other Western nations portrayed Iran’s test as a threatening provocation and linked it to an Iranian nuclear weapons program there is no evidence actually exists.

The London Times’ headline alarmingly read, “Ahmadinejad claims Iran’s new missile is capable of hitting Israel”.

But the paper failed to produce a quote of the Iranian president actually specifying Israel as being within range of the missile. Instead, the text of the article only states that Ahmadinejad merely announced that a missile with a range of 1,200 miles had been successfully tested.

The headline claim that the “missile is capable of hitting Israel” is simply a corollary drawn by the Times, but falsely attributed to Ahmadinejad himself in a not atypical demonizing media account.

“I was told that the missile is able to go beyond the atmosphere then come back and hit its target. It works on solid fuel,” Ahmadinejad said in his speech.

“The defense minister told me today that we launched a Sejil-2 missile, which is a two-stage missile and it has reached the intended target.”

He also talked about the insistence of Western countries that Iran end it’s enrichment of uranium for its nuclear program. “They said if you don’t stop, we will adopt resolutions…. They thought we would retreat but that will not happen.”

The U.S. has used its influence in the Security Council to oversee the passage of a series of U.N. resolutions implementing sanctions against Iran for failing to cease enrichment activities. Iran insists that its right to enrich uranium is guaranteed under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).

The NPT in fact states that nothing may prejudice the rights of member nations to enrich uranium for nuclear energy.

The U.N. watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has continued to verify that Iran has enriched only low-grade uranium, not the highly-enriched uranium necessary to build a nuclear weapon.

“I told them you can adopt 100 sets of sanctions, but nothing will change”, Ahmadinejad said.

In an apparent reference to the Obama administration’s declarations that it would be willing to talk to Iran about its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad said, “All want dialogue with Iran, and we prefer this. But it should be in the framework of justice and respect.”

The lead sentence in the Washington Post’s account of the missile launch employed a similar device as that used in the London Times’ headline.

“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Wednesday,” the Post article read, “that his country had successfully test-fired a medium-range solid-fuel missile apparently capable of striking Israel and U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf region.”

While acknowledging that “arms-control experts debated its significance,” the Post added that the launch demonstrated “an increasing sophistication in its missile program” from a liquid to a solid fuel system. “Solid-fuel rockets can be launched faster and are more mobile,” the Post reported.

The Post quoted Ahmadinejad as saying, “The rocket went into space, returned to Earth and hit its target” to a cheering crowd in a soccer stadium in Semnan province.

The article continued on to say, “Ahmadinejad has long said Iran’s nuclear program has strictly peaceful civilian purposes. But on Wednesday, he linked the missile test with that program, calling it an important scientific achievement and a blow to those trying to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

The implication is that Ahmadinejad himself suggested that the missile test was related to Iran’s nuclear program, with the further corollary from that supposed linkage being that the missile is intended to deliver a nuclear warhead.

Having established this ostensible context for its readers, the Post account continued, providing a quote of Ahmadinejad referencing the nuclear issue.

“‘In the nuclear case, we send them a message: Today the Islamic Republic of Iran is running the show,’ Ahmadinejad said in his speech. ‘We say to the superpowers, “Who of you dare to threaten the Iranian nation? Raise your hand!” But they all stand there with their hands behind their backs.’”

The Post’s implication was that Ahmadinejad had acknowledged Iranian intentions to produce nuclear weapons, deliverable by a missile such as that tested in Semnan on Wednesday. But a second look at Ahmadinejad’s actual remarks and reconsideration of the context reveals the propaganda device employed by the Post here.

The “link” Ahmadinejad was clearly making between the missile test launch and the nuclear program isn’t that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but that Iran now has a non-nuclear deterrent to U.S. or Israeli aggression.

“Today Iran has the power to turn any base that fires a bullet at Iran into hell,” Ahmadinejad also said in his speech. “In the past some threatened Iran but today they cannot threaten Iran with their military power,” he said. “Today we declare that no country has the power to threaten Iran”.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to launch military strikes against Iran to destroy its nuclear program. And U.S. President Barack Obama said recently, echoing remarks from his predecessor, President George W. Bush, that a military attack against Iran was “on the table”.

The linkage between the missile launch, therefore, and the nuclear program isn’t nuclear weapons, but the U.S. and Israeli threats to launch attacks to destroy that program.

But by employing such propaganda devices and spinning Ahmadinejad’s remarks in such a manner, Western media accounts manage to portray Iran as a nation deliberately flaunting its designs on obtaining a nuclear weapon and directly threatening Israel with the possibility of a nuclear attack.

It was through the use of not dissimilar propaganda devices that the U.S. mainstream corporate media managed to convince the as much as 70 percent of the American public prior to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon responded to Iran’s missile test by saying that “In terms of strategic importance, this new missile test doesn’t change anything for us since the Iranians already tested a missile with a range of 1,500 kilometers, but it should worry the Europeans”.

“If anybody had a doubt, it is clear the Iranians are playing with fire”, he said.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported last week that Israel had agreed with the U.S. not to launch military strikes against Iran without giving the Obama administration advance notice of its intentions.

The U.S. has cited the alleged threat from Iran to justify a missile defense system in Europe that has antagonized Russia. A joint analysis by U.S. and Russian scientists, however, concluded that the system “would be ineffective against the kinds of missiles Iran is likely to deploy,” according to the Washington Post’s report on their analysis.

“The missile threat from Iran to Europe is thus not imminent,” the Post quoted the report as saying on Tuesday.

That’s quite the understatement. “And if Iran attempted such an attack, the experts say, it would ensure its own destruction”, the Post also noted.

Throughout the entire debate over the missile defense system, the question of why Iran would ever launch missile strikes against Europe has never been satisfactorily addressed, and the claim that it is designed to deter Iran, rather than that it is designed to contain Russia, as Russia itself fears, is difficult to take seriously.

The New York Times’ report on Iran’s launch asserted that it added “to concerns that Iran’s weapons-development program is fast outpacing the American-led diplomacy that President Obama has said he will let play out through the end of the year.”

The Times quoted the Obama administration’s top official for arms control and security, Gary Samore, who has been labeled by the media as Obama’s “weapons of mass destruction ‘czar’”, as expressing his hope that the administration “‘will be able to capitalize on this launch to strengthen our case’ on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program.”

But the most blatant piece of propaganda in the Times‘ account followed its observation that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that Iran has made progress on two of three technologies necessary to build a nuclear weapon.

“The first,” the Times states, “is enriching uranium to weapons grade, now under way at the large nuclear complex at Natanz.”

This statement goes beyond the boundaries of deceptive spin into the realm of outright lying. The IAEA, as already noted, has verified that Iran is enriching only low-grade uranium at Natanz, not weapons grade uranium as falsely claimed here by the Times.

Iran’s uranium has been enriched to less than 5 percent U-235, whereas it is necessary to enrich uranium to consist of 90 percent or more of the U-235 isotope in order to be able to produce a nuclear weapon.

“The second”, the Times continued, “is developing a missile capable of reaching Israel and parts of Western Europe,” again implying that Iran’s Sejil-2 missile might be related to nuclear weapons development.

The third technology is warhead design, which is the “greatest mystery” about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, according to the Times, which added, “Asked Wednesday whether he had seen additional evidence to indicate that the weaponization program had been restarted, Mr. Samore declined to comment.”

By using the adjective “additional”, the Times asserted as fact that there is evidence Iran had been working on a warhead design until 2003, when, according to a 2007 CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iran halted its work on weaponization.

But the actual evidence supposedly backing this assessment has never been made public. The source for this claim is apparently a laptop computer that was obtained by U.S. intelligence that allegedly belonged to an Iranian scientist and contained documents showing Iran’s work on technology related to weaponization.

Only a select number of these documents have been handed over to the IAEA, which refers to them in its reports as “the alleged studies” and which has so far been unable to verify their authenticity. Iran claims that the documents are forgeries.

The U.S. used fabricated documents during the run-up to the Iraq war in an effort to bolster its claim that Saddam Hussein had attempted to obtain yellowcake uranium from Africa.

The Times fails to discern between an assessment and actual evidence, a mistake it should have learned after its atrocious reporting prior to the invasion of Iraq, when it helped to propagate false claims about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In that case, intelligence estimates similarly claimed that Iraq possessed WMD, but such assessments were not backed by any credible evidence and the CIA was forced to acknowledge after the invasion that Iraq had unilaterally destroyed its undeclared WMD in 1991.

The report was drafted by the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) and submitted to the Congress by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis.

It discusses the acquisition of technology related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for the year 2008 and repeats the assessment of a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran “had been working to develop nuclear weapons through at least fall 2003, but that in fall 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities, and its covert uranium conversion- and enrichment-related activities.”

“We do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons,” the report states, a tacit acknowledgement that there is little or no evidence that Iran today is pursuing a weapons capability.

Iran “is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons by continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons,” the report adds, “if a decision is made to do so.”

The evidence that Iran had previously pursued a weapon capability apparently comes from information retrieved from a laptop computer, referred to in reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as the “alleged studies”.

The laptop, obtained by U.S. intelligence, allegedly came from an Iranian engineer. The U.S. claims that the information obtained from the computer is evidence that Iran had previously been involved in weapon research and development.

The U.S. has only shared a select number of the documents with the IAEA. Iran maintains that the documents are forgeries.

During the buildup to the war on Iraq, the U.S. government claimed that documents showed that Saddam Hussein had attempted to obtain uranium in order to make a nuclear bomb, but the documents proved to have been fabricated.

In that case, the U.S. was reluctant to hand over the documents to the IAEA, but once the agency finally obtained them after repeated requests, it immediately recognized them as fakes.

In the case of Iran, the IAEA has so far declined to take a position on whether the documents are authentic or not, but is taking the matter seriously. The “alleged studies” remain the principle outstanding issue preventing the IAEA from being able to conclude with reasonable confidence that Iran’s nuclear program is not intended for any military purpose.

A staff report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations earlier this month similarly framed Iran’s nuclear program as a potential threat, but at the same time acknowledged that “There is no sign that Iran’s leaders have ordered up a bomb.”

The report also noted that the Director General of the IAEA, Mohammed El Baradei, has “resisted pressure from the United States” to “declare Iran in violation of the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty] because, he said repeatedly, the IAEA had no proof of a military program.”

It also claimed that “Publicly available U.S. intelligence reports and published reports show that Iran had been running a military nuclear program” until 2003. But the 2007 NIE and other publicly available information do not show this as a certainty. The 2007 offers its assessment that this was the case, but it’s unclear what actual evidence the intelligence community had upon which it based this assessment.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the intelligence community had repeatedly issued reports assessing that the country possessed WMD, but was never able to offer any credible evidence to support that claim. The CIA later admitted that Iraq’s WMD programs had been dismantled by the U.N. and all declared proscribed materials destroyed, and that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its remaining stocks of undeclared WMD in 1991.

Both the CIA and Foreign Relations Committee reports were obtained by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and posted on his blog, Secrecy News.

President Barack Obama and other members of his administration, contrary to the acknowledgment that there is no evidence Iran today has a nuclear weapons program, have repeatedly made statements suggesting that Iran is actively pursuing the bomb and has based its policy on that assumption.

“Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable. We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening,” Obama said in his first press conference as the president-elect.

At a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, in April, Obama said, “So let me be clear: Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies.”

Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech in Munich, Germany, in which he said that Iran’s “illicit nuclear program” was “not conducive to peace”, and in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) earlier this month, he said that the possibility of a “nuclear armed Iran” was “an existential threat.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last month, “We know the imperative of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons” and characterized its nuclear program as “the threat posed by Iran”.

In an interview with ABC News on March 3, Clinton said, “Iran’s pursuit of the nuclear weapon is deeply troubling to not only the U.S. but many people throughout the world.”

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced on Tuesday that the number of people registered as refugees as a result of Pakistan’s ongoing conflict against militants had surpassed 500,000.

Most of the registered refugees have found temporary homes among family and friends, or with others who have offered to help accommodate those who have fled the fighting. More than 70,000 others are staying at displaced person camps that have been set up in an effort to help mitigate the humanitarian crisis.

The Pakistan military began waging offensive operations against militants in the Swat district last week just prior to a trip by President Asif Ali Zardari to Washington, D.C. to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The Swat Valley, located in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)region, in recent years has been taken over by militants, but was previously a popular tourist destination sometimes referred to as the “Switzerland of Pakistan” for its mountain scenery.

The Pakistan military operation is largely targeted against the forces of Maulana Fazlullah, the head of Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), who took over the group’s leadership from his father-in-law and the group’s founder, Maulana Sufi Muhammad.

Fazlullah’s forces, allied with Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistan Taliban, led by Baitullah Mehsud, have terrorized Swat, enforcing harsh rule considered by many Swat residents to be un-Islamic, such as burning schools and beheading police officers.

Sources told the Daily Telegraph (UK) that a second offensive is being planned to combat militants in the Waziristan regions of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Baitullah Mehsud has his stronghold in South Waziristan, and according to the U.S. State Department is a “key al-Qaeda facilitator”. The U.S. has also accused him of the assassination of one time Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the late wife of the current president, Mr. Zardari.

Also this week, a U.S. missile attack by a drone aircraft killed 15 people [1] in the village of Sra Khawra on the border of North and South Waziristan.

U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times that drone attacks are now being carried out under a new arrangement with the government of Pakistan “that for the first time gives Pakistani officers significant control over routes, targets and decisions to fire weapons”.

Drone attacks have been the cause of a bitter controversy as the U.S. insists on continuing them while the Pakistani government has repeatedly objected to their use and has decried the U.S. actions as a violation of their sovereignty.

The drone attacks have mostly been CIA operations, but under the new agreement, the Department of Defense will operate a separate fleet of drones and allow Pakistani military officials direction over their use within Pakistan.

The CIA has reportedly carried out at least 55 drone attacks in Pakistan since August.

The Pakistan army’s chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said that 751 militants have been killed so far in the ongoing operation, and 29 security force members. He said he had no specific information about civilian casualties, but that the government was “taking all possible measures to avoid collateral damage”.

As the fighting continues, independent observers have expressed concern over the dangers to civilians.

“Our view is that the Pakistani military’s previous record of counter-terrorism operations does not inspire confidence in its ability to safeguard civilian life,” Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch said. “We would ask the military and its patrons – particularly in the U.S. – to urge the utmost care in regard to civilians.”

The U.S. said it would provide $5 million to assist with the humanitarian situation. Ian Kelly, a spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said “This is primarily to provide tents, provide shelter and emergency relief supplies, food and medicine to the affected populations.”

Meanwhile, a bill to provide Pakistan with billions in military and economic assistance is being debated in Congress. Senator Bob Corker said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday that the vote should be delayed. “We are going to be engaged there for many, many, many years,” he said. “Many men and women will lose their lives. We’re doubling down, and we haven’t debated this yet.”

The Obama administration has come under criticism for not having a clear strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Senator Jim Risch said at the hearing, “It is just breathtaking the amount of money, the American lives we’ve spent there, and you have a government that has control maybe to the outskirts of the capital. I’d love to see an endgame, but I don’t know who’s smart enough to – to develop and endgame for us in that country. It’s very depressing.”

Senator Russell Feingold expressed concern that Obama’s plan to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan might force militants into Pakistan and “could end up creating a pressure in Pakistan, which would add to the instability.”

Graham E. Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, and author of The Future of Political Islam, wrote in an op-ed earlier this week arguing that military force is not the solution. The occupation creates hatred and military force has only made matters worse.

“Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaeda over time without war,” he wrote, referring to a Taliban offer to hand over Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, if the U.S. provided evidence of his guilt.

“That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.”

Fuller also observed that “The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country.”

Only the withdrawal of foreign military forces would lessen tensions in Pakistan, as U.S. policies have inflamed the country and created an unmanageable domestic crisis for the Pakistan government, he wrote.

“The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and defend its own nukes . . . But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies,” Fuller argued.

In conclusion, he wrote, “If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.”

An article by S.M. Nassem in the Pakistan daily Dawn said on Wednesday, “As for the local population, although it may not have much love for the Taliban, they hardly see the security forces as their protectors. They are now in the midst of a crossfire and are desperate for peace even at the price of the lowest level of existence and dignity, which has been the sales pitch of the Taliban movement since its birth in 1994, with the Pakistani intelligence agencies acting as its foster mother.”

But the militant insurgency cannot be defeated by the military alone, Nassem said, adding, “Unfortunately, despite the barbaric atrocities perpetrated on them in the name of the Sharia, many at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder are still unable to view the Taliban as worse than the rulers. The latter hardly ever paid attention to their needs until their own lifestyles began to face an ‘existentialist threat.’ [sic] Unless these ‘root causes’ receive the attention they deserve, it will be foolhardy to believe that people at large will rise against the Taliban.”

President Zardari said this week on NBC’s Meet the Press that both the U.S. and Pakistan intelligence agencies shared responsibility for the creation of the Taliban. “I think . . . it was part of your past and our past,” he said, “and the ISI and the CIA created them together.”

Reiterating the Bush policy of loosely defined “preventive” warfare outlined in Bush’s National Security Strategy, he said that the “U.S. will strive to act preventively to avoid having to choose between the risks of war and the dangers of inaction.”

Echoing the previous administration’s policy, Biden offered an ultimatum, saying the U.S. would be “willing to talk to Iran” but only if Iran acquiesces to the Obama administration’s demands to abandon its nuclear program.

Translated into meaningful terms, this effectively means the U.S. will continue to refuse to talk to Iran, since its nuclear program would be one of the major points Iran would like to negotiate.

The U.S. has accused Iran of having a nuclear weapons program, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is actively monitoring and verifying Iran’s program and its commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), has repeatedly noted that there is no evidence that this is so, and despite the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment that Iran today has no nuclear weapons program.

Iran insists that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes.

Biden incongruously declared that his reiteration of the Bush policy was “a new tone in Washington”, and the Western media parroted the claim, offering no explanation for how the Obama policy Biden outlined was substantially different from that of the previous administration.

The New York Times called Biden’s remarks “a departure from the Bush administration”, failing to explain in what way it represented a “departure”.

The Associated Press reported in an analysis that “Biden promises foreign policy shifts”, while failing to observe that his “promises” of “pressure and isolation” if Iran does not submit to U.S. demands were exactly those of the Bush administration.

Even before the November elections that resulted in a victory for Barack Obama and his vice-presidential running mate Joseph Biden, Biden had strongly expressed that he favored the use of military force against Iran. When Israeli Army Radio reported that Biden firmly opposed the use of force against Iran’s nuclear facilities, his office strongly objected, with his press secretary David Wade calling it “a lie,” adding that “we will not tolerate anyone questioning Senator Biden’s 35-year record of standing up for the security of Israel” by suggesting he wouldn’t attack Iran.

The news coverage of the continuation of the foreign policy of the Bush administration has been expressed in similar terms on other issues. The move towards drawing down forces in Iraq, established under the Bush administration well prior to the inauguration of Barack Obama, has continuously been referred to as representative of a “shift” by Obama’s administration. The same holds true of the move to increase the number of military forces in Afghanistan, which was also a course firmly established during Bush’s final term.

When Obama issued a series of Executive Orders during the first days of his presidency, the Los Angeles Times declared: “Obama overturns Bush tactics in war on terrorism”. But the orders did little more than reiterate existing U.S. law, recognize court decisions that were made during the Bush administration, and respond minimally to enormous public pressure both at home and internationally.

In June 2008, the Supreme Court restored habeas corpus, ruling that prisoners held in the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were entitled to challenge their detention in a court of law.

In July, a U.S. Court of Appeals decided that the courts must be able to assess the reliability of the evidence before determining the status of prisoners, a shift from the Bush policy of simply declaring detainees “unlawful enemy combatants” without evidence.

While such court decisions did not call for the closure of the facility at Guantanamo, they eroded the shaky legal framework that defined the facility’s purpose, which was to provide a legal black hole where the rule of law did not apply.

Where Obama is able to continue Bush policies under color of law, he has already made it clear that he will do so. So, for instance, in solidarity with the Bush administration, Obama advisers told the Associated Press shortly after the November election that the new president would most likely prevent charges from being brought against CIA interrogators for having tortured prisoners.

The L.A. Times article noted above reported that Obama ordered to “permanently shut the CIA’s network of secret overseas prisons”, which had already come under intense international scrutiny. Pressure to close the not so secret CIA centers was growing with both the American public and with the public and governments of the countries where the centers are located. The Supreme Court in 2006 had ordered prisoners held by the CIA in such facilities to be transferred to Guantanamo.

At the same time, as another L.A. Times headline less than a week later observed, “Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool”. Reporting on a fact it had omitted in its earlier article, the Times noted “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”

One solution for dealing with Guantanamo detainees upon its closure, as ordered by President Obama to occur within a year, would be to render them to foreign governments to be held in prisons there, or possibly transfer to other U.S. military detention centers, such as at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan, where court rulings such as the Supreme Court’s restoration of habeas corpus do not apply.

So far, the Obama administration has offered little in the way of evidence that it represents a significant “change” from the previous administration. Headlines proclaiming a “shift” and statements declaring a “departure” and “a new tone”, however, serve as useful propaganda to lull the public into a sense of accomplishment and optimism in order to ease public pressure on the government to press for substantial and measurable changes in policy.

The fact that Obama’s stated policies match almost exactly those of his predecessor are inconvenient to that end, however, and therefore must be rendered down Orwell’s memory hole.

The resolution does not recognize the right to self-defense of the Palestinian people.

The resolution criticizes Hamas for refusing “to comply with the requirements of the Quartet”, which include to “recognize Israel’s right to exist” and to “renounce violence”.

It makes no mention of Israel’s continuing settlement expansion in the West Bank, also in violation of the Quartet requirements. Nor does it call upon Israel, which illegally occupies the West Bank and has held Gaza under siege for three years, to recognize the “right to exist” of a Palestinian state or to renounce violence.

The resolution condemns the use of “human shields” by Hamas, but says nothing of the indiscriminate killing by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) that is taking a devastating toll upon civilians in Gaza.

The resolution, quoting from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, blames Hamas “for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence there”.

It makes no mention of the fact that Hamas had strictly observed the cease-fire until it was violated by Israel on November 4, when Israel launched an airstrike into Gaza that killed 5 and injured several others.

The resolution notes that “the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including shortages of food, water, electricity, and adequate medical care, is becoming more acute”.

It neglects to point out that this is the direct result of Israel’s policy of blockading Gaza, and that the humanitarian crisis has been greatly exacerbated by Israel’s aerial bombardment and invasion of Gaza, instead praising the minimal amount of humanitarian aid Israel has allowed into the territory.

The resolution also states that “a sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will allow for a viable and independent Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the State of Israel … will not be possible as long as Israeli civilians are under threat from within Gaza”.

It says nothing about the impossibility of such a two-state solution so long as Palestinians live under occupation and threat from Israel.

Members of Congress Voice Support for Israel

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) voiced her support for the resolution by saying that Israel’s war on Gaza was “a phase in a war against Iranian terror”. She said she looked forward to being able to visit Israel when its citizens were no longer under threat, presumably from rockets fired from Gaza.

She said nothing about wanting to visit Gaza or looking forward to its citizens living no longer under threat from Israel.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) characterized Israel’s war as “self-defense” and said it was well within its rights to engage in such action. He said he supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but added that such a solution would only be tenable if Israel is “secure”. He added that “Israel can always look to the United States for support and that this will continue to be true “when Barack Obama becomes President”.

He said nothing about the security of any future Palestinian state, or of the security of the territories at present that are illegally occupied by Israel. He offered no suggestions as to where the Palestinian people could look to for support.

Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) expressed having “every confidence that the incoming administration would continue the unwavering support of the United States of America for the state of Israel. She said her own opinion, “as a Jewish member of Congress” is that Israel has “every right to defend itself” and that Israelis “have been too patient” in responding to rocket attacks from Gaza. She expressed that it was unacceptable for tunnels to be used to smuggle weapons into Gaza.

She failed to note that it was Israel, not Hamas, that first violated the cease-fire. She expressed no similar empathy for the Palestinian people, who have lived under oppression and terror on a much greater scale, and who have been killed in far higher numbers by Israeli military actions. She made no mention of the fact that tunnels are also used to avert a complete humanitarian catastrophe, to bring in food, fuel, medical supplies, and other humanitarian goods because Israel’s blockade has prevented such basic necessities from being delivered into Gaza.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) condemned Hamas’ firing of rockets into Israel because they were intended to kill civilians even though only a small number had been killed. He said the US looks forward to “supporting Israel through its difficult time now”.

He did not condemn the Israeli killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians or express any empathy difficult time the Palestinians are going through.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NV) said “if you don’t want to be hit back, don’t hit. That’s really the message” of Israel’s war on Gaza. He blamed criticism of Israel on “anti-Semitism” and called it “blaming the victim”. He said “Israel has that right, to protect itself”.

He neglected to mention that it was Israel, not Hamas, which broke the cease-fire. Nor did he offer any indication that this standard applied equally to both Israelis and Palestinians. He expressed no support for the right of Palestinians to protect themselves.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) expressed that weapons should not be made available to Hamas.

He offered no similar comments about weapons being made available to Israel.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was a lone voice in the Congress expressing any kind of empathy for the plight of the Palestinians. In remarks from the floor of the House, he said:

“Wake up America. We have trillions for a war machine and the banks while our government stands by and sniffs at the slaughter of innocents in Gaza, where Israel is blocking aid for wounded Palestinians. Here’s today’s Washington Post. It says, ‘The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it found at least 15 bodies and several children emaciated but alive in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for 4 days. 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with 4 young children lying next to their dead mothers.’ That’s a quote. Today, US tax dollars, US jets, and US helicopters provided to Israel are enabling the slaughter in Gaza. The administration enables Israel to press forward with the attack against defenseless civilians, blocks efforts at promoting a cease-fire at the UN, and refuses to make Israel compliant with conditions that arms shipments will not be used for aggression. Israel is going to receive $30 billion in a ten year period for military assistance, without having to abide by any humanitarian principles, international laws, or standards of basic human decency. Wake up America.”

Gaza’s offensive against Israel continued today, sharply escalating with a ground incursion that cut off the southern part of Israel from the north.

The Israeli death toll climbed past 400, at least 60 of whom were civilians, according to UN estimates. 4 Palestinian civilians have been killed as a result of Jewish settlers firing rockets into Gaza in response to the military operation led by Hamas.

Cloud bursts with flaming smoke trails were seen over Israeli cities as Hamas employed white phosphorus munitions. The use of such munitions as weapons targeting soldiers or civilians is prohibited by international law, but Hamas says it is only using the munitions legally to provide a smokescreen for its ground offensive.

There have been reports of Israelis with chemical burns from the phosphorus rounds entering hospitals, but the reports could not independently confirmed since Hamas has refused to allow any foreign journalists to enter Israel.

The United States led an effort at the United Nations to issue a resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities, but the effort was blocked by Russia. The Russian ambassador to the UN said, “We don’t want a one-sided cease-fire that would see Gaza end its operations only to allow Israel to continue firing rockets into Gaza. We are seeking a sustainable cease-fire.”

Russia has repeatedly reiterated its demand for Israel to recognize Gaza’s right to exist and renounce violence. Russia’s foreign minister said earlier this week, “Israel is responsible for ending the cease-fire. Gaza has the right to self-defense. No nation would sit by and just watch as rockets exploded in their towns, hitting homes and schools, without a response. No country would tolerate that.”

Israel’s rocket attacks against Gaza sharply escalated after Gaza’s offensive began 9 days ago. Prior to that, no Palestinians had been killed since the cease-fire began last year on June 19. Israel’s Labor Party led by Ehud Barak agreed to the truce in exchange for an easing of the siege of Israel by Gaza.

Barak is also the head of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), which Hamas lists as a terrorist organization.

During the first week of the cease-fire, Hamas soldiers fired upon Israeli farmers near the border in at least seven separate incidents. An 82-year old Jewish man was wounded in one of the incidents. The IDF claimed that this was a violation of the cease-fire, but Hamas responded by announcing a “special security zone” along the border in Israel and warned that it would fire upon any Jews that entered the zone.

At the same time, Hamas also stepped up its operations against the IDF in the Negev region, stating that the cease-fire only applied to northern Israel. Two Jewish militants were killed in one targeted assassination.

Tzipi Livni’s Kadima group responded by firing rockets into Gaza City. The Labor party urged Kadima to observe the cease-fire so that the siege of Israel would be lifted. Hamas warned Barak that his party would be held responsible for any rockets fired from Israel into Gaza by other groups and closed border crossings once again after a brief respite in which it allowed several trucks to cross into Israel delivering humanitarian supplies.

The IDF claimed that Gaza’s firing at Jewish civilians and closing of the borders was a violation of the cease-fire, but held to the truce until after November 4, when Hamas launched an airstrike into Israel, killing 4 militants and injuring several others. Hamas said the Jewish militants were digging a tunnel under the border in order to cross into Gaza to kidnap a Hamas soldier. Hamas released satellite images with arrows pointing to what a spokesman said was the location of the tunnel. Hamas also blamed Barak’s IDF for violating the cease-fire by launching rockets in response to its airstrike.

Human rights organizations have criticized Hamas for its policy of blockading Israel, which they say had brought the Jewish people to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The present military offensive has worsened the situation for Israelis, many of whom have no electricity. Many bakeries in Israel have run out of bread and cannot make more. Israel’s overflowing hospitals are running out of fuel to run generators, and the blockade has prevented them from receiving medical supplies which would assist in helping those injured in the present conflict.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh yesterday rejected the charges, saying “There is no humanitarian crisis in Israel. The humanitarian situation in Israel is exactly as it should be.”

Haniyeh also dismissed charges that Hamas forces were targeting civilians in its operations. “Hamas does everything to prevent the loss of life of civilians,” he said. “Israelis were even warned to leave areas where the terrorists are hiding. We are only targeting militants. It is Israel that is using human shields in violation of international law. It is Israel which is responsible for the loss of innocent lives.”

Critics of Hamas argue that Jews have no place to flee since Gaza has closed the borders and has bombed numerous targets deep within Israeli territory so that no place is safe.

A top Israeli leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, was killed earlier this week when Hamas targeted his apartment building. His wife, Sarah, and two sons, Yair and Avner, were also killed in the bombing.

The UN’s estimate of 60 Israeli civilians killed counts only women and children, and is therefore only a minimum figure. The UN is unable to estimate the number of men that were combatants versus civilians and has said this number is therefore likely to be extremely conservative.

Russia’s Pravda newspaper reported today that most of the men arriving at Israeli hospitals appeared to be civilians. Most seemed to be coming in with their wives and children who were injured along with the men in Gaza’s bombing raids. None were identified as members of the IDF.

Member states of the European Union criticized Russia’s decision to veto any resolution calling for a cease-fire. Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “We need an end to the violence now. The blame-game can continue afterward, but the immediate goal should be to stop the bloodshed.”

A spokesman for the Kremlin said Hamas needed more time to root out “the infrastructure of terror” in Israel and to cripple the IDF’s ability to fire rockets into Gaza towns. “Russia is leading the effort to achieve peace in the region,” he said, by seeking “a sustainable cease-fire.”

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated pieces of property in the world. The presence of militants within a civilian population does not, under international law, deprive that population of their protected status, and hence any assault upon that population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime.

Moreover, the people Israel claims are legitimate targets are members of Hamas, which Israel says is a terrorist organization. Hamas has been responsible for firing rockets into Israel. These rockets are extremely inaccurate and thus, even if Hamas intended to hit military targets within Israel, are indiscriminate by nature. When rockets from Gaza kill Israeli civilians, it is a war crime.

Hamas has a military wing. However, it is not entirely a military organization, but a political one. Members of Hamas are the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Dozens of these elected leaders have been kidnapped and held in Israeli prisons without charge. Others have been targeted for assassination, such as Nizar Rayan, a top Hamas official. To kill Rayan, Israel targeted a residential apartment building. The strike not only killed Rayan but two of his wives and four of his children, along with six others. There is no justification for such an attack under international law. This was a war crime.

Other of Israel’s bombardment with protected status under international law have included a mosque, a prison, police stations, and a university, in addition to residential buildings.

Moreover, Israel has long held Gaza under siege, allowing only the most minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies to enter. Israel is bombing and killing Palestinian civilians. Countless more have been wounded, and cannot receive medical attention. Hospitals running on generators have little or no fuel. Doctors have no proper equipment or medical supplies to treat the injured. These people, too, are the victims of Israeli policies targeted not at Hamas or legitimate military targets, but directly designed to punish the civilian population.

Lie #2) Hamas violated the cease-fire. The Israeli bombardment is a response to Palestinian rocket fire and is designed to end such rocket attacks.

Israel never observed the cease-fire to begin with. From the beginning, it announced a “special security zone” within the Gaza Strip and announced that Palestinians who enter this zone will be fired upon. In other words, Israel announced its intention that Israeli soldiers would shoot at farmers and other individuals attempting to reach their own land in direct violation of not only the cease-fire but international law.

Despite shooting incidents, including ones resulting in Palestinians getting injured, Hamas still held to the cease-fire from the time it went into effect on June 19 until Israel effectively ended the truce on November 4 by launching an airstrike into Gaza that killed five and injured several others.

Israel’s violation of the cease-fire predictably resulted in retaliation from militants in Gaza who fired rockets into Israel in response. The increased barrage of rocket fire at the end of December is being used as justification for the continued Israeli bombardment, but is a direct response by militants to the Israeli attacks.

Israel’s actions, including its violation of the cease-fire, predictably resulted in an escalation of rocket attacks against its own population.

Lie #3) Hamas is using human shields, a war crime.

There has been no evidence that Hamas has used human shields. The fact is, as previously noted, Gaza is a small piece of property that is densely populated. Israel engages in indiscriminate warfare such as the assassination of Nizar Rayan, in which members of his family were also murdered. It is victims like his dead children that Israel defines as “human shields” in its propaganda. There is no legitimacy for this interpretation under international law. In circumstances such as these, Hamas is not using human shields, Israel is committing war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other applicable international law.

Lie #4) Arab nations have not condemned Israel’s actions because they understand Israel’s justification for its assault.

The populations of those Arab countries are outraged at Israel’s actions and at their own governments for not condemning Israel’s assault and acting to end the violence. Simply stated, the Arab governments do not represent their respective Arab populations. The populations of the Arab nations have staged mass protests in opposition to not only Israel’s actions but also the inaction of their own governments and what they view as either complacency or complicity in Israel’s crimes.

Moreover, the refusal of Arab nations to take action to come to the aid of the Palestinians is not because they agree with Israel’s actions, but because they are submissive to the will of the US, which fully supports Israel. Egypt, for instance, which refused to open the border to allow Palestinians wounded in the attacks to get medical treatment in Egyptian hospitals, is heavily dependent upon US aid, and is being widely criticized within the population of the Arab countries for what is viewed as an absolute betrayal of the Gaza Palestinians.

Even Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been regarded as a traitor to his own people for blaming Hamas for the suffering of the people of Gaza. Palestinians are also well aware of Abbas’ past perceived betrayals in conniving with Israel and the US to sideline the democratically elected Hamas government, culminating in a counter-coup by Hamas in which it expelled Fatah (the military wing of Abbas’ Palestine Authority) from the Gaza Strip. While his apparent goal was to weaken Hamas and strengthen his own position, the Palestinians and other Arabs in the Middle East are so outraged at Abbas that it is unlikely he will be able to govern effectively.

Lie #5) Israel is not responsible for civilian deaths because it warned the Palestinians of Gaza to flee areas that might be targeted.

Israel claims it sent radio and telephone text messages to residents of Gaza warning them to flee from the coming bombardment. But the people of Gaza have nowhere to flee to. They are trapped within the Gaza Strip. It is by Israeli design that they cannot escape across the border. It is by Israeli design that they have no food, water, or fuel by which to survive. It is by Israeli design that hospitals in Gaza have no electricity and few medical supplies with which to treat the injured and save lives. And Israel has bombed vast areas of Gaza, targeting civilian infrastructure and other sites with protected status under international law. No place is safe within the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has long been in the planning, and the purpose is to terrorize the Arab population in the hopes that they will revolt against the Hamas leadership and to punish them further for electing them. The siege Gaza has remained under since Israel withdrew its military from the Strip in 2006 has had the same intended purpose.

A comparable policy was implemented by the US against Iraq. The sanctions were intended to further the goal of regime change. The means by which this goal was pursued was to punish the Iraqi people, to deny them food and medical supplies. By United Nations estimates, more than a million Iraqis died as a result. More than half a million of those victims were children.

In the end, although then US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright publicly said that the “price” of half a million dead children was “worth it”, the sanctions served only to strengthen the control of Saddam Hussein’s regime over the people by making them totally dependent upon the regime for their very survival.

When it became clear that the genocidal sanctions were not sustainable due to overwhelming global opposition, the military option came to be seen as the only option for implementing regime change.

The choke hold Israel has maintained upon the population of Gaza has not had its desired effect. And Israel has realized that its siege of Gaza might also not be sustainable, given the ever-increasing global outrage. Israel’s use of force against Gaza was only a matter of time, and the cease-fire was understood from the beginning not to be an effort at a sustained, long-term peace, but to provide political cover for the planned military operation.

Prior to the Egyptian-brokered cease-fire, Israel had announced its intention to wage full-scale military operations against Gaza. The cease-fire did not end those plans, but were a means to that end. It was clear from the beginning that Israel intended to do everything in its power to ensure that the cease-fire was unsustainable in order to provoke Hamas into acting in a way that would provide Israel with a perceived casus belli to punish Gaza violently for continuing to have the leadership of elected Hamas officials.

Israel violated the cease-fire from the start. According to the UN, Israeli soldiers on numerous occasions fired upon Gaza farmers trying to work their land near the border. An 82-year-old man was injured in one such incident on June 27. In another shooting incident, a Palestinian woman was wounded.

The Israeli Defense Force openly announced that it would fire upon any Palestinian entering into what it declared was a “special security zone” within Gaza; essentially a declaration of the intention to continually violate the cease-fire with impunity by firing at farmers and other Palestinians attempting to reach their own land.

Israel also threatened a full-scale invasion if the cease-fire was violated by the Palestinians.

At the same time, Israel stepped up its operations against in the West Bank. On June 24, for example, Israel killed a member of Islamic Jihad, an act for which the group retaliated by launching several rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

Hamas in fact responded by appealing to Islamic Jihad and other groups to desist and to observe the cease-fire. “We expect everyone to respect the agreement so that the Palestinian people achieve what they look for, an end to this suffering and breaking the siege,” Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told reporters.

Although the Israeli leadership knew these attacks were carried out by other groups, who were not a party to the cease-fire, it declared that it would hold Hamas responsible for all such attacks.

At the same time, Israel closed off the border, allowing only minimal humanitarian supplies through. Hamas has declared since the beginning that this was itself a violation of the cease-fire.

As I wrote in June, Israel’s actions seemed “designed to bring about a hostile response which would give Israel a casus belli to invade Gaza.

“In the event of any such invasion, Israel will claim that it had exhausted diplomacy. Israel has made sure that the cease-fire is unsustainable. But it is beneficial as it would be used as political cover for future military action.

“Coupled with Israel’s agreement to a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, The New York Times calls this ‘Israel’s Diplomatic Offensive’. The exchange is Israel’s effort to wrap-up its 2006 war with Hezbollah before engaging in another war. The ‘Diplomatic Offensive’ will more likely than not be followed in coming months by a military offensive.”

The only thing that surprised me about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was how long it took, on account of Hamas abiding by the cease-fire and not giving Israel the excuse it was looking for to terrorize Gaza residents in an extreme form of collective punishment.

None of this violence could occur without the massive support Israel receives from the US. And the US propaganda machine has been in high gear since the bombs started falling attempting to portray Israel as the victim. Although sporadic rocket attacks had occurred during the cease-fire, no Israelis were killed. Two Israelis have been killed since the end of the cease-fire in rocket attacks launched in retaliation for the Israeli bombardment.

The Palestinian death toll, on the other hand, is rapidly climbing towards 400.

Yet The New York Times and other major corporate news outlets have virtually wiped the Israeli violation of the cease-fire last month from history. On November 4, an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip killed five Palestinians and wounded several others. The thinly veiled pretext for the attack was that Hamas was digging a tunnel which would be used to cross the border and capture Israeli soldiers.

But whether this tunnel actually existed or not hasn’t been made clear. And even if it was, such tunnels are used by the people of Gaza to smuggle in much needed supplies, like food, fuel, medicine, and other essentials Israel has denied them. In the end, this pretext bears a striking resemblance to the Bush doctrine of loosely-defined prevention (not preemption), a doctrine that has no legitimacy under international law.

But this Israeli violation of the cease-fire is being wiped from memory. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that Hamas was solely responsible for violating the cease-fire and bringing about its end. The New York Times in current reports either finds that violation unfit for print or references it in couched language, such as by saying simply that the truce “began to unravel in early November”, as though this unraveling were some strange phenomenon with no known causal factors.

One must wonder whether the language in such reports would be so vague had Hamas been the party to initiate hostilities in violation of the truce agreement.

US-made bombs are being used by Israel to kill Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The American people have a responsibility, therefore, in stepping up and taking action to help ensure an end to the current violence. US financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel’s violations of international law and terrorizing of the Palestinian people will continue unless there is massive public pressure brought to bear upon both the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration.

Bringing an end to US support for criminal violence in the region would be an important first step towards a viable and sustainable peace.

To send a message to your representatives in Congress and the Bush White House to take action to end the violence against the people of Gaza, you may use this convenient form at Just Foreign Policy. From there, you may also click a link to send your message to President-elect Obama.

The role in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month of an underworld kingpin that heads an organization known as D-Company, has known ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and who is alleged to have ties with the CIA is apparently being whitewashed, suggesting that his capture and handover to India might prove inconvenient for either the ISI or the CIA, or both.

It was Dawood Ibrahim who was initially characterized by press reports as being the mastermind behind the attacks. Now, that title of “mastermind” is being given to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi by numerous media accounts reporting that Pakistan security forces have raided a training camp of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which evidence has indicated was behind the attacks. Lakhvi was reportedly captured in the raid and is now in custody.

At the same time Ibrahim’s role is being downplayed, Lakhvi’s known role is being exaggerated. Initial reports described him as the training specialist for LeT, but the major media outlets like the New York Times and the London Times, citing government sources, have since promoted his status to that of commander of operations for the group.

The only terrorist from the Mumbai attacks to be captured alive, Azam Amir Kasab, characterized Ibrahim, not Lakhvi, as the mastermind of those attacks, according to earlier press accounts.

Kasab reportedly told his interrogators that he and his fellow terrorists were trained under Lakhvi, also known as “Chacha”, at a camp in Pakistan. Indian officials also traced calls from a satellite phone used by the terrorists to Lakhvi.

But the phone had also been used to call Yusuf Muzammil, also known as Abu Yusuf, Abu Hurrera, and “Yahah”. And it has been Muzammil, not Lakhvi, who has previously been described as the military commander of LeT. It was an intercepted call to Muzammil on November 18 that put the Indian Navy and Coast Guard on high alert to be on the lookout for any foreign vessels from Pakistan entering Indian waters.

Kasab told his interrogators that his team had set out from Karachi, Pakistan, on a ship belonging to Dawood Ibrahim, the MV Alpha. They then hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, to pass through Indian territorial waters to elude the Navy and Coast Guard that were boarding and searching suspect ships.

Although the MV Alpha was subsequently found and seized by the Indian Navy, there have been few, if any, developments about this aspect of the investigation in press accounts, such as whether it has been confirmed or not that the ship was owned by Ibrahim.

Upon arriving off the coast near the city, they were received by inflatable rubber dinghies that had been arranged by an associate of Ibrahim’s in Mumbai.

The planning and execution of the attacks are indicative of the mastermind role not of either Lakhvi or Muzammil, but of Ibrahim, an Indian who is intimately familiar with the city. It was in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) that Ibrahim rose through the ranks of the underworld to become a major organized crime boss.

At least two other Indians were also connected to the attacks, Mukhtar Ahmed and Tausef Rahman. They were arrested for their role in obtaining SIM cards used in the cell phones of the terrorists. Ahmed, according to Indian officials, had in fact been recruited by a special counter-insurgency police task force as an undercover operative. His exact role is still being investigated.

One of the SIM cards used was possibly purchased from New Jersey. Investigators are looking into this potential link to the US, as well.

Dawood Ibrahim went from underworld kingpin to terrorist in 1993, when he was connected to a series of bombings in Bombay that resulted in 250 deaths. He is wanted by Interpol and was designated by the US as a global terrorist in 2003.

It’s believed Ibrahim has been residing in Karachi, and Indian officials have accused Pakistan’s ISI of protecting him.

Ibrahim is known to be a major drug trafficker responsible for shipping narcotics into the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), most Afghan opium (or its derivative, heroin, which is increasingly being produced in the country before export) is smuggled through Iran and Turkey en route by land to Europe; but the percentage that goes to Pakistan seems to mostly find its way directly to the UK, either by plane or by ship.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of opium, a trend that developed during the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort to oust the Soviet Union from the country, with the drug trade serving to help finance the war.

The principle recipient of CIA-ISI funding was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, one of the major drug lords. Hekmatyar has since joined with the Taliban in the insurgency effort to expel foreign forces from the country – not the Soviet Union, this time, but the US.

A Taliban ban on the cultivation of opium poppies in 2000 resulted in the near total eradication of the crop. But since the US overthrow of the regime in 2001, Afghanistan has once again become the world’s leading producer of opium, surpassing all previous records.

While Hekmatyar chose to side with anti-government forces, a number of other warlords involved in the drug trade were members of the Northern Alliance to whom the CIA doled out cash in the US effort to overthrow the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks.

One such warlord is Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was appointed Chief of Staff of the army under the government of Hamid Karzai, and who has been described in US intelligence’s own files as a “Tier One Warlord”.

That list includes a number of other high ranking officials within the Afghanistan government, including former defense minister and parliament member Marshal Mohammad Fahim, Interior Minister for Counter-Narcotics General Mohammad Daoud, and former governor of Helmand province (now by far the largest producer of opium) Sher Mohammed Akhundzada.

Although government officials parroted by the mainstream media tend to characterize the Afghan opium trade as being controlled by the Taliban, in fact the estimated drug profits of all anti-government elements (AGEs) is a mere fraction of the trade’s total estimated export value. The UNODC estimated the export value this year at $3.4 billion. Of that, AGEs profited between $250-470 million, less than 14% of the total trade. Moreover, what fraction of that percentage has gone specifically to the Taliban as opposed to other AGEs is unknown.

Furthermore, while the Taliban profits from the production of opium through ushr, a 10% tax on all agricultural products, and possibly through a protection racket in which it receives compensation for providing security along smuggling routes, the UNODC has acknowledged that there is little indication that the Taliban itself is responsible for either the actual production or trafficking of the drug.

This is an inconvenient truth for the US, which has so far managed through its propaganda efforts to successfully obfuscate the truth about the Afghan drug trade and portray the Taliban as being almost wholly responsible.

A known drug trafficker, Dawood Ibrahim is naturally also involved in money laundering, which is perhaps where the role of gambling operations in Nepal comes into the picture.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, wrote last month after the Mumbai attacks that Ibrahim had worked with the US to help finance the mujahedeen during the 1980s and that because he knows too much about the US’s “darker secrets” in the region, he could never be allowed to be turned over to India.

The recent promotion of Lakhvi to “mastermind” of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen similarly reported that according to intelligence sources, Dawood Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu, Nepal. A deal had been made earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to India, but the CIA was fearful that this would lead to too many of its dirty secrets coming to light, including the criminal activities of high level personnel within the agency.

One theory on the Mumbai attacks is that it was backlash for this double-cross that was among other things intended to serve as a warning that any such arrangement could have further serious consequences.

Although designated as a major international terrorist by the US, media reports in India have characterized the US’s past interest in seeing Ibrahim handed over as less than enthusiastic. Former Indian Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani wrote in his memoir, “My Country My Life”, that he made a great effort to get Pakistan to hand over Ibrahim, and met with then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State) to pressure Pakistan to do so. But he was informed by Powell that Pakistan would hand over Ibrahim only “with some strings attached” and that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would need more time before doing so.

The handover, needless to say, never occurred. The Pakistan government has also publicly denied that Ibrahim is even in the country; a denial that was repeated following the recent Mumbai attacks.

Others suspected of involvement in the attacks and named among the 20 individuals India wants Pakistan to turn over also have possible connections to the CIA, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of LeT, and Maulana Masood Azhar, both veterans of the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort.

Azhar had been captured in 1994 and imprisoned in India for his role as leader of the Pakistani-based terrorist group Karkut-ul-Mujahideen. He was released, however, in 1999 in exchange for hostages from the takeover of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was hijacked during its flight from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India and redirected to Afghanistan. After Azhar’s release, he formed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which was responsible for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that led Pakistan and India to the brink of war. LeT was also blamed for the attack alongside JeM.

Both LeT and JeM have links to the ISI, which has used the groups as proxies in the conflict with India over the territory of Kashmir.

Hafiz Saeed travelled to Peshawar to join the mujahedeen cause during the Soviet-Afghan war. Peshawar served as the base of operations for the CIA, which worked closely with the ISI to finance, arm, and train the mujahedeen. It was in Peshawar that Saeed became the protégé of Abdullah Azzam, who founded an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) along with a Saudi individual named Osama bin Laden.

MAK worked alongside the CIA-ISI operations to recruit Arabs to the ranks of the mujahedeen. The ISI, acting as proxy for the CIA, chose mainly to channel its support to Afghans, such as Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The U.S. claims the CIA had no relationship with MAK, but bin Laden’s operation, which later evolved into “al-Qaeda”, must certainly have been known to, and approved by, the CIA.

But there are indications that the CIA’s relationship with MAK and al-Qaeda go well beyond having shared a common enemy and mutual interests in the Soviet-Afghan war. A number of al-Qaeda associates appear to have been protected individuals.

Branches of MAK existed elsewhere, including in the United States. The US Treasury Department lists one of MAK’s aliases as Al-Kifah. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, served as a recruitment center during the 1980s, but its operations did not end after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Kifah was also a recruitment center for efforts by extremist groups in the Balkans.

Just as in Afghanistan, the US also had mutual interests with Bosnian Muslims and extremist groups acting in the Balkans. MAK had since evolved into al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, which had links to groups operating in Bosnia. Despite an arms embargo against such groups, they managed to obtain weapons and supply shipments in which the US at best looked the other way and at worst played an active role.

The operations to arm al-Qaeda linked groups in Bosnia were carried under the watch of then director of the US European Command Intelligence Directorate Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Hayden subsequently served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and is currently the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, which is the head of the CIA.

A former official at the US consular office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Michael Springman went public after 9/11 to explain how his office was used by the CIA to bring recruits to the US for training during the 1980s.

The Jeddah office is where most of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas to enter the US.

Two other of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were in fact known to the CIA and were being monitored. Despite being known al-Qaeda operatives, they were allowed to enter the US under their real names and neither the FBI nor the State Department were notified.

The US explains this as the result of the CIA losing the terrorists’ trail when they travelled to Thailand after an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. But this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny since it was known that they had obtained visas to enter the US. Thus, even if the CIA did in fact lose track of the terrorists, standard procedure should have dictated that the FBI and State Department be alerted.

The 9/11 Joint Inquiry and subsequent 9/11 Commission were apparently satisfied with the CIA’s explanation that it lost al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, and nobody was ever held accountable for the “mistake” of knowingly allowing two known al-Qaeda operatives on the terrorist watchlist to enter the United States unhindered.

Upon arriving in the US, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were assisted by an individual under FBI surveillance for his possible connections to terrorist groups and, furthermore, even lived in a house rented from an FBI informant. But the FBI claims that it didn’t know anything about the men, despite them using their real names and being listed in the phone book, because the CIA hadn’t informed them the two were in the country. The Joint Inquiry report described this as perhaps the single greatest missed opportunity to break up the 9/11 operation and prevent the attacks.

Additionally, it was in fact the CIA who not once, but at least on six separate occasions, approved a visa, including from the office in Jeddah, for or the entry of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh”, into the US, despite his known connection to terrorist acts in Egypt, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and despite having been on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist. This, too, was described as a series of “mistakes” after the government was forced to admit that it had occurred – an explanation that the New York Times, which reported this information in a series of articles, seemed to find perfectly satisfactory.

Many, however, find such incompetency and coincidence theories to be simply not credible, preferring instead alternative, oftentimes much more plausible, conspiracy theories.

The Blind Sheikh had also travelled to Peshawar during the mujahedeen effort, and was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s top asset during the Soviet-Afghan war. He later became the spiritual head of the terrorist group that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a plot which the FBI had known about in advance through two or more informants.

One of the informants served as a bodyguard for the Blind Sheikh and was made responsible for obtaining materials to make the bomb with. Tape recordings he secretly made of conversations with his FBI handlers reveal that the original sting operation involved a plan to replace a chemical used in making the bomb with an inert stimulant that would render it inoperative. But this plan was withdrawn by a supervisor at the FBI and the terrorist cell was allowed to go ahead and make a real bomb – which was then used to blow up the World Trade Center.

Another notable character connected to Al-Kifah training and recruitment efforts for al-Qaeda is Ali Mohammed. He also happened to be an in FBI informant, a CIA asset, and a member of the special forces in the US Army. It is Ali Mohammed whom some suspect of actually being the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing. He was later charged in connection to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but has since seemingly disappeared off the map.

After the 9/11 attacks, the investigation into the financing of the attacks led to Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin. According to Indian officials, a joint investigation with the FBI revealed evidence that it was at the direction of the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, that Omar Sheikh transferred $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Florida.

Omar Sheikh, a known associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured and imprisoned in India for his role in the kidnapping of American and British nationals in 1994. He was released in 1999 along with Maulana Massod Azhar in exchange for the hostages from Flight 814. According to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, Omar Sheikh was also an agent of Britain’s spy agency, MI6, for whom he served in operations in the Balkans.

Omar Sheikh’s role in the 9/11 attacks has also been downplayed. Mention of him in the media instead focus on his role as the man responsible for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He is currently being held in Pakistan on charges relating to Pearl’s murder.

After Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks became known publicly, Musharraf quietly replaced him and the whole affair was hushed up in the US. When a reporter from a foreign news agency asked then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice whether she was aware of the reports that the ISI chief had financed the hijackers and was in Washington meeting with high level officials at the time of the attacks, she denied having seen “that report” and protested that, “he was certainly not meeting with me.”

Interestingly, the White House website transcript of the press briefing censored the words “ISI chief” from the reporter’s question, despite the words clearly being audible in the video of the briefing.

The 9/11 Commission also acted to whitewash Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the attacks. Despite the question of the ISI chief’s involvement being included on a list of items for the Commission to investigate from families of the victims of the attacks, the Commission’s report made no mention of it, either to confirm or deny the information, which, despite having received zero coverage in the US major media (with the one exception of a citation of a report from the Times of India in a blog on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website), was widely reported internationally (as well as in US alternative media).

Rather, the 9/11 Commission simply acted as though such reports didn’t exist. Despite Bob Graham, one of the chairs of the earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry, publicly stating that he was surprised by the evidence of foreign government involvement (he added that this information would not be made public for another twenty or thirty years when it would be due for release to the national archives), the 9/11 Commission report arrived at the opposite conclusion, saying there was no evidence of any such involvement and, moreover, that the question of who financed the attacks was “of little practical significance”.

Another former head of the ISI is now being privately accused by the US of involvement with the group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, according to reports citing a document listing former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and four other former heads of Pakistan’s intelligence agency as being involved in supporting terrorist networks. The individuals named have been recommended to the UN Security Council to be named as international terrorists, according to Pakistan’s The News.

The document has been provided to the Pakistan government and also accuses Gul, who was head of the ISI from 1987-1989, of providing assistance to criminal groups in Kabul, as well as to groups responsible for recruiting and training militants to attack US-led forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban.

Hamid Gul responded to the reports by calling the allegations hilarious. The US denied that it had made any such recommendations to the UN.

But the US has similarly accused the ISI of involvement in the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul last July. This was unusual not because of the allegation of an ISI connection to terrorism but because it was in such stark contrast with US attempts to publicly portray Pakistan as a staunch ally in its “war on terrorism” when the country was under the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf.

The US attitude toward Pakistan shifted once an elected government came to power that has been more willing to side with the overwhelming belief among the public that it is the “war on terrorism” itself that has exacerbated the problem of extremist militant groups and led to further terrorist attacks within the country, such as the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last year or the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in September. While the world’s attention has been focused on the attacks in Mumbai, a bomb blast in Peshawar last week killed 21 and injured 90.

While the purported US document names Gul and others as terrorist supporters, another report, from Indian intelligence, indicates that the terrorists who carried out the attacks in Mumbai were among 500 trained by instructors from the Pakistan military, according to the Sunday edition of the Times. This training of the 10 known Mumbai terrorists would have taken place prior to their recent preparation for these specific attacks by the LeT training specialist Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny.

Details have emerged regarding who was responsible for the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, with the evidence pointing to the Pakistani-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). But the trail doesn’t end there.

Indications of a coming attack were reportedly received by intelligence agencies well in advance. US signals intelligence (SIGINT) picked up a spike in “chatter” indicating something was brewing, which was supported by information from assets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some of the information that was received by US intelligence was passed on to India as early as September.

The details were specific. The CIA station chief in Delhi reportedly met with his counterpart at India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), to pass on intelligence that LeT was planning a major attack that would come from the sea.

Less than a week before the attacks, a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan purportedly killed a British citizen of Pakistani descent named Rashid Rauf, who was suspected of planning to blow up commercial airliners flying from Britain to the U.S. He fled Britain in 2002 after being suspected of stabbing to death his uncle, Mohammed Saeed. He settled in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, and married a relative of Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of another militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

Besides being linked to JeM, he was also suspected by some intelligence sources of having connections to the ISI. Pakistani authorities arrested him in Bahawalpur in August 2006 at the behest of British authorities, but he escaped police custody when they allowed him to enter a mosque ostensibly to say afternoon prayers. While police waited outside, Rauf walked out the back door. He may have just escaped, but there were also rumors that he was secretly taken into custody by the ISI in a plan that kept him under wraps while preventing him from being extradited to Britain.

The location of Rauf was reportedly given to U.S. officials by the Pakistani government, and may have been a move calculated to appease the U.S. over charges that elements of the ISI are still assisting militants engaged in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. Earlier this year, terrorists bombed the Indian embassy in Kabul, and both India and the U.S. claimed that the ISI had been involved in the attack.

The airstrike that killed Rauf may also have been the result of early information obtained on the attack on Mumbai, as intelligence agencies reportedly had learned that he was involved in the planning of a major upcoming terrorist event. They may have sought to take him out before such an attack could occur.

Indian intelligence had obtained its own warnings of an attack. One indication was a request from a LeT operative to obtain international SIM cards for an upcoming operation. There was also information that a LeT team was training at a camp near Karachi, and that part of their training was to prepare for launching attacks from the sea. The team was trained under Zakir-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, also known as “Chacha”. Also among the information received was that the Taj Mahal hotel was pinpointed as a major target.

As a result, security at the hotel was increased, but was lessened again just a week prior to the attacks because of complaints from the hotel’s clients. Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, which owns the hotel, acknowledged that warnings of a possible attack had been received.

The Tata Group is also invested in the energy sector, and stands to gain from the recent deal between the U.S. and India, which would provide India with nuclear resources outside of the framework of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards system. Pakistan has voiced its opposition to the U.S. deal with its nuclear-armed neighbor.

On November 18, RAW intercepted a satellite phone conversation made to a number in Lahore, Pakistan, known to be used by the military commander of LeT known alternatively by the names Yusuf Muzammil or Abu Hurrera, also known as “Yahah”. The caller notified his handlers that he was heading for Mumbai with unspecified cargo.

As a result of the intelligence it had received, India’s Navy and Coast Guard were on the lookout for suspicious ships entering Indian territorial waters, and were specifically told to watch for an unidentified ship coming from Karachi.

Only one of the terrorists in the Mumbai attacks was captured alive, Azam Amir Kasab, a resident of the territory of Punjab in Pakistan. According to reports, he has told his interrogators a great deal about how the attacks went down.

Kasab confessed to being a member of LeT. He and his fellow terrorists were instructed to target foreigners, particularly Americans, British, and Israelis. They had set out from Karachi in a ship called the “MV Alpha”, which is allegedly owned by Dawood Ibrahim, a terrorist wanted by India in connection with bombings in Bombay in 1993 that resulted in 250 deaths. Ibrahim is also wanted by Interpol, and has been designated a global terrorist by the U.S.

Confronted with increased naval patrols that were boarding and searching suspect vessels, the team hijacked a fishing trawler called the “Kuber”, registration number 2303, and killed most of its crew except for Amarsinh Solanki, whom they kept alive to help navigate.

On November 26, as the terrorists neared their target destination, they killed Solanki by slitting his throat. An associate of Ibrahim’s in Mumbai had arranged to pick the team up in inflatable rubber dinghies. They went ashore at about 9pm. Witnesses reported seeing them land in the dinghies, which were unusual among the common wooden fishing boats, and unloading a number of large bags.

Once on shore near the Gateway to India, Mumbai’s main landing point near the Naval dockyard, the team split up. Four men went to the Taj Mahal hotel, where an advance team had already checked in on November 22 and set up a control room. Two went to the Nariman House, the Mumbai headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch, an ultra-orthodox Jewish group. Another acquisitioned a taxi and drove to the railway station. Two others headed to the Leopold restaurant, a hot spot for foreign visitors to Mumbai.

At about 9:20pm, one team arrived at the Nariman House, where they took hostages, while another opened fire at the Leopold café. At 9:45, terrorists entered both the Taj Mahal and Trident Oberoi hotels, where hostages were again taken. At 10:15, two of the men began firing indiscriminately outside the Cama hospital. At 10:30, terrorists entered the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station and again opened fire.

According to Pakistan’s Daily Times, the terrorists identified and killed two U.S. intelligence officers at the Taj Mahal hotel.

Indian officials are now saying that just 10 men were responsible, indicating that two-man teams were able to strike one target and move on to the next. Teams held out under siege the the Nariman House and the hotels, with the Taj Mahal the last to be cleared. By the end, it had taken Indian forces 60 hours to kill or capture the attackers, with their reign of terror finally ending on the 29th with nearly 200 people reported dead.

According to police, the men were aged 18 to 28. They were found to have drugs in their system, and traces of cocaine and LSD were found at one or more scenes of their attack, which they apparently had taken for an additional adrenaline boost to keep them going for the long siege and battle with Indian special forces.

A Mauritian government identity card was discovered with the terrorists who attacked the Taj Mahal hotel, along with credit and debit cards of a number of different banks, including HSBC (headquartered in London and named after its founding member, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, with global branches), HDFC, and ICICI (both banks in India). The Republic of Mauritius is a former British colony and member of the Commonwealth off the east coast of Africa, near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.

They were reported to be using AK-47 assault rifles. Photos shown in the press reveal what appear to be variants with a folding stock. They were also reported to have handguns and grenades. Additionally, police recovered sub-machine guns used by the terrorists. An Associated Press photo of the confiscated guns reveals what appear to be Heckler & Koch MP5-N sub-machine guns. The “N” model is a version of the MP5 designed specifically for the U.S. Navy and used by Navy Seals teams.

H&K MP5-N

BlackBerry cell phones were also recovered from the terrorists, containing international SIM cards investigators believe correlate with the early intelligence further connecting the team to LeT. During the attacks, they received calls from outside the country, which is apparently among the evidence leading government officials to early on state publicly that the terrorists had ties to a foreign nation.

A global-positioning system (GPS) and satellite phone were found in the abandoned Kuber fishing trawler. Navigation routes plotted in the GPS revealed the planned route from Karachi to Mumbai and back again, indicating that the terrorists hoped they might possibly be able to escape and return to Pakistan. Investigators determined that this was the phone used to contact Muzammil, the LeT military commander. Calls from the phone were also traced to Lakhvi, the LeT training specialist.

The MV Alpha was also intercepted after the attacks by the Indian Navy.

Responsibility for the attacks was claimed via e-mail by a previously unknown group calling itself Deccan Mujahideen. This appears to be a front, apparently designed to direct blame upon groups within India and give the appearance of a home-grown terrorist attack. Deccan may refer to a neighborhood in the city of Hyderabad or to the Decaan Plateau that dominates the middle and south of India.

The RAW traced IP addresses used to send the e-mail to an account in Russia that was opened on the Wednesday just prior to the attack and used to relay the message to media in India. The e-mail was further traced to a computer in Pakistan, and investigators have also said that it was generated by dictation using voice recognition software.

India has called for Pakistan to hand over 20 individuals it has alleged were involved in the attacks. Among the wanted men are Dawood Ibrahim, Hafiz Saeed, and Maulana Masood Azhar.

As noted, Ibrahim is among Interpol’s most wanted. The U.S. designated him as a global terrorist in 2003, stating that he had ties to al Qaeda and that he funded attacks by militant groups, including LeT, aimed at destabilizing the Indian government. Ibrahim’s organization is known as the D-Company and is known to be heavily involved in drug trafficking. According to the U.S. government, D-Company is involved in large-scale shipment of narcotics into the U.K. and Western Europe. He is also alleged to have ties to the CIA through casino operations in Nepal.

Ibrahim is the son of a police constable and worked as a police informant, only to become involved in crime. He rose through the ranks of the underworld in Bombay (now Mumbai) to become one of the city’s leading organized crime bosses. He later fled to Pakistan, where he is believed to have stayed in Karachi under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Some Indian analysts have suggested that it was at the behest of the ISI that Ibrahim planned the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan has denied that he is in the country.

Wanted along with Ibrahim for the 1993 Bombay attacks is Aftab Ansari, also an Indian national. Ansari is linked to Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin. Omar Sheikh is an associate of Osama bin Laden and has been accused of masterminding the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal.

Omar Skeikh was also the paymaster of the 9/11 hijackers and wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in Florida. According to Indian intelligence, working with the FBI a link was established between Omar Sheikh and the head of Pakistan’s ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed. Sources revealed to the media that the evidence obtained from Omar Sheikh’s cell phone indicated that it was at the behest of Mahmud Ahmed that the money was sent to finance the 9/11 hijackers. While this has widely been reported internationally, including by the Press Trust of India, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, Agence France-Presse, and UK’s the Guardian and the Times, it has not received any mention in the U.S. mainstream media.

Hafiz Saeed is the founder of LeT. He travelled to Peshawar to join the CIA-backed effort to overthrow the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. Peshawar served as the command base for both the CIA and Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK). Haiz Saeed became the protégé of Abdullah Azzam, who, along with Osama bin Laden, founded MAK to recruit and train foreign fighters to join the mujahedeen. The CIA worked closely with the ISI to finance, arm, and train the mujahedeen.

By about 1988, MAK had been evolved into the group known as al-Qaeda by bin Laden. The name “al-Qaeda” literally means “the base”, and may either refer bin Laden’s base of operations for the mujahedeen war effort or the actual database of names of jihadist recruits. While numerous terrorist attacks have been attributed to al-Qaeda over the years, it isn’t so much a centralized organization as a loose network of individuals and affiliate groups having roots or otherwise associated with the CIA-backed effort against the Soviet Union.

Maulana Masood Azhar is the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, and is also wanted by Interpol. Like LeT, JeM is said to have close links with the ISI, which has used the groups to wage a proxy war against Indian forces in Kashmir.

Like Hafiz Saeed, Azhar was numbered among the veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war. He was educated at Jamia Binoria, a madrassa (religious school) in Karachi that also served as a recruitment center for the mujahedeen.

He later became a leader of Karkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistani militant group, and was captured by India in Kashmir in 1994. He was tried and acquitted, but spent six years in jail before being freed in exchange for the release of the crew and passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999. He formed JeM after returning to Pakistan.

Omar Saeed Sheikh was also caught and imprisoned by India for involvement in that hijacking, and was likewise released in exchange for the hostages. Like Azhar, Omar Seikh is reported to have close links to the ISI and, according to former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, was also an agent of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, which sent him to engage in operations in the Balkans.

Relations between India and Pakistan also reached a crisis point in December 2001, when gunmen attacked the Indian parliament. JeM and Let were held responsible for that attack as well, and both countries amassed troops on the border, a situation that led to fears of war between two nuclear-armed countries. The U.S. helped mediate an end to the crisis, pressuring Pakistan to crack down on militant groups and setting in motion the plan to assist India with its nuclear program that was finally realized this year.

LeT was banned in Pakistan in 2002 following the attack on the Indian parliament, but remained active in the country nevertheless. The group has denied responsibility for the attacks in Mumbai last week.

Pakistan has on one hand said it would formulate a response to India’s request to turn over the 20 wanted men, and on the other hand indicated it would not do so, insisting that the men are either not in Pakistan or that they have been under Pakistani surveillance and no indication seen that they were in any way involved.

While the evidence strongly points to LeT and a network of associates affiliated with the group or with each other, that web also includes the CIA and MI6. One early report said that some of the Mumbai terrorists were, like Rashid Rauf, British nationals. This was picked up by numerous press accounts around the globe, but the Indian government official this information was attributed to denied ever having said such a thing.

Theories that this was a false flag operation have already begun to spread around the internet, with varying culprits and motives. Whatever the truth is, what is clear from the facts one is able to piece together from media accounts is that there is more to the Mumbai attacks than meets the eye.

“Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years,” the Times reported Thursday, “that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office, says.”

Mr. Costa’s remarks came last week as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) prepared to release its Afghan Opium Survey 2008 report, the executive summary of which has already been available for some time. The now released report shows that poppy cultivation was reduced in much of Afghanistan and is even more highly concentrated in the south, with Helmand province being by far the biggest producer.

The Times states that the Taliban “have for several years ‘systematically encouraged’ opium cultivation as a way to finance their insurgency, the study said.” It notes that the UNODC has estimated that “the insurgents made as much as $300 million from the opium trade” last year.

“But after three years of bumper crops, including this one,” the Times continues, “the Taliban have succeeded almost too well, producing opium in amounts far in excess of world demand.”

Despite production far exceeding global demand, prices for the drug have not fallen as much as might be expected based solely on the supply and demand principle of the market. One explanation that has been put forward is that opium is being stockpiled.

According to the Times’ summary of Mr. Costa’s remarks, “The fact that prices had not collapsed already, he said, was evidence that the Taliban, drug lords and even some farmers have stockpiled the opium, more and more of which is also being processed in Afghanistan. ‘Insurgents have been holding significant amounts of opium,’ Mr. Costa said.”

In addition, “This year, the Taliban are taking a ‘passive stance’ toward cultivation, apparently putting less pressure on Afghan farmers to plant opium poppy. ‘They have called a moratorium of sorts as a way of keeping the stocks stable and supporting the price,’ Mr. Costa said.”

The Times thus acknowledges the role of non-Taliban actors, the “drug lords and even some farmers”, but nevertheless downplays their role and characterizes the cultivation of poppies and production of opium as being predominantly controlled by the Taliban. But this is not an accurate representation of the facts on the ground, as the findings of the UNODC report itself makes clear.

While the Times suggests the amount of opium produced is under the direct influence of the Taliban, in fact the decision to cultivate or not is made by individual farmers.

While the Times suggests the Taliban have “systematically encouraged”, citing the UNODC study, those words in fact do not appear in the report. Nor does it make any similar claim.

As part of the survey, the UNODC asked farmers their reasons for growing or not growing the crop. Most farmers who have never chosen to cultivate poppies cited as their reasons that it was against Islam and otherwise illegal. Of those who did cultivate poppies this year, 92 percent cited poverty alleviation as the driving motivation. Importantly, of those who had grown in the past, but stopped, the government ban was cited as the predominate reason for doing so. The second most common answer was that the choice was based on decisions of the shura and elders.

The two main reasons given in the report for the reduction in the amount of land used for opium cultivation are “successful counter-narcotics efforts in the northern and eastern provinces of Afghanistan” and “unfavourable weather conditions that caused extreme drought and crop failures in some provinces”, mostly in northern Afghanistan, where the Taliban have little or no presence.

Still other factors were the reduction in farm-gate prices for opium, which, coupled with the drought in the north, led farmers to switch to alternative crops. One such alternative crop has increasingly become cannabis. “Farmers growing cannabis,” the UNODC report notes, “may earn the same net income per hectare as farmers who grow opium, or even more, because cultivating cannabis is less labour intensive than opium.”

Furthermore, poppies grown in the south have a higher opium yield than in the north, so another factor in the trend seen this year is simply the result of market conditions. With supply far exceeding demand, driving down farm-gate prices, coupled with drought and lucrative, lower-labor alternatives, it is only natural, whatever other factors are at work, that the cultivation has lessened in the north and east and increased in the south, where the crop produces a higher yield.

Instructively, while the amount of land used to cultivate opium decreased in 2008 by 19 percent, the estimated opium production was still only down 6 percent from last year due to the higher overall yield.

Contrary to what the New York Times suggests, the UNODC report gives no indication that the reason cultivation was cut back had anything whatsoever to do with any kind of direction or control over the crop by the Taliban.

The implications that the Taliban group itself grows the crop and is involved in trafficking are also misleading. According to the UNODC, the Taliban’s profits from the trade come principally from ushr, a 10 percent tax on all agricultural crops, and from offering protection for traffickers involved in moving the opium.

David Mansfield is an independent consultant who has advised governments and organizations such as the World Bank on policy and issues relating to the Afghan opium trade. Mr. Mansfield told Foreign Policy Journal, “Ushr is charged on all agricultural produce and traditionally goes to the mullah for his services to the community. There are reports that this is being absorbed by ‘the Taliban’ — which is not a monolith.” He added that another situation which occurs is half the tax going to the mullah and the other 5 percent to the Taliban.

Thomas Pietschmann, a research officer with the UNODC Statistics and Surveys Section who is credited in the 2008 report, told the Journal that an estimated $50-70 million is made by warlords and Taliban from the farmers. An additional $200-400 million is made from the traffickers. But, he explained, “We do not have any good idea of how this income is divided up between warlords and Taliban.”

Mr. Pietschmann also confirmed that, while they did profit from ushr and from offering security, “We also have not seen strong indications of much direct exporting of opiates by the Taliban.”

In commentary attached to the UNODC report, Mr. Costa asks, “Who collects this money? Local strong men. In other words, by year end, war-lords, drug-lords and insurgents will have extracted almost half a billion dollars of tax revenue from drug farming, production and trafficking.”

Notably, Mr. Costa does not answer his question with “the Taliban”, but includes a much broader range of participants who profit from the trade that includes, but is in no way limited to, the Taliban.

When Mr. Costa told reporters, “They have called a moratorium of sorts as a way of keeping the stocks stable and supporting the price”, the Times reported that “They” meant “the Taliban”. But it seems more probable the UNODC Executive Director intended his use of the pronoun to include other groups as well. In fact, the word “Taliban” does not appear in the report outside of Mr. Costa’s comments. The report refers instead more broadly to “anti-government elements” or AGEs.

The Times actually underreports the total estimated amount made by such elements as being $300 million, as opposed to nearly $500 million. But it attributes these profits to “the insurgents” — which it uses nearly synonymously with “the Taliban” — rather than differentiating between warlords, drug lords, and other insurgent groups besides the Taliban. As Mr. Pietschmann told the Journal, the UNODC did not estimate how much of that half million dollars is specifically going to the Taliban.

There are a number of other important facts to consider that the Times does not share with its readers. The total export value of opium and its derivatives (morphine and heroin) this year was estimated by the UNODC to be $3.4 billion. Therefore a logical corollary of the Times’ own account is that the majority of profits from the opium trade are going to non-insurgents.

It should be noted that this conclusion, too, may be inaccurate, as there are simply too many unknowns. But what is clear is that the Taliban, while profiting from the opium trade, do not control it.

The Times misleads on other counts, as well. The UNODC does suggest that opium is being stockpiled as one possible explanation for why costs haven’t dropped in direct correlation with the vast over-supply. Mr. Costa has said that “Lack of price response in the opium market can only be the result of stock build-ups, and all evidence points to the Taliban.” But Mr. Costa himself appears to be politicizing the report’s actual findings with this remark. The market price of opium against the estimated supply does suggest stocks are being withheld, and the Taliban does profit from the trade. But there appears to be only this circumstantial evidence that the Taliban is responsible for the theoretical stockpiling; and even if we assume that stockpiling is indeed taking place, there are also non-Taliban warlords and drug lords who may be responsible.

Mr. Pietschmann, in his comments to the Journal, presented the notion of stockpiling by Taliban as merely a possibility. While there aren’t strong indications of direct exporting by the Taliban, “They may, however, hold some of the stocks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and/or ‘protect’ those holding the stocks as well as ‘protect’ the laboratories and some of the convoys.”

Indeed, Mr. Costa’s own commentary in the UNODC report contains numerous caveats, such as “If the Taliban are holding major drug stockpiles…” (emphasis added), suggesting this is only a possibility, not a certainty.

This is a point Mr. Mansfield emphasized. With regard to the suggestion that opium is being stockpiled, he said, “This assumption is based on an estimate of global demand of 4,000 metric tons, but is that estimate accurate? Does it adequately reflect use in what are thought to be growing consumer markets such as China and India? It is of course also based on an assessment of Afghan yields, but how accurate are these? The US would seem to systematically estimate lower yields compared with UNODC, to the equivalent of around 2000 metric tons of opium this year. Is some of the ‘surplus’ which UNODC suggests is stockpiled actually a problem of estimates of supply and demand? How much?”

He confirmed that withholding of opium takes place and that he has come across “some wealthier farmers who keep opium and speculate on whether the price will increase” but nevertheless characterized the notion of massive stockpiling to the amounts of “thousands of tons”, as suggested by the UNODC, as being an “assumption”.

By overemphasizing the role of the Taliban, the Times serves to obfuscate the apparent role of local leaders and, more importantly, government and law enforcement officials in the drug trade.

Mr. Mansfield acknowledged, with regard to corruption within the Afghan government and police force, that “some raise the question as to who makes more money from the opium economy — AGE or corrupt government officials.”

Mr. Pietschmann also acknowledged that “Corruption is indeed a problem and there are indications that it may go to rather high levels.” He added, “It is, however, difficult to estimate to what extent the trade is controlled by major players within the government. We do not have any indications that the bulk is being controlled by some of these individuals. There seems to be more of a problem with parliament where drug lords have strong influence over individuals and/or are even personally involved.

“A UNODC study done in 2006 concluded that there may be 35 major criminal groups in Afghanistan, of which 15 are located in southern Afghanistan (Helmand/Kandahar) controlling much of the business. None of them had its criminal head in government. But they seem to influence politics, including who gets the job as police chief at the regional level.”

And while much of the U.S.-led effort to combat the trade in Afghanistan has involved eradication of poppy fields, most experts seem to concur, including in reports from both the UNODC and the World Bank, that at best eradication has had only very limited success and is at worst counterproductive because it targets the farmers, most of whom grow the crop only in an effort to alleviate poverty, rather than the big players who control the actual trade in the drug.

Mr. Pietschmann observed, “Our Executive Director has repeatedly made the point that there is a need to target corruption as well as the drug markets, drug convoys and the laboratories, and not the farmers.”

And yet U.S. policy on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan seems to focus largely, if not predominantly, upon eradication. This may actually help increase the profit margin of the major players, and may actually be used by warlords and drug lords with strong influence in the government either at the state or local level to target competitors in the trade.

A research policy paper for the World Bank by William A. Byrd, for instance, notes that eradication helps drive up the “risk premium”, thereby driving up farm-gate prices and helping to cause “greater extortion of ‘protection money’ from farmers by various authorities.”

The World Bank report also noted “where sharp reductions in cultivation were achieved, physical eradication accounted for only a very small proportion of the decrease in cultivated area.”

It also states that “most of the limited physical eradication of poppy crops that has occurred has been under the leadership of provincial Governors. There are serious concerns however that due to the close ties between many local officials and drug interests, Governor-led eradication is especially vulnerable to corruption in implementation.”

The paper adds that “such corruption tends to result in eradication disproportionately affecting the poor, who lack political connections or resources to pay bribes to avoid eradication.” Moreover, “eradication can exacerbate poverty” among poor farmers and their families, whom are mostly targeted.

Similarly, a UNODC Assessment of Organized Crime in Central Asia noted that “The leaders themselves usually belong to the leading clans and occupy positions of high status in a family. In addition, the leaders are usually well connected to the apparatus of government power, whether in the political leadership or local administration.”

The assessment also notes that while there is often cooperation amongst criminal groups or organizations, there is also a great deal of competition, and that “What is perhaps most interesting here is the degree to which state actors are often involved. This can be illustrated through examining government crackdowns on competing clans. It is highly probable that at least some of the crackdowns on organized crime by government and law-enforcement agencies are carefully targeted against rival clans, while criminal organizations that are linked to the dominant clan obtain ‘preferential impunity’ and are able to continue to accumulate wealth from their criminal activities.”

And there’s an even bigger picture to consider with regard to the Afghan opium trade. The UNODC report estimates farm-gate prices and the export value of the opium, and also notes that rates of seizure of the drug indicate that it is going to Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. Some of this opium is “exported by sea or by air,” Mr. Pietschmann told the Journal. “Direct exports from Pakistan go to the UK. The UK estimates that 20-25% comes directly from Pakistan and 75% comes via the Balkan routes and the Netherlands into the UK.”

But, he said, from Afghanistan, “Most of these opiates then go to Iran,” which he confirmed “is a major transit country.” He added, “Most is then trafficked from Iran to Turkey.”

Once the opium has left Afghanistan its cost increases exponentially, which is where the real profits are made. For example a Development Research Group report for the World Bank by Peter Reuter noted that “the principal costs … are associated with distribution rather than production.” In 2000, “A pure kilogram of heroin produced in Afghanistan for less than $1,000, was exported from Turkey for $10,000, and by the time it reached consumers in Western Europe it was priced at $175,000.”

The World Bank report noted that “The cost of production, as opposed to distribution, is a trivial share of the final price.”

Mr. Pietschmann made a similar observation in response to inquiries. “We have not as yet done the global calculations for 2008,” he replied, “but it is quite clear that the overwhelming profits out of opiates produced in Afghanistan are made outside Afghanistan,” such as “in the transit countries to Europe and even more so, within Europe.”

The role of the Taliban in the opium trade is often greatly exaggerated by the U.S. corporate media. But even if one was to accept accounts like those the New York Times gives of the Taliban’s role, it nevertheless still remains self-evident that the Taliban’s cut is “trivial” if one considers the bigger picture.

That is not to say the profits gained by the Taliban and other insurgent groups are not significant. As Mr. Costa notes in the UNODC report, given an estimate of nearly $500 million going to insurgents, it is not surprising that “the insurgents’ war machine has proven so resilient”.

While acknowledging that “the Taliban will only receive a rather small fraction of the overall Afghan income from the opiate trade”, Mr. Pietschmann also emphasized, “But even the ‘little money’ of let’s say US$150-200 million is a lot for financing insurgency activities. Our information is that Taliban fighters earn several times more than people in the Afghan army.”

The question still remains of who is really responsible for the lion’s share of the highly profitable Afghan opium trade. Mr. Pietschmann suggested a role of Kurdish groups in trafficking the drug from Iran into Turkey.

In Turkey, some have suggested the existence of a shadow government, or what is termed the “deep state”, that really controls things behind the scenes. Even a former president and seven-time prime minister of Turkey, Suleyman Demirel, has said, “It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two.” He added, “There is one deep state and one other state. The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one.”

Writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, John Gorvett, a free-lanced journalist based in Istanbul, said: “Defining the ‘deep state’ is not so easy, however. Some argue that it is a hangover from the Cold War, when Western powers sought to establish a network of armed groups that would stay behind in countries that might have fallen to the Soviet bloc. While these groups were then abolished in most countries when the Soviet Union collapsed, the theory is that in Turkey this never happened. Instead, the group continues to operate, an unofficial underground army tied to organized crime and a bevy of corrupt politicians, police and bureaucrats.”

In one case, a heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list named Abdullah Catli died in a car accident in 1996 near the town of Susurluk and was found carrying a diplomatic passport signed by the Interior Minister of Turkey. Writing in Druglink Magazine in 2006, journalist and television producer Adrian Gatton commented, “The Susurluk Incident became Turkey’s Watergate, exposing the deep links between the Turkish state, terrorists and drug traffickers. It revealed what Turks call the Gizli Devlet, or Deep State — the politicians, military officers and intelligence officials who worked with drug bosses to move drugs from Afghanistan into Europe.”

That corruption extends to the United States, according to former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. According to Ms. Edmonds, U.S. officials were involved in helping foreign intelligence agents acquire sensitive nuclear secrets. She also says she was approached by a mole within the FBI who attempted to recruit her. The woman who approached her was a member of the American Turkish Council, which was the target of an FBI investigation because it was suspected of being involved in, among other things, drug trafficking. When she went to her superiors with concerns over possible misconduct and espionage within the FBI, she was fired. The Department of Justice then gagged her under the “state secrets privilege”.

Ms. Edmonds later formed the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, which includes as a member Daniel Ellsberg, the former special assistant to the Secretary of Defense who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Ellsberg has said, with regard to Ms. Edmonds, “Al Qaeda, she’s been saying to congress, … is financed 95% by drug money — drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours — such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan — all the ‘Stans — in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe’s heroin”.

If such allegations are correct — and Ms. Edmonds is not alone in making them — then it might perhaps explain why the U.S. government is so keen on solely blaming the Taliban for the production of opium in Afghanistan and the lucrative drug trade.

And, as the reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war amply demonstrated, the U.S. mainstream media — not the least of which includes the New York Times — is only too willing to parrot government propaganda while failing to question the official line or critically examine key issues.

The terms of the agreement effectively allow the U.S. to continue to control billions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of exported Iraqi oil held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It also contains numerous loopholes that could allow the continuing long-term presence of U.S. military forces and would effectively maintain U.S. jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

Iraq’s cabinet approved the agreement a week ago with 27 members voting in favor, out of 28 ministers who were present, with nine ministers absent. It is now being debated in the Parliament.

Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi, Iraq’s minister of defense, issued a dire warning that without the agreement and continued presence of U.S. forces, “then what happened in the Gulf of Aden will happen in the Arabian Gulf too. Pirates will start in these ports in a way you can’t even imagine.”

Governments often use fear tactics to push through controversial legislation. Before the U.S. invasion, members of the Congress were told that if they didn’t authorize the President to use military force against Iraq, Saddam Hussein might attack the east coast of the United States with biological weapons from unmanned aerial vehicles, for example. More recently, members of Congress were warned that if they did not pass the highly unpopular bill taking taxpayers’ dollars to bail out banking and investment corporations, there would be martial law in America.

While painting an imaginary threat to frighten the public into supporting the agreement, Obaidi criticized opponents as being conspiracy theorists. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Obaidi “batted down conspiracy theories about the agreement”, theories fueled by “anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr” about “the existence of secret deals for a longer American presence.”

And yet Obaidi at the same time seemed to lend credence to the fears of opponents. As the Times noted, without comment on the contradiction, he “held open the possibility that some Americans might be needed after” the deadline of the withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2011.

The agreement has been protested by large popular demonstrations in the streets of Baghdad. Thousands protested during a rally on Friday against the deal in Firdaus Square, where in 2003 U.S. soldiers toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in a staged publicity event that has since been hailed by the mainstream media as “an iconic moment”.

At the rally, demonstrators burned an effigy of President George W. Bush. A man who helped erect the effigy was quoted by the London Times as saying, “Just like Saddam’s statue was brought down, Mr Bush has fallen as well.”

The demonstrations were reportedly organized by Moktada al-Sadr, a highly influential figure whose father was murdered in 1999, most likely by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he organized a resistance to the occupation consisting of both political and military elements. He commands the al-Mahdi Army, which has threatened to resume armed resistance if the agreement is passed by the Iraqi government.

While the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki initially claimed it could make an agreement unilaterally with the Bush administration, it has since conceded that the measure must obtain Parliamentary approval.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the agreement would also need to be agreed to by the Senate to have the force of law, but the Bush administration has claimed that no Senate approval is necessary, essentially declaring its intention to violate Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. This is not the first time the Executive Branch under Bush has declared for itself the power to govern by fiat, and it is likely to continue to be met with little resistance by the complacent U.S. Congress.

The SOFA agreement, which now has the official lengthy title of “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq”, while addressing a number of the Iraqi concerns, contains a number of loopholes that would allow, among other things, a U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond the given deadline for withdrawal.

It states in the preamble that both parties recognize the importance of “contributing to world peace and stability, combating terrorism in Iraq”, and “thereby deterring aggression and threats against the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Iraq”. The agreement affirms that cooperation between the two countries “is based on full respect for the sovereignty of each of them in accordance with the purpose and principles of the United Nations Charter”.

This must be considered rather Orwellian language, given the fact that the invasion of Iraq was an act of aggression, defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”; and that the invasion was itself a breach of the peace in violation of the U.N. Charter and other applicable international treaties comprising the body of international law, resulting in instability and bringing terrorism to Iraq. It’s also quite meaningless language given some of the actual contents of the agreement itself.

Article 3 of the agreement contains a clause apparently intended to prevent the U.S. from including Iraqis in its extraordinary renditions programs by barring the U.S. from transferring any non-U.S. persons into or out of the country “unless in accordance with applicable Iraqi laws and regulations, including implementing arrangements as may be agreed to by the Government of Iraq.”

There is thus a loophole that might allow the U.S. to do precisely that, and any such “arrangements” could be interpreted, if the record of the Bush administration is any gauge, to mean approval from the Iraqi President without advice of consent of the Parliament. The U.S. could also, of course, simply violate the agreement and spirit disappeared persons out of the country as it has under the CIA renditions program.

Article 4 states that the U.S. military presence is requested “for the purposes of supporting Iraq in its efforts to maintain security and stability in Iraq”, which is belied by the fact that most Iraqis want the American troop presence to end and consider the continuing occupation to be the most significant causal factor of the violence that, while having ebbed over the past two years, continues to plague the country.

A survey taken last year for the U.S. military, for example, revealed that “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation”, as reported by the the Washington Post.

The agreement states that any such operations “shall be fully coordinated with Iraqi authorities” and “overseen by a Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC)”, and that it is “the duty of the United States Forces to respect the laws, customs, and traditions of Iraq and applicable international law.” It then adds that both nations “retain the right to legitimate self defense within Iraq, as defined in applicable international law.”

This itself represents a major loophole because, of course, the right to “self defense” under international law is very broadly interpreted by the U.S. For example, the invasion of Iraq itself was painted by the Bush administration as an act of self defense against a perceived threat and thus, according to the administration, legitimate. As another example, the U.S. continues to bomb Pakistan despite growing protests from both the public and the government. In one incident that is particularly revealing as to the U.S. interpretation of “self-defense” under international law, a U.S. airstrike in June targeted and killed 11 members of the Pakistani Frontier Corp within Pakistan. Despite having killed allied forces within their own borders, the Pentagon described the attack as a “legitimate” act of self-defense.

The agreement sets the date of June 30, 2009 as the deadline for “the withdrawal of combat forces from the cities, villages, and localities.” U.S. forces would then be located on bases within Iraq and would ostensibly only be able to leave those bases on combat operations executed with the full cooperation of the Iraqi government. Use of such bases would be granted to the U.S. for the purpose of the ongoing foreign military presence within Iraq.

The agreement states that its implementation must be “consistent with protecting the natural environment and human health and safety” and that “Each Party shall provide the other with maps and other available information on the location of mine fields and other obstacles that can hamper or jeopardize movement within the territory and waters of Iraq.”

But it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. will engage in efforts to clean up areas contaminated with depleted uranium (DU), a still radioactive and chemically toxic isotope that is leftover from the process of enriching uranium. The dense metal is used as a weapon for penetrating armor by the U.S. military, but aerosolizes upon impact, and thus presents the risk that DU particles could be spread by the wind or contaminate drinking water. While the Pentagon has denied publicly that DU poses a health risk, it has privately acknowledged in internal documents and studies that inhalation of DU represents a serious health risk and may lead to cancer.

The Pentagon acknowledged after the Gulf War that at least 320 tons of DU remained on the ground from that conflict. Cancer rates in southern Iraq rose significantly after that war, with many Iraqi doctors attributing the increase to DU, claims that have been dismissed by the Pentagon as “propaganda”. Dr. Doug Rokke, a former US army colonel sent to the Gulf by the Army as a health physicist in 1991 to advise on cleanup procedures involving depleted uranium, has said that 30 members — nearly a third of his entire team — are now seriously ill, himself included, and that several have since died from cancer.

One estimate puts the amount of DU used in the first couple months of the Iraq war following the March 19, 2003 invasion at 1,100 to 2,200 tons.

It’s equally unlikely that the U.S. will make any effort to clean up “dud” cluster munitions that still litter Iraq from both wars. Estimates from the Gulf War put the number of unexploded submunitions, which effectively become landmines, at more than one million. These weapons continued to kill a decade after the war. According to a Human Rights Watch estimate, in 2001, cluster submunitions caused an average of 30 casualties per month. In its World Report 2004, the group reported that the U.S. and U.K. “dropped nearly 13,000 cluster munitions, containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions” in just the first three weeks of combat. Even assuming only a conservative 5% “dud” rate for the weapons (many of which were not bombs but ground-launched munitions with a dud rate of up to 16%), that would translate into 100,000 unexploded munitions.

Another controversial aspect of the SOFA agreement has been the question of jurisdiction for crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq. While the U.S. has backed down from its insistence that private Pentagon contractors, such as mercenaries from the infamous Blackwater group, be under U.S. jurisdiction, the final agreement still maintains that U.S. soldiers themselves will primarily be.

The agreement states that “Iraq shall have the primary right to exercise jurisdiction over members of the United States Forces and of the civilian component”, but only for “premeditated felonies” and only “when such crimes are committed outside agreed facilities and areas and outside duty status.” Thus, for Iraq to have jurisdiction, any crimes committed by American soldiers would have to be shown to be “premeditated” and committed while off duty.

Were a soldier to kill an Iraqi civilian, for example, while not on duty, it would have to be shown that he had contemplated the killing in advance and acted with intent to kill. If the soldier, therefore, claimed that he had been threatened by other Iraqis and discharged his weapon only to deter an assault, and that any collateral damage that resulted was accidental, then the case would fall not under Iraqi, but U.S. jurisdiction.

Moreover, the pact adds that any member of the U.S. armed forces who is found to have committed a premeditated crime while off duty would “be entitled to due process standards and protections consistent with those available under United States and Iraqi law.” Any such incident would thus still fall under U.S. legal jurisdiction, with only what might perhaps be described as special consideration for Iraqi law — but not full Iraqi legal jurisdiction, as has been misreported by some of the mainstream media.

On top of that, the text adds that “United States Forces authorities shall certify whether an alleged offense arose during duty status”, which essentially gives the U.S. the power to define any service member’s “duty status” at the time of any given incident — yet another loophole that might prevent Iraq from having jurisdiction over crimes committed against its own people by foreign occupying military forces.

The agreement also stipulates that “each Party shall waive the right to claim compensation against the other Party for any damage, loss, or destruction of property, or compensation for injuries or deaths that could happen to members of the force or civilian component of either Party arising out of the performance of their official duties in Iraq.”

In other words, if the U.S. destroys Iraqi property or injures or kills Iraqis, the Iraqi government may not seek any compensation or reparations. Of course, this clause is mostly one-sided since there is no risk of Iraqis destroying the homes of U.S. citizens. Iraq isn’t bombing U.S. cities, towns, and villages, and Iraqis aren’t killing U.S. civilians within their own borders. So this clause may in effect be read as an Iraqi waiver of any right of the government to seek reparations from the U.S. for damages, injuries, or deaths resulting from the continuing foreign military occupation.

There is a recourse for “third party claims” — meaning from Iraqi citizens as opposed to the government — under which the U.S. would “pay just and reasonable compensation” for “meritorious” claims. But the U.S. apparently gets to decide what claims are “meritorious” or not, and all such claims “shall be settled expeditiously in accordance with the laws and regulations of the United States.” In other words, claims of damages, injuries or deaths from Iraqi citizens seeking compensation for actions of the U.S. military would not fall under Iraqi jurisdiction.

The SOFA agreement stipulates that detentions must be carried out only with Iraqi cooperation and that detained individuals must be turned over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours of their arrest, which represents a shift from the U.S.’s earlier position that it be able to detain Iraqi citizens when and however it chooses.

The most commonly reported statement in the agreement, reflected in many headlines, is that which reads, “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”

In addition, “All United States combat forces shall withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities no later than the time at which Iraqi Security Forces assume full responsibility for security in an Iraqi province, provided that such withdrawal is completed no later than June 30, 2009.”

The agreement also states, “The United States recognizes the sovereign right of the Government of Iraq to request the departure of the United States Forces from Iraq at any time.” (Notice it doesn’t recognize the sovereign right of the People of Iraq, who overwhelmingly want the U.S. forces gone and whose government is seen by many as a puppet regime for colluding with the U.S. in arranging for its occupying forces to remain. Of course, Iraqis who recognize this have fallen prey to “conspiracy theories” — at least according to the Iraq’s minister of defense.)

In return, the U.S. does offer a few incentives for the Iraqi government. It pledges, for example, to “Support Iraq to obtain forgiveness of international debt resulting from the policies of the former regime”, which the U.S. supported throughout the 1980s.

The agreement also states: “Recognizing and understanding Iraq’s concern with claims based on actions perpetrated by the former regime, the President of the United States has exercised his authority to protect from United States judicial process the Development Fund for Iraq and certain other property in which Iraq has an interest. The United States shall remain fully and actively engaged with the Government of Iraq with respect to continuation of such protections and with respect to such claims.

“Consistent with a letter from the President of the United States to be sent to the Prime Minister of Iraq, the United States remains committed to assist Iraq in connection with its request that the UN Security Council extend the protections and other arrangements established in Resolution 1483 (2003) and Resolution 1546 (2003) [sic] for petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas originating in Iraq, proceeds and obligations from sale thereof, and the Development Fund for Iraq.”

Resolution 1483 noted “the establishment of the Development Fund for Iraq to be held by the Central Bank of Iraq” and that funds “shall be disbursed at the direction of the [Coalition Provisional] Authority”.

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), then headed up under Paul Bremer, proceeded to establish the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) in an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. To get around the terms of 1483, the DFI was held on the books of the Central Bank of Iraq and a portion of the fund located in Baghdad. But the U.S. nevertheless remained in control of the money and held most of it in New York.

The fund consists of assets seized from Iraq under the regime of Saddam Hussein as well as proceeds from the export of Iraqi oil.

While 1483 stipulates that these funds should be used “to assist the people of Iraq in the reconstruction and development of their economy and to facilitate assistance by the broader donor community”, the system has been plagued with charges of corruption and lack of accountability, with billions of dollars reportedly unaccounted for. Billions more have been paid out to corporations contracted by the Pentagon for ostensible reconstruction. One such corporation has been Halliburton. Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 until 2000.

A further resolution on June 8, 2004, Resolution 1446, stated that “upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the funds in the Development Fund for Iraq shall be disbursed solely at the direction of the Government of Iraq”, but that proceeds from export sales of oil and natural gas would continue to be deposited in the fund.

As a January 2004 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted, in March 2003, “President Bush issued an executive order directing the transfer of funds controlled by the Iraqi government and its financial and oil institutions to the U.S. Treasury.” The Federal Reserve Bank then created a “Special Purpose Account” for the funds on behalf of the Treasury.

According to a Congressional Research Service report from October, about $10 billion is currently still being held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, accounting for a third of Iraq’s total reserves of foreign currency and gold.

If the agreement is approved by the Iraqi Parliament, it will thus effectively acquiesce to continued control over these proceeds from the export of Iraqi oil by the U.S., with merely a recognition of Iraqi “concern” over this money and a veil of Iraqi control over only the disbursement of the money for reconstruction and development. This aspect of the proposed pact has received little — if any — attention in U.S. mainstream media reports that have focused instead on the date set for withdrawal.

Antonio Graceffo¹ is a wanted man. His crime? Supporting the Shan people in their rebellion against the ruling military junta in Burma, known euphemistically as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

A former successful Wall Street investment banker from Brooklyn turned travel and adventure writer, Antonio has authored numerous books, including about his adventures bicycling around Taiwan, bicycling across the Taklamakan Desert in China, and his time studying with the monks at the famous Shaolin Temple. More recently, he has been involved trying to bring the world’s attention to the plight of the Burmese people suffering under the brutal reign of the SPDC.

Since outside journalists are banned from entering the country, Antonio crossed the border under the protection of the Shan State Army (SSA) and began reporting on conditions in the country, interviewing victims of the SPDC’s war against the people, writing about what he learned, and producing a series of videos featured on YouTube to bring awareness about the plight of the Shan.

Perhaps more well known than the SSA are another resistance group known as the Karen National Union (KNU), and its armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), who were featured in the 2008 movie Rambo, starring Sylvester Stallone in the fourth installment in the film series.

But while Stallone played a fictional character, Antonio Graceffo, one could fairly say, is the real Rambo. An experienced martial artist featured on the Discovery Channel and in a number of martial arts films, Antonio was embedded with the Shan State Army and helped train Shan soldiers in the art of close-contact self-defense. Among Antonio’s videos on YouTube are several featuring him demonstrating martial arts techniques and sparring with SSA soldiers.

It is on a purported KNU website that an image of Antonio appears under a heading reading “wanted”, reminiscent of an old Western poster — except, of course, that Antonio is wearing the cap and uniform of the Shan State Army instead of a cowboy hat and leather vest, and holding a Kalashnikov rifle instead of a Winchester.

The website, MyanmarNargis.org, has a few telltale signs of being a false front operation–what is euphemistically known in the field as “counterintelligence”– headed up in fact by the SPDC. Perhaps not least among these signs is the name, “Myanmar”, which is the ruling regime’s name-change for the country that is otherwise known — particularly among opposition groups who do not recognize the regime — as Burma.

And the fact that a “wanted” poster for a man who has helped the rebels on a website of a rebel organization is also more than slightly counter-intuitive. Anti-junta groups Antonio remains in contact with confirmed to him that it is a disinformation site designed by the SPDC to create disunity and infighting among and within opposition groups.

“Fortunately,” says Antonio, “most people working on the Burma issue don’t trust anything written in Burmese. Each of the tribes has its own language and alphabet. Most of them are smart enough to use English on their websites to garner international support. The junta, it appears, is not that smart. But, since General Ne Win forcibly closed all of Burma’s universities, to prevent smart people from meeting and exchanging political ideas, it is no wonder that they are slipping intellectually.”

The text of the website page featuring the “wanted” poster, which requires the proper character encoding to be installed on one’s computer in order to read it, was translated for Antonio by a person he described as “an exiled Burmese intellectual, who had to flee Burma and seek asylum in another country. He hates the junta with a passion and supports the resistance groups.”

The exile noted along with his translation to Antonio, “the KNU has cleared your name and so we cannot sell you by the kilo to them.” (How very disappointing for those of us who know his whereabouts).

The page heading, under the “wanted” poster, reads “The Former Marine Who Would Combine Military Forces with Terrorists.” It describes the KNU, SSA and other resistance groups, as “armed terrorists” (perhaps–just maybe–another sign that the website is a counterintelligence front of the SPDC). It describes Antonio as “a former US Marine Italian race, American citizen”, and as being the head of a small group travelling within the country. It says Antonio’s group “is surely going to have to run and escape for their lives as they go through the Armed Forces’ Offensives” but that “it is more certain they will die violent deaths.”

Not very polite. Fortunately, Antonio is not actually in Burma currently — nor was he during the period of time last month the website alleges he was moving through the country with his “group” — a merry band, no doubt.

As much as the page seems designed to put people on the lookout for Antonio, it also seems intended to sow resentment among opposition leaders. Take, for instance, the insertion of this tidbit: “5th Brigade Commander Baw Kyaw Hair, on his part, was dissatisfied with how the present congress has appointed a central group in which General Tamlabaw’s sons and daughters have important posts in the KNU.”

Baw Kyaw Hair’s group “favors having a ceasefire with the present military government and exchange arms for peace”, the website says. (The exiled translator noted to Antonio that “this is an SPDC phrase for complete surrendering of one’s forces and one’s weapons to SPDC — very indicative of an SPDC author”.)

That author adds, “It is heard that 6th Brigade Commander Hsarmi is [also] dissatisfied with Tamlabaw’s circle of family and friends.”

The intent thus seems to try to poison relations among rebel groups as much as to threaten Mr. Graceffo — not that such a warning from the violent SPDC should be taken lightly.

While Antonio always manages to keep his sense of humor, despite the danger and despite the ugliness he has witnessed firsthand, the oppression in Burma under the military junta of the SPDC is no laughing matter. It’s high time the world took notice and took action. Antonio’s courageous work in defiance of the ruling regime has been intended to further that goal.

To close, in the words of Antonio, “please say a prayer for the people of Shan State.”

1. Adventure and martial arts author, Antonio Graceffo has lived in Asia for many years, publishing four books and several hundred articles in magazines and websites around the world. He has worked as a consultant and writer for shows on the History and Discovery channels and appears on camera in “Digging for the Truth” and “Human Weapon”. Antonio is host of the web TV show, “Martial Arts Odyssey.” Antonio was embedded with the Shan State rebel army in Burma, documenting human rights abuses, and doing a film and print project to raise awareness of the Shan people. See all of his videos about martial arts, Burma and other countries. Check out his books. Check out his website, Speaking Adventure. To send him an email, click here.

Earlier this week, John McCain once again attacked his presidential campaign opponent Barack Obama on the basis of his association with another individual. In this case the individual was Rashid Khalidi. Mr. Khalidi’s sin? He’s a Palestinian who has been critical of Israel. Obama’s sin? Speaking at a dinner five years ago held in honor of Mr. Khalidi.

Other speakers at the dinner were critical of Israel, accusing the state of committing terrorism against the Palestinian people, leading McCain to compare the dinner gathering to “a Neo-Nazi outfit”, and thus implying that criticism of Israel’s crimes is equivalent with racism.

The Los Angeles Times reported last April on the Obama’s presence at the dinner, noting that “a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel.” Another speaker noted that “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” shared one thing with Osama bin Laden; they were both “blinded by ideology.”

Obama, who has vigorously portrayed himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, said at the dinner that his talks with Mr. Khalidi and his wife Mona had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases” and expressed hope that “for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

Mr. Khalidi is a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University in New York.

The McCain campaign last Tuesday criticized the L.A. Times for withholding a videotape of the dinner. A campaign spokesman said, “A major news organization is intentionally suppressing information that could provide a clearer link between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi.”

The L.A. Times explained that it “did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it.”

McCain himself lashed out at the L.A. Times for choosing to not release the videotape, accusing the paper of bias and comparing the dinner to a “neo-Nazi outfit”.

“I’m not in the business of talking about media bias,” McCain said, “but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet? I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.”

McCain’s choice for vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, also criticized Obama’s attendance at the dinner. “Among other things, Israel was described there as the perpetrator of terrorism rather than the victim,” she said. “What we don’t know is how Barack Obama responded to these slurs on a country that he professes to support.”

She also accused the L.A. Times of bias. “It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking after his best interests like that,” she said. “We have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public’s right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed.”

The Obama campaign responded by emphasizing that Obama “has been clear and consistent on his support for Israel, and has been clear that Rashid Khalidi is not an adviser to him or his campaign and that he does not share Khalidi’s views.” They also observed that McCain is the chairman of the International Republican Institute, which gave $448,000 to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Khalidi was a founder of that organization.

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt returned the criticism, saying, “Instead of giving lectures on media bias, John McCain should answer why, under his own chairmanship, the International Republican Institute repeatedly funded an organization Khalidi founded.” The McCain campaign responded by noting that “it is obvious that Khalidi and Obama are close friends, whereas McCain and Khalidi have never even met.”

What’s remarkable about the whole affair is the deeply embedded racism it reveals in both candidates’ campaigns and in the media.

Take the McCain campaign position that any association with Mr. Khalidi is somehow sinful, and criticism of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people abhorrent. This is a deeply anti-Semitic position–for Arabs are Semitic peoples, too–in that the underlying assumption is that Palestinian terrorism against Israelis is rightly condemned, but even the suggestion of Israeli terrorism against Palestinians regarded as a “slur” against Israel.

Or take the Obama campaign’s response, and how quickly they were to disavow Khalidi, essentially confirming that the McCain camp would be right to consider it worthy of criticism were Obama to share his views and even criticizing McCain in turn for chairing a group that gave money to Khalidi’s organization. The Obama camp’s response, in other words, served only to reinforce the underlying assumption of the McCain campaign.

Khalidi himself has observed the trend for criticism of Israel to be equated with anti-Semitism. In an article he wrote in The Nation magazine last May, he said, “It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and indeed tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events sixty years ago [leading to the creation of the state of Israel] should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy.”

To Palestinians, these events are called al-Nakba–the expulsion. “Palestinians presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating Zionists everywhere,” Khalidi wrote. “The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel also created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the US occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must therefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact that it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land nearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of ethnic cleansing.”

This truth, of course, was well recognized by the early Zionist leaders.

Explaining the origin of the state Sarah Palin describes as the “victim” rather than the “perpetrator”, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, explains how Israel was born in 1948 with “the often violent expulsion of 700,000 Arabs as Jewish soldiers conquered villages and towns throughout Palestine.” Ben-Ami notes that “the Zionists committed more massacres than the Arabs, deliberately killed far more civilians and prisoners of war, and committed more acts of rape.” This policy of terrorizing the Arab population of Palestine for the purpose of ethnic-cleansing “helped demarcate the boundaries of the new state”.

Ben-Ami quotes then Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion as saying, “The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them — to run away.” Ben-Ami adds, “And they did; panic-stricken, they fled in the face of massacres in Ein Zeitun and Eilabun, just as they had done in the wake of an earlier massacre in Deir Yassin. Operational orders, such as the instruction from Moshe Carmel, the Israeli commander of the northern front, ‘to attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy and burn the villages,’ were carved into the collective memory of the Palestinians, spawning hatred and resentment for generations.”

The ethnic-cleansing of Palestine by the Jews “was in no small measure driven by a desire for land among Israeli settlers”, Ben-Ami observes, noting in addition that “The hunger for land persists to this day”.

Indeed. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Jewish settlements in those territories are illegal, a violation of international law, and contrary to international treaties to which Israel is a party, including the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter.

The “hunger for land” that “persists to this day” is also still accompanied by the policy of terrorizing the Palestinian people.

According to the organization Remember These Children, 1,050 Palestinian children have been killed since September 2000 compared with 123 Israeli children.

Catherine Cook of the Middle East Research and Information Project has noted, “The majority of these children were killed and injured while going about normal daily activities, such as going to school, playing, shopping, or simply being in their homes. Sixty-four percent of children killed during the first six months of 2003 died as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks, or from indiscriminate fire from Israeli soldiers.”

That trend continues. This year, 4 Israeli children were killed at by a Palestinian gunman in a single incident in Jerusalem. In this same period of time, 72 Palestinian children have been killed, most by attacks from the Israeli Defense Force within the Palestinian territories.

According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, since September 2000 4,871 Palestinians have been killed compared with 1,061 Israelis. According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, 32,744 Palestinians and 8,341 Israelis have been injured over the same time period.

U.S. financial support for Israel is upwards of $3 billion annually. In addition, the U.S. provides military and diplomatic support for Israel, including the use of its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to protect Israel against resolutions seeking to condemn it for its crimes against the Palestinian people and its other neighbors.

During the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, for instance, the U.S. vetoed a measure calling for a cease-fire, insisting that Israel be given more time to finish its destruction of southern Lebanon and further terrorize its people. Commenting on the Israeli actions, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted, “The tactic of pressuring civilians has been tried before, and more than once. The Lebanese, for example, are very familiar with the Israeli tactic of destroying power stations and infrastructure. Entire villages in south Lebanon have been terrorized, with the inhabitants fleeing in their thousands for Beirut.”

The World Health Organization observed that Israeli’s air strikes against Lebanon had “caused widespread destruction of the country’s public infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and road networks preventing the humanitarian community from accessing vulnerable populations and civilians fleeing war-affected areas.” Israeli military operations “caused enormous damage to residential areas and key civilian infrastructure such as power plants, seaports, and fuel depots. Hundreds of bridges and virtually all road networks have been systematically destroyed leaving entire communities in the South inaccessible.

While the Israeli siege of Gaza and illegal occupation and settlement of the West Bank continue, and while the Palestinian people continue to be terrorized under Israeli policies, the two leading candidates for the presidency bicker over who is more worthy of condemnation for their association with Rashid Khalidi.

The media, for its part, has failed to challenge even one iota of the fundamental racism inherent in the assumption that its a sin to associate with a Palestinian who is critical of Israel, and the deep anti-Semitism–against Arabs–inherent in the axiom that it is a “slur” to consider Israel anything other than the “victim” in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

John McCain, in attempting to portray Obama as somehow racist against Jews by comparing the dinner honoring Mr. Khalidi to a “Neo-Nazi outfit”, revealed his own deep racism and contempt for the Palestinian people.

But let the final word be for Barack Obama. If he were a man worthy of the presidency, far from issuing denials and disavowals, his campaign would rather embrace Mr. Khalidi and his views. Obama, unlike his opponent, is willing at least to acknowledge his “own blind spots” and his “own biases.” That’s a start. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough for a man seeking to lead the nation whose support for Israel is the single most important mechanism in denying the Palestinian people their equal rights and preventing a viable, sustainable peace in the Middle East from becoming obtainable.

“Both agree,” the Post said, “on a course of action in Afghanistan that could lead to a long-term commitment of American soldiers without a clear statement of how long they might remain or what conditions would lead to their withdrawal.”

In addition, “Neither candidate has spoken explicitly about how American and NATO forces would get out of Afghanistan.”¹

During the presidential debates, Senator Obama insisted that the US had a right to bomb Pakistan if it had intelligence on the whereabouts of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, while declining to explicitly state that he would not use military force against the country under other circumstances, thus leaving open the possibility that he might well continue the policy of the Bush administration, which has been to wage airstrikes and even put boots on the ground despite strong protests from both the Pakistani government and its people.

McCain disagreed with Obama’s position. He, like Obama, declined to say whether he would shift policy away from that implemented by the Bush administration, but added that he wasn’t going to “announce” positively that he would attack Pakistan. He had no real objection to doing so, it was just that he would rather it be a surprise than to “telescope” his intentions by answering in the affirmative that, yes, he too would bomb the country. And that was the only discernible difference between their positions.

U.S. allies and political analysts, meanwhile, have increasingly come to view the use of force in the region as not being a solution by itself, with some going so far as to recognize it as part of the problem. This has long been recognized — indeed, the consequences that have come to pass were predicted well in advance — by a large number of critics of US foreign policy whose views are marginalized by the corporate media, but only recently has begun find its way into the mainstream political discussion.

While both Obama and McCain have announced their intention to increase the troop presence, with McCain saying that an Iraq-style “surge” is “going to have to be employed in Afghanistan,” the US commander General David D. McKiernan has emphasized that such a policy would not end the conflict.

The so-called “surge” of troop numbers in Iraq has widely been credited with the decrease in violence there; a claim trumpeted by McCain and parroted by Obama. But the fact is that there were numerous other factors that led to progress in that regard, which occurred not because of but in spite of the “surge”.

The sectarian violence wound down after reaching its peak as the process of ethnically cleansing neighborhoods in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities became finalized. In Baghdad, walls were constructed around Shiite and Sunni communities to separate them where people of both Islamic faiths once lived peaceably as friends and neighbors.

Some Sunni groups also began turning against organizations such as Al Qaeda in Iraq that were responsible for terrorist attacks against civilians, which served to inflame the ethnic tensions. This movement of Sunni groups once engaged in armed resistance against the US military occupation shifting their focus to fighting terrorist elements, including other Sunni groups, led to many even becoming allied with US forces. These groups came to be known as “Awakening Councils” or “Sons of Iraq”, and this shift was largely responsible for helping to bring about the decrease in violence.

Other contributing factors included the decision by influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order his Mehdi Army to stand down and the withdrawal of foreign occupying forces from the south. As both the British commanding officer and US General David Petraeus noted, the violence in Basra plummeted as a result of the British withdrawal from the city.

And, of course, most Iraqis themselves point to the continuing US presence in Iraq as the principle causal factor in the violence.²

While both candidates announced their intention to implement a “surge”-type increase of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McKiernen, while agreeing that he wanted more troops, said, “Afghanistan is not Iraq…. I don’t want the military to be engaging the tribes” in Afghanistan. “It wouldn’t take much to go back to a civil war,” he added, saying that engaging tribes there was necessary, but that it was the Afghan government itself that should be responsible for doing it.³

Early this month, a leaked diplomatic cable revealed that the British envoy to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, had said that “The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust.”

“The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he observed, before going on to opine that the collapse of the Afghan government and its replacement with “an acceptable dictator” would be preferable.⁴, October 3, 2008.

While the British ambassador’s alternative proposal was worthy of the criticism it received, it no less negated the validity of his statement that US policy was part of the problem.

Right about the same time the leaked diplomatic cable was reported, for instance, Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, said there would be no “decisive military victory” and that the current strategy was “doomed to fail”.

“We’re not going to win this war,” he said. “It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.”

To do that, he said, “We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations. If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this.”⁵

In response, the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rejected the notion that the US and its allies would not “win” the war, saying there was “no reason to be defeatist”. Like the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, he suggested that “We continue to see the need for additional forces in Afghanistan.”

Yet his position differed from the candidates’ in that he also agreed with the British commander that peace negotiations with the Taliban were a “key long-term solution.” McCain has rejected the very notion of engaging in diplomacy with “enemies” of the United States. Obama, on the other hand, has expressed a willingness to sit down and talk in general terms, but has not specified that he would do so in the case of the Taliban.

“Part of the solution is strengthening the Afghan security forces,” Gates added. “Part of the solution is reconciliation with people who are willing to work with the Afghan government.”⁶

The British high commissioner in Islamabad, Pakistan, said that Carleton-Smith’s views were not new and echoed Gates, saying, “We are prepared to talk to good Taliban, who renounce violence and lay down their arms.”⁷

The Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir N. Kabulov, was once Moscow’s top KGB agent in Kabul, serving there during the Soviet military occupation of the country. “They’ve already repeated all of our mistakes,” he said of the US government and its policy in the region. “Now, they’re making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright.”

“One of our mistakes,” he suggested, “was staying, instead of leaving.”

“We abused human rights,” he acknowledged, “including the use of aggressive bombardment. Now, it’s the same, absolutely the same.” Criticizing the notion that increasing the military presence could solve the problem, he said, “The more foreign troops you have roaming the country, the more the irritative allergy toward them is going to be provoked.”⁸

US Army Colonel Christopher D. Kolenda, who served as a task force commander in Afghanistan, has also criticized the policy set by Washington. Writing in the Weekly Standard, he said, “Simply killing militants is not enough.”

“While building up the central government is important,” he wrote, “that effort will be in vain without a complementary effort to build systems and institutions at the local level, which can eventually be connected to the national government.”

While also favoring an increase in “international security forces”, he argued that these forces “must concentrate on protecting the population” and “reduce the friction associated with the presence of foreign forces” by working “with local leaders to promote security in villages and on roads” and “promote local solutions to local problems”.

A focus on international assistance to build Afghanistan’s infrastructure and economy is needed “to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life” in order to “mitigate the real risk of a return to the warlordism that racked the country after the Soviet war.”

The same focus on helping to rebuild the country and empower tribal leaders at the local level should also be implemented in neighboring Pakistan, Kolenda argued.⁹

Just last week, two more British experts on counterterrorism spoke out against the US policy. Former director general of Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency suggested the US should “stop using the phrase ‘war on terror.’” She described the US response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 “a huge overreaction”, saying that its “war on terror” had “got us off on the wrong foot because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily.”

Ken Macdonald, a top prosecutor for England and Wales who has overseen terrorism trials rejected “the Guantanamo model” applied by the US, in which detainees in the “war on terror” are denied their rights. “Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model,” he said. “You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats. Or you can say, as I prefer to, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.”¹⁰

The Afghan government itself, under President Hamid Karzai, has also taken a more conciliatory approach. A month ago, he told reporters, “A few days ago I called upon their [the Taliban’s] leader, Mullah Omar, and said, ‘My brother, my dear, come back to your homeland, come and work for the peace and good of your people and stop killing your brothers.”¹¹

Talks have reportedly taken place between representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban, with Saudi Arabia acting as intermediary, though both parties have denied this.¹² The denials may be technically accurate. The Reuters news agency reported that the talks were held in Saudi Arabia between “a group of pro-government Afghan officials and former Taliban officials.”¹³

The Taliban have said that they will not accept talks unless occupying forces leave the country. Karzai acknowledged, however, that he had asked the Saudi king to use his influence to help bring peace to Afghanistan. Prior to 9/11, Saudi Arabia was the Taliban’s second most important benefactor after Pakistan, and one of only three countries to officially recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Afghan political and tribal leaders also met this week with their Pakistani counterparts to discuss how to bring an end to the ongoing conflict in both their countries. Former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan Ayaz Wazir criticized any approach that rejected the logic of entering negotiations. “If you say you will talk only if they lay down arms then what’s the point in talking?” he asked. “The trouble is, they are not laying down their arms and you have to talk to them to convince them to lay down arms.”¹⁴

The US-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan has increasingly come under criticism for the deaths of civilians, such as an August 22 attack against the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. Afghan officials and United Nations investigators said the evidence pointed to the deaths of 90 or more civilians, mostly women and children. The Department of Defense first denied the claim, stating that as many as 30 militants had been killed, acknowledging the deaths of only five to seven civilians. Later, when images taken by villagers’ cell phones emerged showing the bodies of dozens of victims laying where they had been gathered on the floor of a building that served as the local mosque, the Pentagon was forced to change its estimate, but still only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths – the very minimum it could claim and still maintain even the least amount of credibility since that was about the number whose corpses were shown in the cell phone images.¹⁵

Another attack earlier this month in Helmand Province killed 25 to 30 civilians, most of whom were women and children, according to Afghan accounts.¹⁶ Another recent attack that resulted in the deaths of nine Afghan Army soldiers was called a case of “mistaken identify”.¹⁷

Some Afghan soldiers and police have grown so disillusioned with the increasing numbers of civilian deaths and ineffectiveness of the government to establish law and order that they have begun to defect to join the Taliban, seeking to expel the U.S. forces from their country. “Our soil is occupied by Americans and I want them to leave this country,” said Sulieman Ameri, who just a month before had served with police forces. “That is my only goal.” 16 other men that had been under his leadership joined him in switching sides to fight the occupying forces.

Another new recruit, Fida Mohammed, told Al Jazeera, “When Russia came it was only one country. Today we have 24 foreign infidel countries on our soil. All our men and women should come and join the jihad.”

The defectors had received training from the US or by the private military contractor Blackwater, and some still held certificates showing their completion of the training.¹⁸

Another who has turned against the occupying forces is the former mayor of Heart province, Ghullam Yahya Akbari, who says he now has bases training fighters. He’s grown so disillusioned with the Afghan government the foreign occupation that he says he’d also turn against the Taliban if they were to engage in talks with Karzai. “I do not believe that Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader] would do that, but if they sit with the Afghan government and negotiate then for us they will be like all the other members of the government and we’ll continue our jihad,” he said.¹⁹

Similarly, locals in Logar Province, have grown frustrated at the ineffectiveness of the Afghan government to establish law and end the thievery of bandits. “So people turned to the Taliban,” explained Abdel Qabir, a local resident. “They may not provide jobs, but at least they share the same culture and brought security.” The Taliban have rid the area of crime and established their own government with police chiefs, judges, and education committees.²⁰

And it’s not just the outlying provinces. Crime has gotten so rampant in the capital of Kabul itself, and the perception of corruption within the government so great, the Washington Post reported last month, that “It is making some Afghans nostalgic for the low-crime days before 2001, when the Taliban ruled most of the country.”

Nader Nadery, an official at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told the Post, “The government is weak, and it has an enormously high level of tolerance for crime, abuse and corruption. If you have power and money, you don’t have to account for your actions. Instead of rule of law, there is a state of impunity, which is one of the factors contributing to the growth of the Taliban.”

Another Afghan, Mohammed Hussain, who had recently been attacked while driving a passenger bus, said, “In the Taliban time, the roads were totally safe. You could drive anywhere in the country, 24 hours a day. Now, you take your life in your hands every time you leave on a trip.”²¹

Many critics of the US “war on terror”, though marginalized by the government and media, opposed the US actions in Afghanistan from the beginning and predicted in advance the consequences that have now led to criticism from an increasing number of analysts and government and military officials even within the political mainstream.

After 9/11, the Taliban said it would negotiate the handing over of Osama bin Laden if the US would share the evidence it claimed it had that he was responsible for the attacks. The Bush administration rejected diplomacy, however, and preferred to use military force. Critics argued that war would only bring more violence and more innocent deaths; and, indeed, more Afghan civilians were estimated to have been killed during the first several months of the U.S. campaign than had been killed in the attacks on 9/11. And, of course, the US never did capture Osama bin Laden.

Terrorist leaders have been captured, but not through the use of military force. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was arrested by Pakistani intelligence and handed over to the US.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, regarded early in the investigation into 9/11 as the money-man behind the plot and infamous for his alleged role in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, was similarly arrested by Pakistani police.

It was not military action, but police work, that resulted in the capture of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in Pakistan in 1995. Yousef was one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a mastermind of the foiled Bojinka plot to hijack airliners and fly them into targets including the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Barnett R. Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation and renowned Pakistani expert on the region Ahmed Rashid explain in the current issue how, “The crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan are beyond the point where more troops will help.”

They note that U.S. military action in Afghanistan served to push the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership into Pakistan, which has been increasingly destabilized as a result. “For years,” they acknowledge, “critics of U.S. and NATO strategies have been warning that the region was headed in this direction.”

They criticize the Bush administration’s “Cross-border attacks into Pakistan”, which they state “will not provide security”, but serve rather only to further stir up the region and threaten to spread the conflict “even to other continents — as on 9/11 — or lead to the collapse of a nuclear-armed state” (referring to Pakistan). U.S. reliance on air strikes, they observe, “cause civilian casualties that recruit fighters and supporters to the insurgency.”

So patently counter-productive and “irrational” has been the US policy in the region that “Many Afghans believe that Washington secretly supports the Taliban as a way to keep a war going to justify a troop presence that is actually aimed at securing the energy resources of Central Asia and countering China.”

Moreover, “the concept of ‘pressuring’ Pakistan is flawed”, they argue, because “No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal.” The Pakistani people and their government view the US “war on terror” as being opposed to their own interests and serving only to generate further militancy and terrorism within their own borders.

“U.S. diplomacy has been paralyzed by the rhetoric of ‘the war on terror’” that “thwarts sound strategic thinking by assimilating opponents into a homogeneous ‘terrorist’ enemy. Only a political and diplomatic initiative that distinguishes political opponents of the United States — including violent ones — from global terrorists such as al Qaeda can reduce the threat faced by the Afghan and Pakistani states and secure the rest of the international community from the international terrorist groups based there.”

Furthermore, to make negotiations possible between the Afghan government and the Taliban, “the United States would have to alter its detention policy. Senior officials of the Afghan government say that at least through 2004 they repeatedly received overtures from senior Taliban leaders but that they could never guarantee that these leaders would not be captured by US forces and detained at Guantanamo Bay or the U.S. air force base at Bagram, in Afghanistan.”

In conclusion, they write that “The goal of the next US president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for ‘victory’ as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy.”

But to date, neither candidate for president has expressed their recognition of these facts on the ground in the region, and there is little indication that US policy in the “war on terror” is likely to be significantly altered from its present course under either a McCain or an Obama administration.

1. Robert G. Kaiser, “Iraq Aside, Nominees Have Like Views on Use of Force,” Washington Post, October 27, 2008; Page A04.
2. Karen DeYoung, “All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows,” Washington Post, December 19, 2007; Page A14.
3. Ann Scott Tyson, “Commander in Afghanistan Wants More Troops,” Washington Post, October 2, 2008; Page A19.
4. Elaine Sciolino, “Afghan ‘Dictator’ Proposed in Leaked Cable,” New York Times
5. Christina Lamb, “War on Taliban cannot be won, says army chief,” Sunday Times, October 5, 2008.
6. “Gates rejects defeatism in Afghanistan”, The News (Pakistan), October 8, 2008; Richard Halloran, “US teeters on the edge of swamp of uncertainty in Afghanistan,” Taipei Times, October 14, 2008.
7. Muhammad Saleh Zaafir, “US, UK agree on settlement with Taliban: British HC,” The News (Pakistan), October 1, 2008; “US, UK agree on settlement with Taliban,” Press TV (Iran), October 11, 2008.
8. John F. Burns, “An Old Afghanistan Hand Offers Lessons of the Past,” New York Times, October 19, 2008.
9. Christopher D. Kolenda, “How to Win in Afghanistan: It’s time to adjust the strategy,” Weekly Standard, October 13, 2008; Volume 014, Issue 05.
10. Raymond Bonner, “2 British Antiterror Experts Say U.S. Takes Wrong Path,” New York Times, October 21, 2008.
11. “Taliban chief offers safe exist to allied forces: Karzai seeks Saudi help for talks with Mullah Omar,” Daily Times (Pakistan), October 1, 2008.
12. Nic Robertson, “Source: Saudi hosts Afghan peace talks with Taliban reps,” CNN, October 5, 2008.
13. “Pakistani and Afghan Elders to Meet to Ponder Violence,” Reuters, October 26, 2008.
14. Reuters, October 26, 2008.
15. Eric Schmitt, “30 Civilians Died in Afghan Raid, U.S. Inquiry Finds,” New York Times, October 7, 2008.
16. John F. Burns, “Afghans’ Toll Shakes Generals,” New York Times, October 18, 2008.
17. Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall, “‘Mistaken Identity’ Cited in 9 Afghan Deaths,” New York Times, October 22, 2008.
18. “Defections hit Afghan forces”, Al Jazeera, October 15, 2008.
19. “Afghan mayor turns Taliban leader,” Al Jazeera, October 17, 2008.
20. Anand Gopal, “Some Afghans live under Taliban rule — and prefer it,” Christian Science Monitor, October 15, 2008.
21. Pamela Constable, “As Crime Increases in Kabul, So Does Nostalgia for Taliban,” Washington Post, September 25, 2008; Page A13.

Among those who will cast their ballot, most, even those who will vote along party lines, view both Barack Obama and John McCain with skepticism. They are both seen negatively, both representing the established order. But one or the other of them is viewed as the lesser evil. To keep the greater evil out of power, a vote for the lesser one becomes necessary.

This remains true even when there are alternatives to the Democratic and Republican candidates, and even when the alternative candidates are seen far more as representing American interests and far less as being corrupted. A great many voters will vote for who they see as a lesser evil rather than who they see as actually being a good candidate because they so greatly fear the possibility of the greater evil gaining power.

This voting strategy is deeply ingrained. During the 2000 election, Ralph Nader was an extraordinarily popular candidate, particularly among the left. He was seen as far more worthy than the Democratic candidate Al Gore. And yet many liberals who shared that view chastised their fellow leftists for casting their vote for Nader, particularly when it came down to the Florida election.

The reasoning is straightforward: voting for Nader meant not voting for Gore, which meant George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, had a better chance of winning. Voting for Nader helped ensure a Bush win, the argument goes, because liberals might swing their vote away from Gore, but conservatives were less likely to do so. Nader didn’t have nearly as good a chance as winning as Gore, and so the strategic goal of keeping Bush from power meant voting for Gore even if Nader was the better candidate.

While this appears to be a perfectly logical argument and pragmatic voting strategy, it is rooted upon a number of fallacies. First and foremost is the deeply ingrained belief that alternative candidates don’t have a chance of winning, and so to vote for one would mean “wasting” your vote.

This year, the most extraordinary candidate was, hands down, Ron Paul. He was extremely popular, and remains so after having withdrawn his candidacy. He made waves in America, and, despite being old enough to be their grandfather, spoke to a whole new generation of voters that are disillusioned with business as usual in Washington. His position on the issues make sense and Americans recognized that he represented real change. The fact that he was even in the running gave hope to many that the U.S. political system might actually be able to function as the founding fathers intended, that a restoration of the American Republic based upon the U.S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land might be possible.

Still, one could turn on the TV and watch news reports where people on the street are interviewed about their preference of candidates and see people saying things like “I really like Ron Paul. I think he’s the best candidate. I like his position on the issues, and he makes sense. But he doesn’t have much chance of winning, so I’m probably going to vote for Barack Obama.”

Therein lies another fallacy. People don’t vote for who they actually like for the presidency based upon their opinion of whether or not they think it is likely that they will win. The “we have to ensure the greater evil doesn’t gain power” mindset wins out over “we have to ensure the best candidate wins”. But, of course, strict adherence to this electoral strategy can only result in the self-perpetuation of the same political process they are so disillusioned with in the first place.

The truth is that the only reason a candidate like Ron Paul is “unlikely” to win an election is because people won’t vote for him. And they won’t vote for him because they think he’s unlikely to win, which of course results in the self-fulfillment of that reality.

The American people need to recognize that an alternate reality exists, and that the way to bring it about requires merely a shift in paradigm. American voters should shift their electoral strategy from seeking to put the lesser of evils into power to seeking to elect the force for the greatest good.

There are, of course, those who already adhere to this alternative framework. If there were a few more among their numbers, alternative candidates like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Ralph Nader would gain more votes. They might still lose. But does voting for a losing candidate mean one’s vote has been wasted? How much more wasted is a vote that goes towards the lesser evil? You’ve still voted for the perpetuation of evil.

Far more worthy alternative candidates might still lose, but it wouldn’t mean votes were wasted. The increased percentage of the votes that went towards them would send a powerful message to Washington. It would encourage more people in the next election to do the same and vote their conscience, rather than adhering to a voting strategy that virtually guarantees nothing will ever substantially change.

Eventually, the number of votes being cast towards alternative candidates would be enough that the message from the American public could no longer be ignored. Even if still resulting in a loss for the worthiest candidate it would remain a win for the American public, because whichever evil from whichever party did win the election would be under far greater pressure to implement real reform.

And for Americans who don’t believe their voice is heard in Washington or that public pressure has any effect, a simple refresher course in history could remind them that advancements in society are not made at the behest of government or the ruling class, but only by pressure from the masses reaching a tipping point. Politicians don’t go out on a limb to promote radical change on their own accord. They have to be pushed out there under massive public pressure and under the fear that one’s constituency might very well vote one out of power if one doesn’t do precisely what they are publicly demanding.

One of the most effective means by which the American people could send a message to Washington would be by voting. There’s every reason to be cynical of the political system in the U.S. But there’s no reason for despair. There is hope. And there are individuals working within the system representing real hope and real change. More Americans need to take the time to stay informed and get engaged in the political process. And of those Americans who do vote each election, more need to recognize that the “lesser of evil” strategy only perpetuates the framework wherein it remains a choice between evils.

The only real voting strategy that can offer real hope for change is the one wherein Americans vote their conscience and cast their ballot for the candidate they think is truly the most worthy to be called by the title of President of the United States of America.

Until Americans realize this then there will indeed remain little hope for the future.