There are a number of common gripes about Professor Chomsky. The leading one is that he is actually a Zionist and “left gatekeeper” who, despite appearances, really seeks to limit debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Another, part and parcel of the first, is that he denies the power of the Israeli Lobby and wrongly believes that Israel is a strategic asset of the U.S. A third and more recent criticism is that he is opposes to a boycott against Israel and considers activists who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BSD) campaign “hypocritical”.

Such arguments, in truth, only serve to demonstrate either the ignorance of Chomsky’s actual views or the dishonesty of the writer who deliberately misrepresents them. In a recent example that typifies the latter class of articles, Jeffrey Blankfort has written a piece entitled “Chomsky and Palestine: Asset or Liability?“, in which he does an excellent job of constructing a strawman Noam Chomsky to contend with.

Blankfort begins by noting that Chomsky gained some mainstream media attention when Israel denied him entry from the Palestinian West Bank, where he was scheduled to give a lecture and meet the unelected prime minister Salam Fayyad. Fayyad is “a favorite of both Washington and Israel and, it would appear, Chomsky”, writes Blankfort, the implication being that Chomsky favors Fayyad, and for the same reasons as Washington and Israel.

To support that implication, Blankfort cites Chomsky from an interview with Democracy Now! in which he stated that Fayyad “is pursuing policies, which, in my view, are quite sensible, policies of essentially developing facts on the ground.” Chomsky described the policies as “sensible and sound ones.”

Chomsky was — it should go without saying — referring to specific policies Fayyad has implemented — those of seeking to construct the infrastructure for a de facto Palestinian state now, without waiting indefinitely for Israel to shift its policy away from rejection of such a state. Blankfort thus portrays Chomsky’s support for a de facto Palestinian state as a blanket endorsement of the Palestinian Authority and all its actions.

“Unfortunately,” continues Blankfort, “Chomsky was not questioned about his support for the nation building priorities of the earlier Zionists nor if he considered the Palestine Authority’s endorsement of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, of its attempts to suppress a UN investigation of the Goldstone Report, and of the role played by its US-trained militia in protecting Israel, to be also ‘sensible and sound.’”

The intended implication, of course, is that Chomsky supports the Zionist theft of Arab land, the Israeli blockade, the blocking of the Goldstone Report, and P.A. collusion with Israel — all of which, as anyone who is familiar with Chomsky’s actual views knows — is just complete asinine nonsense.

Yet, Blankfort adds, “For those puzzled by that question, be assured that it is meant to be taken quite seriously” — something should be quite difficult for any reader who actually has any knowledge of Chomsky’s actual views, and given Blankfort’s propensity for mischaracterizing and distorting them.

Blankfort continues, saying that “Once upon a time Prof. Chomsky was considered by many to be the most important spokesperson for the Palestinian cause.” This, however, was because of his writings and activism on other issues in which “unlike the case with Israel, he had no personal vested interest.” Chomsky “maintained that position” even though there have been Palestinian professors “who were and are more knowledgeable about the subject” and who “could speak from personal experience that does not include prior service as ‘a Zionist youth leader’ — Chomsky’s background”.

Blankfort is correct on this point. Chomsky in fact makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he was what he calls a Zionist youth leader. But the intended implication is that he supported the Zionist rejection of Palestinian rights and supports the policies of contemporary Zionism. It should go without saying — again, for anyone remotely familiar with his work — that this is more asinine nonsense and contradicted by Chomsky’s volumes of work on the subject and criticism of those same Zionist policies. As for being a self-confessed “Zionist”, Chomsky explains:

[In] the 1940s I was what was called a Zionist youth leader. But Zionism at that time included my own position, which was opposition to a Jewish state and a call for a binational settlement in the former Palestine. And I still held — one of the reasons I went to that specific kibbutz was that it was … the kibbutz organization which had indeed been opposed to a Jewish state up ’til 1948.

As I explain in “The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination“, the binational settlement was in fact the one favored and proposed by the Arab states — but rejected by the Zionist leadership and their Western benefactors. Chomsky explained further in the interview, as he has elsewhere, what he has meant when he’s referred to himself as a “Zionist”:

What I said was that I remain a Zionist in the sense of Zionism in the 1940s. Zionism has changed. That doesn’t mean my views have.

But, never mind Chomsky’s actual views. That Chomsky could remain the leading spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, Blankfort continues, is “a reflection of the political culture of the American Left which was and remains substantially if not predominantly Jewish”.

Thus it is not because his work has any merit, but only because Chomsky is really a Zionist Jew that his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been so highly regarded. Because of “deeply embedded” support for Israel and fears of anti-Semitism, criticism of Israel could only come from “someone within the tribe”, like Chomsky, “who unequivocally supported” Israel’s existence.

Blankfort himself is perfectly well aware of Chomsky’s actual views. The above quotes from Chomsky come from an interview Blankfort himself cites in his article, and which Blankfort himself participated as well, having called in to the live program. Yet hes chooses to omit the facts that that Chomsky was opposed to the creation of a “Jewish state” and instead supported the solution favored by the Arabs, a single binational state. Instead, Blankfort deliberately tries to create the impression that Chomsky was an ardent Zionist in the sense that the term “Zionism” has become known today; which is to say that Chomsky “unequivocally supported” the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of the rights of the majority Arab inhabitants.

Continuing, Blankfort asserts that Chomsky’s being a Zionist Jew “largely explains why Chomsky maintains his reputation despite public utterances over the past half dozen years that have done more to undermine the Palestinian cause than to help it.”

Blankfort claims a “destructive impact” of Chomsky’s “dismissal of the pro-Israel lobby as an influential force in shaping US Middle east policy”, and a “destructive role” Chomsky plays with his “unyielding opposition to the BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions] campaign launched by the leading organizations of Palestinian civil society.”

It might be instructive to turn here to what Chomsky actually has had to say about divestment, from the same interview:

I clearly cannot deal with the rumors that circulate in the internet gossip system. I mean, I’ve been in favor of the divestments since 2002 — in fact before the movement was even formed I was one of the sponsors of one of the first efforts. And I’ve repeatedly supported and in fact been one of the initial supporters of divestment efforts.

However, while Chomsky supports divestment, it is true he is opposed to the BDS campaign against Israel. He explains:

What I have opposed is the BDS proposals that harm Palestinians. If we’re serious about BDS or any other tactic we ought to want to ask what the consequences are for the victims.

Blankfort acknowledges that “Chomsky does support” a “vastly different, US-centered” campaign that targets “US companies that provide goods and services that assist Israel in maintaining the occupation.” But this campaign, Blankfort curiously asserts, “avoids penalizing Israel”.

The divestment campaign Chomsky supports includes, for example, pressuring the U.S. corporation Caterpillar “to stop selling bulldozers to the Israel military which it has used to destroy Palestinian homes.” Blankfort agrees “this is a worthy endeavor”, but suggests it would not “change the current situation for the Palestinians in any significant way”, which in turn suggests, he posits, that Chomsky is really just engaged in “damage control on Israel’s behalf”.

This is further evidenced by Chomsky’s statements in a recent interview, in which “Chomsky not only repeatedly attacks advocates of an Israeli boycott as being hypocritical, he accuses them of doing damage to the Palestinian cause.” Blankfort quotes Chomsky saying that a boycott of Israel harms Palestinians, but — unsurprisingly — omits Chomsky’s explanation for his position (which we’ll come to). Continuing, he emphases Chomsky’s remarks that the U.S. is “responsible for most of Israel’s crimes“, and, again, that the U.S. is “responsible for a lot of Israel’s criminal behavior.”

Chomsky has written extensively on which crimes he means, and anyone even modestly familiar with his work knows he is referring to U.S. financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israeli violations of international law under the “special relationship” that has developed particularly since 1967, including U.S. support for the illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian territories, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the rejection of the two-state settlement, the ’08-’09 massacre in Gaza, and so on.

But Blankfort doesn’t turn to anything Chomsky has ever actually written about U.S. support for Israel for examples. Nor does he deny that this U.S. support for Israeli crimes exists. Instead, he simply constructs a further strawman argument, suggesting Chomsky is here blaming Israel for the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 — suggestions for which Blankfort offers no supporting evidence from any of Chomsky’s voluminous writings and talks on the subject. This should not be surprising, since none exists.

Blankfort again criticizes the kind of divestment campaign Chomsky favors — one targeting the U.S. — on the grounds that “failure” is “patently inherent in such a campaign” and “would bring further disaster down upon the heads of the Palestinians.”

Blankfort makes no effort to explain why divestment in U.S. corporations supplying the Israeli criminal regime with the tools of oppression would be a “failure” or why it would bring “disaster” upon Palestinians. Nor does he explain the contradiction between, on one hand, agreeing that divesting from U.S. companies like Caterpillar is “a worthy endeavor”, while on the other suggesting such action would be a “failure”; between saying on one hand that it would not “change the current situation for the Palestinians in any significant way”, while on the other saying that it would be a “disaster” for them.

Turning back to Chomsky’s actual views on divestment, he explained further why he views a boycott of Israel as hypocritical and harmful:

If we’re serious about BDS or any other tactic we ought to want to ask what the consequences are for the victims. We have to distinguish always in tactical judgments between what you might call the “feel-good” tactics and “do-good” tactics. There are tactics that may make people feel good. “Look, I feel good. I’m doing something.” But maybe they harm the victims. There are other kinds that actually do good. That is, they benefit the victims. That’s a distinction we have to make and it’s a critical one. I’ve discussed what I think about it. But where there are actual “do-good” efforts of BDS, I’ve always supported them. In fact, long before the program even announced itself…. So, yes, I do oppose a boycott I think that’s harmful to Palestinians. And the reason it’s harmful is very obvious: It is so hypocritical that it discredits the whole effort.

Again Blankfort turns to his preferred rhetorical device, the strawman argument, to make his case against Chomsky. He paraphrases Chomsky as arguing that it would be “hypocritical” because the Israeli lobby “will use this against the Palestinians by pointing out that the US has committed far greater crimes than Israel.” By asking us to believe that American Jewish organizations would actually “compare America’s crimes to Israel’s”, Blankfort adds, Chomsky “insult[s] our intelligence”.

But — needless to say — Chomsky didn’t at all argue that it was “hypocritical” because the lobby would compare U.S. crimes with Israeli crimes. Rather, he pointed out the fact that it is hypocritical for Americans to support a boycott of Israel while not boycotting their own country, because the U.S. “supplies it with the tools of oppression”.

It should also be needless to say that the definition of “hypocrisy”, in the Biblical sense of the word (which is the sense in which Chomsky uses the word, as he himself has pointed out), is refusing to apply to oneself the same standard one applies to others. The principle is summarized by Jesus in the analogy of removing the plank from one’s own eye first, so that one can see clearly to remove the splinter from one’s brother’s.

Thus, by definition, boycotting Israel without first divesting from American corporations that support Israeli crimes, is “hypocritical”.

This simple application of this most elementary moral truism either completely escapes Blankfort, or he simply chooses to reject it in order to deliberately and dishonestly mischaracterize Chomsky’s actual argument.

The dishonest mischaracterization continues as Blankfort continues to attempt to portray Chomsky as a “Zionist” supporter of Israel. To do this, he quotes Chomsky saying, “I don’t regard myself as a critic of Israel. I regard myself as a supporter of Israel”, which he follows by reminding readers that Chomsky “likes to boast of his early Zionist activities”.

Chomsky has made this point many times, and explained his reasons for making it and his definition of “support” for Israel, but Blankfort refers here specifically to an interview on an Israeli news program earlier this year. Turning to the source, the interviewer had said to Chomsky, “You undermine Israel’s existence, it’s right to exist…” Chomsky interrupted to her to say:

That’s quite false. In fact, I don’t regard myself as a critic of Israel. I regard myself as a supporter of Israel. The people who are harming Israel, in my opinion, it’s what I’ve said many times, are those who claim to be supporting it. They are helping [to] drive Israel towards moral degeneration and possible ultimate destruction. I think support for Israel should be support for policies which are for its benefit.

The interviewer then correctly pointed out that Chomsky does not “support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state“, which Chomsky then acknowledged, noting later in the show that neither does he “think that the United States should exist as a Christian state” or that “Pakistan should exist as an Islamic state”.

Thus, taken together with his enormous body of work on the subject, clearly what Chomsky means by saying he is “a supporter of Israel” is not that he supports Israel as a “Jewish state”, that he supports Zionism in the contemporary understanding of the word, that he supports the occupation, or any other such asinine nonsense, but just the opposite — that he opposes all of these policies. It’s those who support Israel’s criminal policies, in Chomsky’s view, who in fact are acting against Israel’s own best interests by encouraging its “moral degeneration”.

Blankfort, of course, declines to provide his readers with the explanation Chomsky gave for his statement that he is a “supporter of Israel”, which followed in his very next breath and in which he made perfectly clear that his own position is precisely the opposite of that which Blankfort would so disingenuously have his readers believe it to be.

Blankfort next quotes Chomsky as saying, “once Israel was formed in 1948, my position has consistently been that Israel should have all the rights of every state in the international system, no more and no less.” We are supposed to draw the conclusion, apparently, that Chomsky views Israel’s creation through an act of ethnic cleansing as having been legitimate.

But Blankfort yet again declines to share with his readers Chomsky’s explanation for that position, in which he explicitly rejected that Israel has a “right to exist”. As anyone familiar with his work knows, Chomsky has consistently held that:

No state has a right to exist, and no one demands such a right. For example, the United States has no such right. Mexico doesn’t respect the right of the United States to exist, sitting on half of Mexico, which was conquered in war. They do grant the U.S. rights in the international system, but not the legitimacy of those rights. This concept “right to exist” was in fact invented, as far as I can tell, in the 1970s when there was general international agreement, including the Arab states and the PLO, that Israel should have the rights of every state in the international system. And therefore, in an effort to prevent negotiations and a diplomatic settlement, the U.S. and Israel insisted on raising the barrier to something that nobody’s going to accept. Certainly, the Palestinians can’t accept it. They’re not going to accept Israel’s existence but also the legitimacy of its existence and the legitimacy of their dispossession. Why should they accept that? Why should anyone accept it?

Returning to the Israeli news interview, when asked whether it was relevant to his criticism of Israel that he is Jewish, Chomsky responded:

Well sure. Since I’m Jewish, and since I have a special relationship with Israel since childhood, and since I care about it, I think it should take positions that are moral, realistic, and appropriate for its own peace and survival.

When his Israeli interviewer suggested that Chomsky was being hypocritical by disproportionally focusing on Israel, instead of other oppressive regimes, Chomsky replied:

You started by asking, “Why is Israel in the center?” Answer: It isn’t. Not for me. What’s in the center for me is the United States, and for a very elementary moral reason. The moral principle is: we are responsible for our own actions and their consequences. Every crime that Israel commits is because of U.S. participation and authorization. So any decent American citizen, even without a special interest in Israel, as I have, should have these in the center of their attention; because those are the ones we are participating in, we are responsible for.

This, of course, goes back to Chomsky’s point that Americans should rather support divestment in U.S. corporations that participate in Israeli crimes before seeking divestment from Israel itself — again, a position based on a perfectly elementary moral truism that Blankfort must either reject or fail utterly to comprehend.

Chomsky also cited in the interview examples of Israeli actions that could not continue without U.S. support:

Israel, for example, could not have attacked Gaza, could not carry out the occupation, and so on, without decisive and direct U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic support…. Israeli actions in the occupied territory with crucial U.S. backing, are, first of all, illegal — Israeli recognized that in 1967 — they’re illegal, and they’re harmful.

Yet we may recall how Blankfort chooses to ignore Chomsky’s own specific examples, which he’s written on constantly and documented extensively, of how the U.S. is “responsible for a lot of Israel’s criminal behavior”, instead preferring to create a strawman argument by suggesting he was referring to Israeli actions in ’48 and ’67 that the U.S. did not decisively and directly support — and which, contrary to what Blankfort would have his readers believe, Chomsky has never claimed the U.S. was responsible for.

Chomsky also expressed his support for the Goldstone Report and opposition to it’s suppression in the interview, as he has elsewhere:

Take, say, the reaction to the Goldstone Report, which was quite interesting. Now, Israel has turned it into an international incident. If Israel had acted rationally, they would have responded to the Goldstone Report by saying, “Thank you, Mr. Goldstone, for your careful work. Thank you particularly for giving us a great gift”, as he did.

Recall Blankfort’s dismay that “Chomsky was not questioned” about whether he supported attempts to suppress the Goldstone Report and whether he found those efforts to be “sensible and sound”. It would seem that Blankfort might not be so puzzled about Chomsky’s position on this if he didn’t choose to deliberately withhold it from his readers.

This is not to say Chomsky has not been critical of the report; he’s criticized it for being biased in favor of Israel for focusing on Israel’s conduct in it’s assault on Gaza without addressing the question of whether or not that attack itself had any legitimacy under international law — which, Chomsky has observed, noting that it was not Hamas but Israel that violated the cease-fire, it didn’t.

But never mind what Chomsky actually has to say about anything. It’s simple enough just pretend Chomsky has never actually expressed his views on such matters in order to carry on this charade that if he did answer questions about such things, his support for Zionist injustices towards Palestinians might be exposed, which is why Chomsky is supposedly silent on such matters.

Taking this theme further, Blankfort implies that Chomsky rejects the Palestinian right of return, saying Chomsky thinks it “not only unrealistic but potentially dangerous”, and asserting that Chomsky “rarely, if ever mentions” the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in which more than 700,000 Arabs were made refugees, “unless asked about it”.

On the right of return, Blankfort suggests Chomsky’s “preferred outcome” is that “the refugees would be obligated to give up their ‘right of return’ under a ‘two-state solution’”. Apparently in an attempt to provide evidence for this claim from Chomsky’s own work, Blankfort provides a lengthy quote in which Chomsky explains his view that it is unrealistic to expect that this right will ever be exercised — that is, that large population of Palestinian refugees will actually be allowed to return to the their land in what is today Israel. But nowhere does Chomsky even remotely suggest that he thinks that it is right or preferable that Palestinians not be allowed to return.

But, by taking Chomsky’s expression of what he deems realistic and turning it into an expression of what Chomsky deems preferable, Blankfort huff and puff and blow the strawman Chomsky down.

The real Chomsky, for his part, as Blankfort also perfectly well knows, has discussed this very topic of “realism” versus “acting on principle” — a false dichotomy, in Chomsky’s view — at length.

Chomsky in fact also recognizes and supports the Palestinian’s right of return, noting that “Their right to return or compensation is written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Dec. 10, 1948), spelled out more explicitly in UN Resolution 194 passed unanimously the next day, and reiterated annually.”

As for Blankfort’s statement that Chomsky “rarely, if ever mentions” the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in what Israelis call “The War of Independence” and the Arabs call “The Nakba”, or “catastrophe”, it is possible he is not being dishonest here, and that he is truly just almost completely ignorant about Chomsky’s actual work. Chomsky, of course, frequently refers to the “Nakba”, or the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine, in his writing.

Take, for instance, Chomsky’s 1983 epic analysis, “Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians“, in which he notes (pp. 95-96) that “The Irgun-LEHI Deir Yassin massacre in April had already taken place, one major factor in causing the flight of much of the Arab population” in the subsequent ethnic cleansing. “By May, about 300,000 Arabs had fled, about 1/3 of them from territories assigned to the Palestinian State” in the U.N. General Assembly partition proposal. “The armies of the Arab states entered the war immediately after the State of Israel was founded in May. Fighting continued, almost all of it within the territory assigned to the Palestinian state…. About 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled in the 1948 conflict.”

Or take his more recent 1999 book, “The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo“, in which he notes (p. 17) that the estimates of refugees from that conflict “are about the same as the number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948…. In that case, refugees numbered about 750,000, 85% of the population, with over 400 villages levelled.”

But never mind the real Chomsky. Blankfort’s imaginary Chomsky, which he finds it much easier to exercise his intellectual prowess against, avoids mentioning it because he secretly believes in the legitimacy of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Blankfort continues, quoting Chomsky as saying:

Palestinian refugees should certainly not be willing to renounce the right of return, but in this world – not some imaginary world we can discuss in seminars – that right will not be exercised, in more than a limited way, within Israel. Again, there is no detectable international support for it, and under the (virtually unimaginable) circumstances that such support would develop, Israel would very likely resort to its ultimate weapon, defying even the boss-man, to prevent it. In that case there would be nothing to discuss. The facts are ugly, but facts do not go out of existence for that reason. In my opinion, it is improper to dangle hopes that will not be realized before the eyes of people suffering in misery and oppression. (Emphasis added) Rather, constructive efforts should be pursued to mitigate their suffering and deal with their problems in the real world.

He then feels it necessary to “interpret” Chomsky’s meaning for his readers, offering:

What Chomsky is saying to the refugees is that if they persist with their demand to return to Palestine, and should that demand, support for which is currently undetectable in Chomsky’s eyes, actually grow to the point where Israel feels threatened with an avalanche of returnees, it is likely to use its nuclear weapons and blow up the planet.

Notice, among other problems with Blankfort’s “interpretation”, he asserts that by “ultimate weapon” Chomsky meant “nuclear weapons”, when in fact Chomsky clearly stated that the “ultimate weapon” he was referring to was Israel simply ignoring orders from Washington, D.C., in the unlikely hypothetical scenario that the U.S. would actually tell Israel to permit refugees to return. It would seem readers might not be expected to find Chomsky’s remarks quite so detestable if Blankfort didn’t see fit “interpret” them for us in a way that served only to distort his meaning.

Blankfort similarly “interprets” Chomsky pointing out that under Israeli law and in practice, Palestinians have “second class citizenship” by saying this is a defense of “Israel’s legitimacy”. His main objection seems to be that Chomsky compares Israel to “the US and other Western democracies” in this respect — the U.S. Constitution, after all, defines blacks as three-fifths of a person, and so on. But Blankfort turns Chomsky’s longstanding criticism of Israel in this regard into an “attempt to rationalize Israel’s ongoing discrimination of those Palestinians who remained after the Nakba”.

Yet, after all this, Blankfort has the chutzpah to accuse Chomsky of “intellectual dishonesty”. By such dishonest means as these, Blankfort turns Chomsky’s insistence on applying an equal standard and not being hypocritical into “double standards”, and he twists Chomsky’s criticisms of Israel into Chomsky’s “defense of Israel”.

He states that Chomsky “and his followers continue insisting that US support for Israel is based on it being a ‘strategic asset’ for the United States even when an increasing number of mainstream observers who are not linked to AIPAC or the Zionist establishment have judged it to be a liability”, thus suggesting — falsely — that Chomsky’s himself shares the view that Israel is a “strategic asset”.

As any person even remotely familiar with Chomsky’s work on the subject — and who is willing to be honest about it — knows, he does not share that view. Rather, he simply observes that as defined by the political and economic elite in Washington, Israel is a strategic ally. In fact, he points this out in the interview Blankfort participated in, explaining briefly the interest of the military industrial complex in Israel:

Once they send those high tech weapons to Israel, then Saudi Arabia and the Emirates comes along and say well, we want them too, and the U.S. military industry can provide them — which they of course pay for — with masses of less advanced weaponry. And in general, military intelligence cooperation between Israel and the United States has been very close for many years. So, sure, there are many domestic factors that we should definitely pay attention to when we consider how policy is formed.

He further elaborated on his meaning in describing Israel as a strategic asset:

Now the term “national interest”, these are all very vague notions, but let me return to what I said before. The strongest support for Israel in the United States comes from the business sector. That’s why the Wall Street Journal is the most strong pro-Israel journal. That’s why you get increasing high-tech investment in Israel. That’s why you have things — That’s why the military lobby supports it. Now you can argue that this is against something called the national interest, whatever that is, but in so far as the national interest is determined by powerful domestic forces in the United States…

Chomsky was cut off for a commercial break at that point, but his point is clear, and he has made it repeatedly elsewhere. It is not his view that Israel is a “strategic asset” of the U.S. — and he’s argued endlessly to the contrary — but that is nevertheless the longstanding predominant view within the U.S. policy-making elite. This is a rather elementary observation that is hardly debatable, Blankfort and others’ efforts to manufacture a controversy over it notwithstanding.

Blankfort concludes by suggesting that “serious supporters” of the Palestinian cause should ask themselves whether Chomsky isn’t actually a liability to that cause.

Serious supporters of the Palestinian cause would do well to set aside such claptrap as Blankfort and his ilk see fit to spend their time and efforts writing on and go out and pick up Fateful Triangle or read any of Chomsky’s other countless writings on the subject, read it thoroughly and actually listen to what he actually has to say, and make an effort to actually comprehend it.

One needn’t agree with everything Chomsky writes, but one can learn a lot from the man who has rightfully earned his place as a — if not the – leading American critic of Israeli crimes and supporter of Palestinian rights.

And, at the very least, one can certainly learn much more about Chomsky’s actual views from the real Chomsky than from reading about some imaginary Chomsky the likes of Blankfort so dishonestly choose to manufacture in all their intellectual masturbation that serves only to distract attention away from the real issues concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The bill, H.R. 1457, was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and was cosponsored by Gary L. Ackerman (NY), Howard L. Berman (CA), Dan Burton (IN), Ron Klein (FL), Mike Pence (IN), Ted Poe (TX), and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL).

The bill claims that “vote counts in the June 12, 2009, election were inconsistent with Iranian demographics and political trends, including provinces in which more votes were allegedly cast than the number of registered voters and vote counts that indicated unusual pro-Ahmadinejad voting patterns by traditionally anti-Ahmadinejad constituencies”.

It also refers to what it calls “the Government of Iran’s unrealistic vote count and fraudulent announcement of election results”.

Additionally, the bill “condemns the Government of Iran’s continued pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability”.

The claim that the 2009 election results “were inconsistent with Iranian demographics and political trends” is based upon the claim that there was a “swing” to Ahmadinejad, but is contested by both past voting trends and numerous public opinion surveys conducted both before and after the election.

When Ahmadinejad won in a run-off election in 2005, he did so with 61.7 percent of the vote, comparable to his 63 percent margin of victory in 2009.

Just prior to the 2009 vote, a public opinion survey conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow, the New America Foundation, and KA Europe SPRL found that Ahmadinejad was the preferred candidate by a margin of more than 2 to 1.

In that survey, 34 percent of respondents said they would vote for Ahmadinejad, while just 14 percent said they planned on voting for the incumbent’s leading contender, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Eight University of Tehran polls all found that Ahmadinejad was the frontrunner for the election.

A World Public Opinion survey conducted after the election, in September 2009, found that 55 percent of the 87 percent of respondents who said they voted in the election said that they voted for Ahmadinejad, while only 14 percent said they voted for Mousavi.

That survey also found that, asked who they would vote for if the election were to be held again, 49 percent said they would vote for Ahmadinejad, while only 8 percent would vote for Mousavi.

The poll also found that “81 percent of Iranians consider Ahmadinejad to be Iran’s legitimate president”, with only 10 percent who disagreed.

A GlobeScan poll following the election similarly found that a majority had voted for Ahmadinejad, with 76 percent of respondents saying they believed the election was fair and only 16 percent who believed it was “not very fair or not at all fair”.

Two further polls conducted by the University of Tehran similarly found that a majority of Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad.

Walter Mebane, a political scientist, statistician, and expert on electoral fraud, conducted an analysis of the results and found that “there’s no solid evidence of fraud.”

A World Public Opinion analysis in February, 2010 found that there was “little evidence to support” the conclusion that the Ahmadinejad had won by fraud.

The argument that more votes being cast in some provinces than the number of registered voters has been a leading argument put forth by those claiming fraud.

The most often-cited source cited for this claim is a Chatham House and Institute of Iranian Studies report entitled “Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election”, which argued that a turnout of more than 100 percent in Mazandaran and Yazd provinces was evidence of fraud.

That report acknowledged the fact that Iranian voters may cast their ballots anywhere in the country, and not only in their home province, but argued that the number of people who would have done so was not significant.

However, that analysis, principally authored by avowed expert on Iran, Professor Ali Ansari, fails to point out that the election occurred on a Friday, which is the Islamic day of prayer, and also the weekend in Iran.

Iran’s Guardian Council, in response to the allegations of fraud, put out a report that noted that people “journey to nicer geographic areas with better weather at weekends”, that students vote in cities where they go to school rather than their home districts, that members of the military similarly vote in the places they are based, and that cities attract workers who commute from elsewhere.

That report also observed that a similar phenomenon had occurred in the previous, uncontested, election and was “quite normal and inevitable”.

“In many areas the number of voters was significantly higher than the number of eligible voters in the area”, the Guardian Council report stated.

In one case, in Shemiranat, the voter count was at 800 percent the number of eligible voters, far higher than any single case in the 2009 election.

The claim of “fraudulent announcement of election results” contained within the bill is presumably based upon the fact that the Iranian government announced the results early.

However, typically omitted from accounts arguing that this is evidence of fraud is the fact that this was prompted by the Mousavi campaign’s announcement even before the first vote counts were released that he was “definitely the winner” based on “all indications from all over Iran.”

Mousavi told a news conference on the day of the election, “I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin.”

The state news agency responded an hour later by reporting than Ahmadinejad had actually won.

Political analysts Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett wrote in Foreign Policy earlier this month that the reason “so many got it wrong” on the Iranian election was because of “willfully bad journalism and analysis, motivated in at least some cases by writers’ personal political agendas.”

“From literally the morning after the election,” they observed, “the vast majority of Western journalists and U.S.-based Iran ‘experts’ rushed to judgment that the outcome had to have been the result of fraud.”

But, they added, “there has never been a shred of hard evidence offered to back up the assertion of electoral fraud.”

They also pointed out that “Mousavi failed to produce evidence substantiating his public claims”.

The claim in the draft bill that Iran continues to pursue “a nuclear weapons capability” is also not supported by the available evidence.

In 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluded that Iran did not have an active nuclear weapons program in parallel to its civilian one.

In September 2009, Newsweek reported that the intelligence community was still standing by that assessment.

The 2007 NIE had claimed that Iran had had a weapons program until 2003, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a statement in September 2009 saying, “the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran” (emphasis added).

The IAEA, which is actively monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, has consistently reported that there has been no diversion of nuclear material to any military aspect of the program.

The former Director General of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, had repeatedly pointed out that there was no evidence Iran had a weapons program

His successor, Yukiya Amano, also said just prior to taking over the office, “I don’t see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this”, in response to a question about whether Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Since that time, the U.S. has continued to fail to offer any proof of its claims, such as contained in this new draft bill, that Iran is seeking the nuclear bomb.

Experts criticized the U.S. policy of continually seeking tougher sanctions on Iran by pointing out how ineffective it is.

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and current director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said the chance that the new resolution would get Iran to acquiesce to U.S. demands is “virtually zero.”

Apparently validating that assessment, Iran responded immediately by shrugging off the resolution. “Nothing will change,” said the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will continue uranium enrichment activities.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad replied, “The resolutions you issue are like a used handkerchief which should be thrown in the dustbin. They are not capable of hurting Iranians.”

The international community first learned in 2003 that Iran had for 18 years been concealing its nuclear program from the IAEA, in violation of its obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

But since that time, Iran has allowed IAEA inspectors into the country to monitor its program. Iran insists that its program is peaceful, but the U.S. and its allies charge that Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said on Monday, “While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

He said such cooperation included Iranian acquiescence to the Security Council’s demand that it halt uranium enrichment and implementation of the Additional Protocol, which is a further agreement NPT members may voluntarily sign that allows the IAEA even greater access to their nuclear programs.

In Iran’s case, however, adoption of the agreement is being treated as though it were a legally obligatory measure. Amano described Iran as being a “special case” in describing Iran’s adoption of the Additional Protocol as being “necessary” in order for IAEA for inspectors to do be able to do their job.

Iran charges that the Security Council’s sanctions resolutions are themselves illegal, and that the U.N. has no authority to demand that it cease enriching uranium.

The NPT does, in fact, guarantee that it is the “inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes”, which legally means that no one, including the IAEA Board of Governors and the U.N. Security Council, can tell Iran that it can’t enrich uranium so long as it isn’t doing so in order to produce a nuclear weapon.

The former Director General of the IAEA, Mohammed El-Baradei, had repeatedly noted that there was no evidence that Iran actually has a parallel weapons program.

Prior to taking over the office, Amano had similarly said, “I don’t see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this”, in response to a question about whether Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has so far only produced low-enriched uranium (LEU), not the highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium required to manufacture a nuclear bomb.

Western media reports commonly assert that Iran has begun producing “higher-enriched uranium”, or similar language, but, in fact, this is a reference to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 20 percent for its research reactor in Tehran.

Uranium must be enriched to 90 percent or more in order to manufacture a weapon.

Iran has previously been enriching to only the 3.5 percent necessary to fuel civilian power plants.

Expert analysts agree that if Iran was to actually enrich uranium to weapons-grade and produce a nuclear bomb, it would first have to expel IAEA inspectors.

Moreover, it would likely take at least two years for Iran to acquire the other technical capabilities required to manufacture a bomb from the time that the decision was made to pursue that course.

The new measure, resolution 1929, passed with a vote of 12 in favor and 2 opposed.

Brazil and Turkey, which recently entered into an agreement with Iran to have uranium shipped to Turkey for enrichment there, voted against the resolution. Lebanon abstained from the vote.

Ban Ki-moon previously described the agreement, known as the Tehran Declaration,  as a potential positive step, but the U.S. has sought to downplay its importance.

The Brazilian representative stated that sanctions would not be effective, but “would lead to the suffering of the Iranian people and play into the hands of those on all sides who did not want a peaceful resolution of the issue.”

It also undermined Brazil’s efforts with Turkey to engage Iran diplomatically, and “would delay rather than accelerate or ensure progress”.

The Turkish delegate similarly expressed his country’s deep concern “that the adoption of sanctions would negatively affect the momentum created by the Tehran Declaration and the overall diplomatic process”.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We disagreed with their vote. But I can understand from a diplomatic perspective why they might be able to make a convincing case for how they voted today.”

Clinton had previously acknowledged that the goal of U.S. policy towards Iran was to gain support for “crippling sanctions” to punish the country for its defiance of the U.S., suggesting that punishment, rather than actual progress towards verifying the peaceful nature of Iran’s program, is itself Washington’s endgame.

The U.S. representative, Susan Rice, denied that the sanctions were “aimed at Iran’s right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes” despite the fact that the U.S. has led the effort in demanding that Iran halt enrichment regardless of whether or not there was proof that Iran had a parallel weapons program.

President Barack Obama said the resolution “will put in place the toughest sanctions ever faced by the Iranian government”.

He also said it “was not inevitable”, suggesting that it was Iran that had not been willing to engage diplomatically with the U.S., and not vice versa.

“We made clear from the beginning of my administration that the United States was prepared to pursue diplomatic solutions to address the concerns over Iranian nuclear programs,” he said, adding that the U.S. had made the offer to Iran of better relations “if – and only if – it lives up to its international obligations” – the usual euphemism for demands issued from Washington.

Obama added, “And I want to be clear: These sanctions do not close the door on diplomacy.” Iran could “take a different and better path”, a reference to the U.S. demand that Iran not enrich its own uranium.

For Iran, the whole point of a dialogue would be to negotiate on that point.

The U.S. policy, which consists primarily of this ultimatum, thus effectively renders “diplomacy” moot and administration rhetoric about “engaging” Iran virtually meaningless.

The Obama administration’s policy of demanding that Iran halt enrichment is a continuation of Bush administration’s policy towards the Islamic Republic. Like Bush, Obama has preferred the dual threat of sanctions and military action to serious engagement with the Iranian leadership.

Obama told Newsweek last year that he had “been very clear” that a U.S. military attack on Iran would not be taken “off the table”, a position he repeated in April of this year.

In addition, he issued a further threat against Iran in April, saying that the U.S. “will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations.”

Since the U.S. charges that Iran has not lived up to its obligations under the NPT, this logically means the U.S. could use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against Iran – a statement which, itself, constitutes a direct threat of violence.

The U.N. Charter forbids member nations from not only from using, but also from threatening to use force in international relations, a fact of international law which Washington perpetually disregards.

As political analyst and historian Gareth Porter wrote, “The Barack Obama administration’s declaration in its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that it is reserving the right to use nuclear weapons against Iran represents a new element in a strategy of persuading Tehran that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites is a serious possibility if Iran does not bow to the demand that it cease uranium enrichment.”

With the new resolution, the Security Council decided “that Iran shall not acquire an interest in any commercial activity in another State involving uranium mining, production or use of nuclear materials and technology”.

It also forbids member nations from the sale or transfer to Iran of conventional military equipment, including “battle tanks, armoured combat vehicles, large caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles or missile systems”, and forbids Iran from developing ballistic missiles that could potentially be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

The resolution thus could be interpreted as effectively seeking to impair Iran’s ability to maintain a defensive capability against the continual threat of either a U.S. or Israeli attack against its nuclear installations.

The U.S. has long sought to get China and Russia, two other permanent members of the Security Council, on board for further sanctions against Iran, but a lesser known fact is that Israel has also been working behind the scenes to this end.

The New York Times reported yesterday that “a high-level Israeli delegation” travelled to Beijing in February “to explain in sobering detail the economic impact to China from an Israeli strike on Iran”.

An Israeli official said their Chinese counterparts “really sat up in their chairs when we described what a pre-emptive attack would do to the region and on oil supplies they have come to depend on.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement in response to the passage of the resolution saying, “The Security Council’s decision is insufficient, and it must be accompanied by additional steps against Iran outside the Security Council,” a reference to their desire to see the U.S. and its European allies adopt more severe sanctions of their own.

The New York Times, for instance, asserted that “Mr. Hanjour overcame the mediocrity of his talents as a pilot and gained enough expertise to fly a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.”² The Washington Post similarly suggested Hanjour had the requisite skills, reporting that “Federal records show that a Hani Hanjoor obtained a commercial pilot’s license in April 1999 with a rating to fly commercial jets.”³

The 9/11 Commission expanded upon this narrative in its final report. It noted that Hanjour first came to the United States in 1991 to study English, then again in 1996 “to pursue flight training, after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia.” In 1997, after returning to Arizona, he “began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot’s license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999.”⁴

Subsequently, “Hanjour reportedly applied to the civil aviation school in Jeddah after returning home, but was rejected.” By the end of 2000, Hanjour was back in the U.S. and “began refresher training at his old school, Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough. The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa. An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing. Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.”⁵ A footnote in the report asserts that Hanjour was chosen specifically for targeting the Pentagon because he was “the operation’s most experienced pilot.”⁶

John Ashcroft told reporters early in the investigation, “It is our belief and the evidence indicates that flight training was received in the United States and that their capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial. It’s very clear that these orchestrated coordinated assaults on our country were well-conducted and conducted in a technically proficient way. It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case.”⁷

A pilot with a major carrier for over 30 years told CNN that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators.”⁸ An air traffic controller from Dulles International Airport told ABC News, “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.”⁹

CBS News suggested that according to its sources, Flight 77, “flying at more than 400 mph, was too fast and too high when it neared the Pentagon at 9:35. The hijacker-pilots were then forced to execute a difficult high-speed descending turn. Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it’s clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed. The jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon at 460 mph.”¹⁰

The Washington Post similarly noted that the plane “was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm.” Hanjour was so skilled, in fact, that “just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot” – later identified as Hanjour – “executed a pivot so tight it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver.”¹¹ The Post reported in another article that “After the attacks … aviation experts concluded that the final maneuvers of American Airlines Flight 77 – a tight turn followed by a steep, accurate descent into the Pentagon – was the work of ‘a great talent … virtually a textbook turn and landing.’”¹²

According to the report of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cited by the 9/11 Commission, information from the flight data recorder recovered from the Pentagon crash site and radar data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) show that the autopilot was disengaged “as the aircraft leveled near 7000 feet. Slight course changes were initiated, during which variations in altitude between 6800 and 8000 feet were noted. At 9:34 AM, the aircraft was positioned about 3.5 miles west-southwest of the Pentagon, and started a right 330-degree descending turn to the right. At the end of the turn, the aircraft was at about 2000 feet altitude and 4 miles southwest of the Pentagon. Over the next 30 seconds, power was increased to near maximum and the nose was pitched down in response to control column movements. The airplane accelerated to approximately 460 knots (530 miles per hour) at impact with the Pentagon. The time of impact was 9:37:45 AM.”¹³

The NTSB created a computer simulation of the flight from the flight data recorder information showing that the plane was actually at more than 8,100 feet and doing about 330 mph when it began its banking turn at 9:34 am. ¹⁴ At that point, the alleged pilot Hanjour could have simply decreased thrust, nosed down, and guided the plane into what would have been 29 acres, or 1,263,240 square feet of target area – the equivalent of about 22 football fields.¹⁵ From this angle, proverbially speaking, it would have been like trying to hit the side of a barn. Hanjour could have guided the plane into the enormous roof of the building, including the side of the building where the office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was located, and where he happened to be that morning.¹⁶

Instead, the plane began a steep banking descent, circling downward in a 330-degree turn while dropping more than 5,600 feet in three minutes before re-aligning with the Pentagon and increasing to maximum thrust towards the building. The nose was kept down despite the increased lift from the acceleration, while flying so close to the ground that it clipped lamp posts along the interstate highway before plowing into the building at more than 530 mph, precisely hitting a target only 71 feet high, or just 26.5 feet taller than the Boeing 757 itself.¹⁷

In other words, by performing this maneuver, Hanjour reduced his vertical target area from a size comparable to the height of the Empire State Building to an area just 5 stories high. Instead of descending at an angle and plowing through the roof and floors of the building to cause the greatest possible number of casualties, including possibly taking out the Secretary of Defense, Hanjour hit wedge 1 of the Pentagon, opposite to Rumsfeld’s office, which happened to be under construction, and where the plane, travelling horizontally, had to penetrate through the steel- and kevlar-reinforced outer wall of the building’s southwest E-ring in addition to the numerous additional walls of the inner rings of the building.¹⁸

But even more problematic than the question of why Hanjour would perform this maneuver is the question of how he performed it. Perhaps the most incredible thing about this, the official account of what happened to Flight 77, is that Hani Hanjour was in reality such a horrible pilot that he had trouble handling a light single-engine aircraft and even just one month before the attacks was rejected at two different schools because he was judged too incompetent to rent a plane and fly solo.

As the Los Angeles Times ironically put it, “For someone suspected of steering a jetliner into the Pentagon, the 29-year-old man who used the name Hani Hanjour sure convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly.”¹⁹

The Legend Unraveled

According to an FBI chronology for Hani Hanjour cited by the 9/11 Commission, Hanjour first travelled to the U.S. in 1991 on a visa issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”, in order to attend the University of Arizona’s Center for English as a Second Language. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was again issued a visa at Jeddah in March, 1996. Back in the U.S., he attended classes at the ELS Language Center in Oakland, California from May until August. For a week in September, he took ground training lessons at the Sierra Aeronautical Academy Airline Training Center (SAAATC). From the end of September until mid-October, he purchased flight instruction from Cockpit Resources Management (CRM) in Scottsdale, Arizona. He then returned to Saudi Arabia once more.²⁰ The Washington Post reported that according to Hanjour’s brother, Yasser, “Hanjour applied for a job at the state-owned Saudi Arabian Airlines but was told that he lacked sufficient grades…. He said the company told him it would reconsider his application only if he acquired a commercial pilot’s license in the United States.”²¹ Yasser characterized Hanjour “as a frustrated young Saudi who wanted desperately – but never succeeded – to become a pilot for the Saudi national airline.”²²

Hanjour made plans to return to the U.S. and was issued a third visa in Jeddah in November 1997. His visa application contained red flags that should have resulted in his visa being denied. He failed to write in the name and address of the school he would be attending and provided no proof, as required by law, that he could furnish financial support for himself.²³ With that application accepted, he reentered the U.S. and took pilot training from CRM again in December.²⁴

It was at this time that, according the 9/11 Commission, Hanjour began his training “in earnest”. But in reality, while at CRM, Hanjour never finished coursework required to get his certificate to be able to fly a single-engine aircraft.²⁵ The New York Times reported that “he was a lackadaisical student who often cut class and never displayed the passion so common among budding commercial airline pilots.”²⁶ ABC News reported that when he returned to CRM that December, “He was trying for his private pilot’s license”, but according to one of his instructor’s, he “was a very poor student who skipped homework and missed flights.”²⁷ The school’s attorney said that when Hanjour reapplied again later in 2000, “We declined to provide training to him because we didn’t think he was a good enough student when he was there in 1996 and 1997.”²⁸ The school’s owner described him as a “weak student” who “was wasting our resources.”²⁹ He said, “One of the first accomplishments of someone in flight school is to fly a plane without an instructor. It is a confidence-building procedure. He managed to do that. That is like being able to pull a car out and drive down the street. It is not driving on the freeway.” Although it normally took three months for students to earn their private pilot’s certificate, Hanjour “did not accomplish that at my school.” He added, “We didn’t want him back at our school because he was not serious about becoming a good pilot.”³⁰ The Chicago Tribune reported that at CRM, “A flight instructor said Hanjour left an impression by being unimpressive. ‘He was making weak progress,’ said Duncan Hastie, president of CRM.”³¹

Hanjour switched schools, and from the end of December 1997 until April 1999, took flight lessons from Arizona Aviation in Mesa, Arizona.²⁴ There, too, the 9/11 Commission’s own evidence contradicts the characterization that Hanjour was training “in earnest”. An FBI document cited by the Commission stated that “Hanjour often participated in flying lessons for a one to two weeks [sic] and then would disappear for weeks or months at a time.” The school “often had to call Hanjour in an effort to get Hanjour to pay his bill.”³²

Buried in the footnote for the paragraph suggesting Hanjour began training “in earnest”, the 9/11 Commission report acknowledged that “Hanjour initially was nervous if not fearful in flight training” and that “His instructor described him as a terrible pilot.”³³ FBI documents cited by the Commission reveal that witnesses from the school told investigators that “Hanjour was a terrible pilot. Hanjour had difficulty understanding air traffic control, the methods for determining fuel management and had poor navigational skills.” The FBI was told by one witness that “the only flying skill Hanjour could perform was flying the plane straight”, and that “he did not believe Hanjour’s poor flying skills were due to a language barrier.” He was “a very poor pilot who did not react to criticism very well. Hanjour was very, very nervous inside the cockpit to the point where Hanjour was almost fearful.”³²

In April 1998, Hanjour applied for his private pilot certificate with a single-engine rating, but he failed his test. One of the tasks documents show he would need to be reexamined for was “coordinated turns to headings”³⁴ He tried again later that same month and this time received his private pilot certificate under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor,” with an “Airplane Single Engine Land” rating.

In an apparent attempt to bolster the misleading characterization that Hanjour began training “in earnest”, the 9/11 also stated that it took only “Several more months” to obtain his commercial pilot certificate. In fact, it took Hanjour another year of training before he managed to obtain that second certificate. On April 15, 1999, the FAA issued a commercial pilot certificate to him under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor.”²⁴ The certificate was issued by Daryl M. Strong, an independent contractor for the FAA, with an “Airplane Multiengine Land” rating. To obtain the certificate, Hanjour’s records show he flew his check ride in a Piper PA 23-150 “Apache”, a four-seat twin-engine plane, which Hanjour was in command of for 14.8 hours of the 27 hours completed for the test.³⁵

Contrary to the Washington Post’s assertion that this certificate allowed him “to fly commercial jets”, in fact it only allowed him to begin passenger jet training. Hanjour did so, only to fail the class.³⁶ As the Associated Press reported, the “certification allowed him to begin passenger jet training at an Arizona flight school despite having what instructors later described as limited flying skills and an even more limited command of English.”³⁷

Furthermore, there remains an open question about whether Hanjour was actually qualified to receive that certificate in the first place. According to Heather Awsumb, a spokeswoman for Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS), a union that represents FAA employees, “The real problem is that regular oversight is handed over to private industry”, since private contractors “receive between $200 and $300 for each check flight. If they get a reputation for being tough, they won’t get any business.”³⁸

To obtain a commercial pilot license, the applicant must “Be able to read, speak, write, and understand the English language.” It seems highly dubious that Hanjour met that qualification, as the 9/11 Commission itself acknowledges that his English skills were inadequate. The certificate does not allow its holder to fly any commercial aircraft, but is issued for “the aircraft category and class rating sought”. Hanjour only trained in light propeller planes like the single-engine Cessna and twin-engine Piper, and had never flown a jet aircraft.³⁹

Additionally, commercial pilot certification is different from the Airline Transport Pilot certification held by airline captains. To obtain a commercial certificate with a multi-engine rating, Hanjour only needed to log in 250 hours of flight time, whereas to obtain an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, pilots are required to log 1,500 hours.⁴⁰ Needless to say, having the ability to control a Cessna 172 or Piper Apache propeller plane does not translate into the ability to handle a Boeing 757 jetliner – and Hanjour could barely do the former.

Anyone unfamiliar with pilot certification could easily make the mistake of thinking a “commercial pilot license” meant Hanjour was qualified to fly a jet airliner, a conclusion reinforced by the Washington Post’s false assertion that his certificate allowed him “to fly commercial jets.” The 9/11 Commission report reinforced that false impression, only vaguely hinting at the truth six paragraphs later by saying that Hanjour subsequently “wanted to train on multi-engine planes”. But the Commission then further obfuscated that truth by asserting that this was merely “refresher” training (a matter to which we will return).

Hanjour again left the country on April 28, 1999.²⁴ As the 9/11 Commission report observed, when he returned to Saudi Arabia to apply in the civil aviation school in Jeddah, he was rejected.²⁴ He subsequently began making preparations to return to the U.S. once again.²⁴ In September 2000, Hanjour was denied a student visa after indicating that he wanted to remain in the U.S. for three years, and yet listed no address for where he intended to stay in Arizona.²³ But he tried again for a student visa under the name “Hani Hanjour” later that same month. This time, he wrote that he wanted to stay for one year instead of three, and listed a specific address in California, not Arizona, where he said he was going on his first application. Despite these obvious red flags, he was issued the visa.²³

He entered the U.S. in December and took more flight lessons that month at Arizona Aviation. From February until mid-March, he attended Pan Am International Flight Academy, also known as Jet Tech International, in Mesa, Arizona.²⁴

It was upon his return to Arizona Aviation in 2000 that the 9/11 Commission stated he wanted “refresher” training on multi-engine planes but was advised to discontinue “because his English was not good enough.” The implications are that Hanjour was merely brushing up on skills he had already achieved through previous flight training, and that the only reason he was advised not to continue was because of his poor language skills. But turning to the report’s footnote, it reads: “For his desire to train on multi-engine planes, his language difficulties, the instructor’s advice, and his reaction, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Rodney McAlear, Apr. 10, 2002.”⁴¹ That document reveals that McAlear worked not for Arizona Aviation, but rather “instructed Hani Hanjour in ground school flight training at Jet Tech in the early 2001.”⁴² The 9/11 Commission, by misleadingly suggesting that this occurred at Arizona Aviation, apparently intended to bolster the claim that this was “refresher” training by making it sound as though this occurred at Hanjour’s old school, when the truth is that it occurred when he was at a different school he’d never been to before.

The 9/11 Commission was also deceiving the public suggesting that the sole reason Hanjour was not able to complete his training on multi-engine planes was because his English wasn’t good enough. As already noted, an instructor at Arizona Aviation thought his earlier failings there were due primarily to his poor flight skills, and not because of his language inadequacies. More importantly, again, this training actually occurred at Jet Tech. Turning to the documentary record, as article in the New York Times entitled “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence” noted, his instructors there “found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot’s license was genuine”. As a result, they actually reported him to the FAA and requested confirmation that his certificate was legitimate. The staff there “feared that his skills were so weak that he could pose a safety hazard if he flew a commercial airliner.” Marilyn Ladner, a vice president at the academy, told the Times, “There was no suspicion as far as evildoing. It was more of a very typical instructional concern that ‘you really shouldn’t be in the air.’”⁴³

As already discussed, it remains an open question whether Hanjour was actually qualified to hold his commercial pilot certificate. It was at this time, as the Associated Press reported, that “Federal aviation authorities were alerted in early 2001 that an Arizona flight school believed one of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers lacked the English and flying skills necessary for the commercial pilot’s license he already held, flight school and government officials say.”⁴⁴ The manager of JetTech said, “I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had.”⁴⁵

Whereas the 9/11 Commission suggested that, because he “persevered”, Hanjour “completed the initial training”, thus leading the public to the conclusion that his skills had advanced accordingly, the Times offered a very different account: “Ultimately administrators at the school told Mr. Hanjour that he would not qualify for the advanced certificate. But the ex-employee said Mr. Hanjour continued to pay to train on a simulator for Boeing 737 jets. ‘He didn’t care about the fact that he couldn’t get through the course,’ the ex-employee said. Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. ‘I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon,’ the former employee said. ‘He could not fly at all.’”⁴³

Another Times article similarly noted that when Hanjour enrolled in February 2001 “at a Phoenix flight school for advanced simulator training to learn how to fly an airliner, a far more complicated task than he had faced in earning a commercial license”, his “instructors thought he was so bad a pilot and spoke such poor English that they contacted the Federal Aviation Administration to verify that his license was not a fake.”⁴⁶

According to FAA inspector Michael Gonzales, when Pan Am International Flight Academy contacted the FAA to verify that Hanjour’s license was valid, “There should have been a stop right then and there.” The Associated Press reported that Gonzales “said Hanjour should have been re-examined as a commercial pilot, as required by federal law.”³⁷ But that was not done. Instead, the FAA inspector who “even sat next to the hijacker, Hani Hanjour, in one of the Arizona classes” and “checked records to ensure Hanjour’s 1999 pilot’s license was legitimate” concluded that “no other action was warranted” and actually suggested that Hanjour get a translator to help him complete his class. “He offered a translator,” said the school’s manager, who “was surprised” by the suggestion. “Of course, I brought up the fact that went against the rules that require a pilot to be able to write and speak English fluently before they even get their license.”⁴⁵

As with the fact that multiple visa applications from Hanjour should have been denied, the 9/11 Commission made no mention of any of this. One would think that a commission tasked with investigating the events of 9/11 with the goal of assessing what went wrong and fixing the system to prevent any loss of life in the future would have looked into who issued Hanjour visas in Jeddah and why the red flags were ignored. One would think that misconduct from FAA officials and contractors that allowed a terrorist to improperly obtain certification to fly a plane would also not be outside of the purview of the investigation – yet the Commission’s report is absolutely silent on this.

Turning to the footnote for the claim that Hanjour “completed” training at Jet Tech, one can read (emphasis added): “For his training at Pan Am International Flight Academy and completion by March 2001, see FBI report ‘Hijackers Timeline,’ Dec. 5, 2003 (Feb. 8, 2001, entries…)”. But turning to that source, the FBI timeline does not state that Hanjour “completed” the training, only that he “ended” the course on March 16.⁴⁷ The truth is that, as the Washington Post reported, “Hanjour flunked out after a month” at Jet Tech.¹² Offering corroboration for that account, the Associated Press similarly reported that “Hanjour did not finish his studies at JetTech and left the school.”⁴⁸

The 9/11 Commission additionally noted that Hanjour had later gone to Air Fleet Training Systems in New Jersey and “requested to fly the Hudson Corridor” along the Hudson River, which passed the World Trade Center. He was permitted to fly the route once, “but his instructor declined a second request because of what he considered Hanjour’s poor piloting skills”, the Commission admits. However, the report continues, “Shortly thereafter, Hanjour switched to Caldwell Flight Academy in Fairfield, New Jersey, where he rented small aircraft on several occasions during June and July. In one such instance on July 20, Hanjour – likely accompanied by Hazmi – rented a plane from Caldwell and took a practice flight from Fairfield to Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to fly near Washington, D.C. Other evidence suggests Hanjour may even have returned to Arizona for flight simulator training earlier in June.”⁴⁹

But here, the pattern of deception continues by omission of other relevant facts. The report does not explain that when Hanjour was permitted to fly the Hudson Corridor in May of 2001, unlike his subsequent rental flights, it was with an instructor on a check ride, and not a solo flight.²⁴ By saying his instructor there “considered” Hanjour’s skills to be poor, the 9/11 Commission implied this was merely a subjective judgment, but that others considered him perfectly capable. Although it would have been a standard practice, there’s no indication from FBI records that Caldwell actually required him to go on a check ride before renting the plane. Even more significantly, the 9/11 Commission omitted altogether the fact that, while Hanjour was allowed to rent from Caldwell Flight Academy, he was rejected yet again by yet another school shortly thereafter that the record shows did require a check ride.

In August 2001, less than one month before 9/11, Hanjour took flight lessons at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland.²⁴ As the New York Times observed, Hanjour “still seemed to lack proficiency at flying”. When he showed up “asking to rent a single-engine plane”, he attempted three flights with two different instructors, and yet “was unable to prove that he had the necessary skills” to be allowed to rent the plane. “He seemed rusty at everything,” said Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at the school.²⁶ The Washington Post similarly reported that to “the flight instructors at Freeway Airport in Bowie”, Hanjour “was just a bad pilot.” And “after supervising Hanjour on a series of oblong circles above the airport and Chesapeake Bay, the instructors refused to pass him because his skills were so poor, Bernard said. ‘I feel darn lucky it went the way it did,’ Bernard said, crediting his instructors for their good judgment and high standards.”⁵⁰ The London Telegraph also reported that Hanjour claimed to have 600 hours of flight time, “but performed so poorly on test flights that instructors would not let him fly alone.”⁵¹ Newsday reported that when flight instructors Sheri Baxter and Ben Conner took Hanjour on three check rides, “they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172.”⁵² The Los Angeles Times reported, “‘We have a level of standards that we hold all our pilots to, and he couldn’t meet it,” said the manager of the flight school. Hanjour could not handle basic air maneuvers, the manager said.”¹⁹

The deception does not end with this rather egregious omission. As noted, the 9/11 Commission also suggested that Hanjour obtained further training in a flight simulator, again, in an apparent attempt to exaggerate his training. But a review of the records shows that the preponderance of evidence indicates Hanjour was actually in New Jersey throughout the time period in question in June. FBI records show that on May 31, 2001, after having been rejected at Air Fleet Training Systems, Hanjour rented a Cessna 172 at Caldwell Flight Academy, where he “made an error taxing [sic] the airplane upon his return.” On June 6, he rented a single-engine aircraft. The FBI placed him in Paterson, New Jersey, on June 10. Then he rented a plane again on June 11, 18, and 19. The FBI has Hanjour (along with Nawaf Al-Hazmi) obtaining a mailbox at Mailboxes, Etc. in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on June 26, and opening a bank account and making an ATM withdrawal in New Jersey on June 27.⁵³

Somewhere in there, the 9/11 Commission would have the public believe that “evidence suggests” Hanjour again trained on a simulator in Arizona. To begin with, the simulator at the Sawyer School of Aviation in Phoenix was for small aircraft and was nothing like the cockpit of a Boeing 757 – another fact omitted by the Commission.⁵⁴ But this perhaps becomes a moot point when one realizes that the evidence shows Hanjour never left New Jersey. Turning to the footnote for this claim, the Commission stated that documents from Sawyer “show Hanjour joining the flight simulator club on June 23, 2001″. But, the footnote acknowledges, “the documents are inconclusive, as there are no invoices or payment records for Hanjour, while such documents do exist for the other three” who joined the club at that time. The actual evidence thus demonstrates clearly that while Hanjour may have signed up (something which may have been possible over the phone or via the internet), he did not actually attend. The footnote further acknowledges that “Documentary evidence for Hanjour, however, shows that he was in New Jersey for most of June, and no travel records have been recovered showing that he returned to Arizona after leaving with Hazmi in March.”⁵⁵

The second piece of “evidence” that “suggests” Hanjour took further flight simulator training is a Sawyer employee who “identified Hanjour as being there during that time period, though she was less than 100 percent sure.” The FBI document cited in the footnote for that claim was obtained by Intelwire.com, but it is almost entirely redacted, so it’s impossible to verify the actual nature of this eyewitness testimony.⁵⁶ But another document cited further into the same footnote also refers to the eyewitness from Sawyer, who described the four men who had joined the club. The first “UNSUB” (unidentified subject) was “short and stocky”. The second was 5’9″-5’10″, 170 pounds, and “medium build”. The third was 5’8″, 170 pounds, and “medium build”. And the fourth was 5’6″-5’7″ with a beard and mustache. Other eyewitness descriptions for Hanjour offered in the same FBI document have him as being no more than 5’6″ (one witness from Arizona Aviation, the document notes, “confirmed that he was only about 5’0″ tall”), 140-150 pounds, and very slight and thin, with short, curly hair. This clearly rules out the first three subjects, leaving only the detail-lacking fourth description as being the only one possibly matching Hanjour’s description. But the details given are far too vague to suggest a positive identification, particularly given the witness’s own admission that she wasn’t sure if it was Hanjour.⁵⁷

Even more significantly, that same FBI document reveals that it was not during the FBI’s initial interview with the witness that she identified that fourth “unsub” as Hanjour, as the 9/11 Commission report implies by citing the report from the FBI’s initial interview for that claim in the footnote. Rather, it was later, during a second interview that occurred after the names and images of the hijackers had been shown repeatedly in the media that she picked Hanjour’s out of a photo lineup. The FBI summary of that later interview states that according to the witness, Hanjour “has the same general characteristics and is very similar appearing as the person she saw at Sawyer…. However, she could not be 100% sure.”⁵⁷

The third and final piece of “evidence” is another witness who identified Hanjour as being “in the Phoenix area during the summer of 2001″, citing the FBI document just discussed, which is redacted enough that this claim cannot be readily verified. But the document does show additionally that Hanjour’s membership was good only from June 23 until August 8, at which time it expired.⁵⁷

Thus, the 9/11 Commission would have the public believe that sometime after June 19, Hanjour went from the east coast to Arizona without leaving any paper trail (i.e. airline or car rental records, ATM withdrawals, etc.), signed up for a two-week flight simulator club on June 23 without leaving any record he ever actually paid or even showed up (whereas records did exist for other members), only to change his mind and return again to be back in New Jersey with Nawaf Al-Hazmi three days later. In other words, what the evidence actually suggests is that the eyewitness testimony is unreliable and that, contrary to the Commission’s assertion, Hanjour never left New Jersey during that time.

There is a clear pattern of misleading and untruthful statements in the 9/11 Commission’s final report that cannot be dismissed as mere error. Rather, the evidence is incontrovertible that the Commission willfully and deliberately sought to present a falsified story of the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour; not to relate the facts to the public, but rather to cement a legend in the public mind; not to investigate and draw conclusions based on the facts, but to start with a conclusion – the official account of 9/11 – and manipulate the facts to suit the government’s own conspiracy theory.

The Fiction Perpetuated

The mainstream media has dealt with the problematic nature of the official story in a number of ways. As already seen, one method has simply been to exaggerate characterizations of Hanjour’s competence. The official story as related by the New York Times that Hanjour “overcame the mediocrity of his talents” is not merely unsupportable by the evidence, but stands in stark contrast to the available known facts. The legend is also maintained by the mainstream media through false claims, such as the Washington Post’s assertion that Hanjour’s pilot certificate allowed him to fly commercial jets. While the Los Angeles Times suggested Hanjour “convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly”, the underlying assumption of the article was that, despite his apparent ineptitude in the cockpit, he really did know how to fly. The public is apparently supposed to believe that he was merely pretending to an incompetent pilot even though he was actually quite skillful. The mainstream media have a tendency to mock and ridicule anyone who dares even to just question the official narrative, all the while putting forth such utter absurdities as this.

As the evidence surfaced that Hanjour was not the pilot extraordinaire the public was initially told he must have been in order to carry out the attack on the Pentagon, another narrative began to emerge. While most of the mainstream media simply ignored the evidence, or, as in the case of the New York Times, drew conclusions that were contradicted by some of their own reporting. In no small part due to the 9/11 Commission report’s findings, the fiction remained firmly embedded in the minds of the public that Hanjour, through determination and perseverance, overcame all obstacles in order to acquire the skills necessary to pilot Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

There was, however, at least some acknowledgment of the major hole in that theory. A few media reports did acknowledge that Hanjour was a horrible pilot and that all evidence demonstrated that he never “overcame his mediocrity”. But rather than calling the official theory into question in doing so, these accounts simply offered a revisionist account in order to maintain the legend.

Gone was the story that the hijackers’ “capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial”, that the attacks were “conducted in a technically proficient way”, that “It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case”. No more was the expert opinion that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators”, that Flight 77′s final maneuver was “a difficult high-speed descending turn”. Vanished was the view that Flight 77 “was flown with extraordinary skill”, even so that it “reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver”, that this was evidence of “a great talent” in the cockpit.

In the place of that conventional wisdom, the new narrative that began to emerge in some accounts was that it really wasn’t that difficult a maneuver after all, and even a novice pilot like Hani Hanjour – or anyone who’s ever flown a small aircraft and perhaps spent some time playing a flight simulator game, for that matter – could have, with just a bit of luck, pulled it off.

The New American presented this new narrative by quoting Ronald D. Bull, a retired United Airlines pilot, as saying, “It’s not that difficult, and certainly not impossible.” But Bull was apparently not speaking specifically with regard to the Pentagon, as he then added, “If you’re doing a suicide run, like these guys were doing, you’d just keep the nose down and push like the devil.” In this case, Bull seems to have had the attacks on the World Trade Center, and not the Pentagon, in mind. Moreover, even if Bull also had the Pentagon in mind, he was obviously only considering a situation where the pilot was flying in a straight line towards his target. Thus, if he was also speaking with regard to the Pentagon, he was quite apparently uninformed as to the actual flight path the plane took.

Similarly quoted was George Williams, a pilot for Northwest Airlines for 38 years, who said, “I don’t see any merit to those arguments [that Hanjour couldn’t have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon]. The Pentagon is a pretty big target and I’d say hitting it was a fairly easy thing to do.”⁵⁸ It’s true that the Pentagon was a very big target. But Williams was apparently similarly aware, when he was asked to comment, of the plane’s final descending maneuver; or of the fact that this maneuver put the plane on a path that reduced the margin to a mere 26.5 feet (a few feet lower, the plane crashes into the ground; a few feet higher, the plane overshoots the target); or that the plane wasn’t flying at a constant airspeed, but was rather accelerating rapidly, thus creating more lift that needed compensating for with subtle precision in order to stay within that margin for error; or that the plane wasn’t just ambling along at something near landing speed, but was screaming along at an incredible 530 mph. To put that into perspective, cruising speed for airliners is about 600 mph at 30,000 feet of altitude, where the air is less dense. At sea-level that would be equivalent to about 300 mph hour, about double safe landing speed. A velocity of 530 mph at sea-level would be supersonic speed if it were possible to maintain at cruising altitude.⁵⁹

In both cases, the expert pilots seem to assume that Hanjour simply lined up the hijacked plane and flew a straight line into the building at a speed at which an aircraft could more easily be controlled by an inexperienced pilot. Needless to say, neither pilot’s statements accurately reflect the actual situation with regard to Flight 77. There is no indication that the New American bothered to fill either Bull or Williams in on the specifics of what Flight 77 actually did when it sought them out to “debunk” the assertion that Hanjour wasn’t a capable enough pilot to have pulled it off.

Offering a similar revisionist account, airline pilot Patrick Smith, writing for Salon, said that it was one of “the more commonly heard myths that pertain to the airplanes and their pilots” that “the terrorist pilots lacked the skill and training to fly jetliners into their targets. This is an extremely popular topic with respect to American 77. Skyjacker Hani Hanjour, a notoriously untalented flier who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater, seemed to pull off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon.” Smith’s answer to this was simply to flip conventional wisdom on its head. He opined that “If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation’s capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with the help from the 757’s autopilot. Striking a stationary object – even a large one like the Pentagon – at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn.” Hanjour had all the skill that was required, Smith suggested, adding “You can learn it at home.”⁶⁰

So, according to this narrative, Hanjour’s “textbook” “fighter jet maneuver” in a Boeing 757 is evidence that he was a “shitty pilot” and any pilot wannabe with some rudimentary training and maybe just a little bit of luck could have done it. It was easier to hit a target merely 5 stories high at a nearly horizontal angle (“obliquely” as Smith misleadingly claims), than to simply point the nose down to hit a target the size of 22 football fields. These remarks are perhaps not so much the result of an attempt to challenge conventional wisdom as they were simply demonstrative that Smith made very little effort to actually understand the actual nature of Flight 77’s final flight path before writing that it is a “myth” that Hanjour was not a pilot capable of having performed that maneuver. His characterization of Hanjour’s final maneuver as “loops and turns and spirals” indicates that Smith was generalizing without having any real concept of what Flight 77 actually did in its final minutes. A further indication that Smith really just didn’t know what he was talking about was his suggestion that Hanjour “possibly” had “help from the 757’s autopilot” in pulling off those final maneuvers, which is both patently ridiculous and demonstrably false.

The German magazine Der Spiegel also made the rare attempt to actually address this issue, but found it sufficient enough merely to opine that “This is not difficult to accomplish” and similarly suggesting practically anyone could do it since it was “a maneuver that can be practiced with any flight simulator software.”⁶¹ End of discussion.

The public was originally told that attack on the Pentagon obviously required a fairly high level of sophistication in the cockpit. It was conventional wisdom that being able to maneuver a large jetliner required a certain level of training, a certain level of skill. The public was then told that Hanjour was the pilot among the 19 hijackers who had the most training and the greatest piloting skill. As the facts emerged and it became evident that Hanjour did not have the requisite level of skill, the government chose to manipulate the evidence in order to maintain its theory. The 9/11 Commission served to cement the legend of Hani Hanjour into history, and the mainstream media, for the most part, accepted and maintained that legend even when much of their own reporting revealed facts that contradicted it. In a few cases, there was acknowledgment that Hanjour was a “shitty” pilot after all, but in such cases the official account was still maintained by throwing common sense out the window and reversing the original consensus that it must have taken a skilled pilot to have performed that final, fatal maneuver.

Perhaps this revisionist retelling of the official story is the correct one. Perhaps the conventional wisdom that it would actually take a skilled pilot to competently control a large jetliner is really wrong. Perhaps it’s true that any second-rate pilot who has trouble controlling even a Cessna-172 could get into the cockpit of a Boeing 757 and do what Hani Hanjour is said to have done. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the revisionist account is just as much nonsense as the story that Hanjour “persevered” and “overcame his mediocrity”.

Whichever the case, many questions about the events of 9/11 remain to this day unanswered, despite the appointment of the 9/11 Commission ostensibly to investigate and provide answers to those questions. And whichever the case, the conclusion is inescapable that the 9/11 Commission deliberately attempted to deceive the public about the piloting capabilities of Hani Hanjour.

Why?

1. Statement for the Record FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry, September 26, 2002.
2. Jim Yardley and Jo Thomas, “For Agent in Phoenix, the Cause of Many Frustrations Extended to His Own Office,” New York Times, June 19, 2002.
3. “FBI Names 19 Men as Hijackers,” Washington Post, September 15, 2001; Page A01.
4. “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates,” FBI, November 14, 2003 (hereafter “FBI Hijackers Timeline”), p. 41. The complete FBI timeline is available for download online. See: “Newly Released FBI Timeline Reveals New Information about 9/11 Hijackers that Was Ignored by 9/11 Commission”, HistoryCommons.org, February 14, 2008. The timeline reads: “FAA issued Commercial Pilot certificate #2576802 to [redacted] [sic].” The “[sic]” is in the original. Why the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor” is redacted is unclear.
5. The Final Report of the National commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, p. 225-227 (hereafter “9/11 Commission Report”).
6. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 530.
7. Global Security, September 14, 2001.
8. “Hijackers ‘knew what they were doing,’” CNN, September 12, 2001. The quote is CNN’s paraphrase of what the flight expert told them.
9. “‘Get These Planes on the Ground’: Air Traffic Controllers Recall Sept. 11,″ ABC News, October 24, 2001.
10. “Primary Target: 189 Dead Or Missing From Pentagon Attack”, CBS News, September 21, 2001.
11. Marc Fisher and Don Phillips, “On Flight 77: ‘Our Plane is Being Hijacked,’” Washington Post, September 12, 2001; Page A01
12. Steve Fainaru and Alia Ibrahim, “Mysterious Trip to Flight 77 Cockpit,” Washington Post, September 10, 2002.
13. “Flight Path Study – American Airlines Flight 77,” NTSB, February 19, 2002.
14. A copy of the NTSB video was obtained by the group Pilots for 9/11 Truth. It is available for viewing on YouTube (accessed April 8, 2010).
15. “The Pentagon,” GlobalSecurity.org.
16. Don Van Natta and Lizette Alvarez, “A Hijacked Boeing 757 Slams Into the Pentagon, Halting the Government,” New York Times, September 12, 2001.
17. “The Pentagon,” Great Buildings Online (accessed March 27, 2010). Boeing 757 Technical Specifications from Boeing.com (accessed Marcy 27, 2010).
18. “DoD News Briefing on Pentagon Renovation,” Department of Defense, September 15, 2001.
19. Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001.
20. “FBI Summary about Alleged Flight 77 Hijacker Hani Hanjour”, Scribd.com (accessed April 6, 2010; herafter “FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour”). This document was cited by the 9/11 Commission. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) possesses the Commission’s records and has released many documents to the public. See: “9/11 Commission Records,” NARA (accessed March 28, 2010). Many of the released records are available online at Scribd.com. See: “9/11 Document Archive,” Scribd.com (accessed March 28, 2010).
21. Washington Post, September 10, 2002.
22. Charles M. Sennott, “Why bin Laden plot relied on Saudi hijackers,” Boston Globe, March 3, 2002.
23. Joel Mowbray, “Visas that Should Have Been Denied,” National Review Online, October 9, 2002.
24. FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.
25. Thomas Frank, “Tracing Trail of Hijackers,” Newsday, September 23, 2001.
26. David W. Chen, “Man Traveled Across U.S. In His Quest to Be a Pilot,” New York Times, September 18, 2001.
27. “Who Did It? FBI Links Names to Terror Attacks,” ABC News, October 4, 2001.
28. Newsday, September 23, 2001.
29. “Hanjour an unlikely terrorist,” Cape Cod Times, October 21, 2001.
30. Carol J. Williams, John-Thor Dahlburg, and H.G. Reza, “Mainly, They Just Waited,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001.
31. V. Dion Haynes, “Algerian man didn’t try to hide, neighbors say,” Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2001.
32. “FBI Summary of Information, Lofti Raissi”, January 4, 2004.
33. 9/11 Commission Report p. 520.
34. Hanjour’s FAA airman documentation from the 9/11 Commission records released by NARA are available online at Scribd.
35. Hanjour’s FAA airman records are available online at Scribd.
36. Kellie Lunney, “FAA contractors approved flight licenses for Sept. 11 suspect,” Government Executive, June 13, 2002.
37. “Report: 9/11 Hijacker Bypassed FAA,” Associated Press, September 30, 2004
38. Government Executive, June 13, 2002.
39. The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 12. The report notes that “To our knowledge none of them [the hijackers] had ever flown an actual airliner before.”
40. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14, Sections 61.123, 61.129. Present requirements in these regards are the same as they were when Hanjour obtained his certificate. See the version revised as of January 1, 1999.
41. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 521-522.
42. “FBI FD-302, James Charles McRae,” April 10, 2001.
43. Jim Yardley, “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence,” New York Times, May 4, 2002.
44. “FAA Probed, Cleared Sept. 11 Hijacker in Early 2001,” Associated Press, May 10, 2002.
45. David Hancock, “FAA Was Alerted to Sept. 11 Hijacker,” CBS News, May 10, 2002.
46. Jim Yardley and Jo Thomas, “For Agent in Phoenix, the Cause of Many Frustrations Extended to His Own Office,” New York Times, June 19, 2001
47. FBI Hijacker’s Timeline, p.123.
48. Associated Press, May 10, 2002.
49. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 242.
50. Brooke A. Masters, Leef Smith, and Michael D. Shear, “Dulles Hijackers Made Maryland Their Base,” Washington Post, September 19, 2001; Page A01.
51. “Piecing together the shadowy lives of the hijackers,” Telegraph, September 20, 2001.
52. Thomas Frank, “Tracing Trail of Hijackers,” Newsday, November 24, 2004.
53. FBI Hijackers Timeline, p. 150, 154, 156-157, 161-162, 166-167.
54. Jacques Billeaud, “More Arizona ties to terror suspect,” Associated Press, September 20, 2001.
55. “9/11 Commission Report,” p. 529. The document cited by the 9/11 Commission was obtained by Intelwire.com. “FBI Memorandum, Sawyer Aviation records”, October 12, 2001.
56. “FBI FD-302, Interrogation of Tina Beth Arnold (Sawyer Aviation),” FBI, October 17, 2001.
57. “FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi,” FBI, January 4, 2004
58. William F. Jasper, “9-11 Conspiracy Fact & Fiction,” The New American, May 2, 2005.
59. “Airplane Flight: How High? How Fast?” NASA (accessed April 17, 2010). Relative airspeed is calculated by the equation B d v2 = W, where factor B depends on the profile of a given set of wings (larger wings produce more lift), d is air density, v is velocity, and W is the airplane’s weight. At 30,000 feet, air density is about ¼ that at sea level, allowing an airliner to double its speed to produce the same amount of lift.
60. Patrick Smith, “Ask the pilot,” Salon, May 19, 2006.
61. “What Really Happened: The 9/11 Fact File,” Der Spiegel, December 20, 2006.

At the time, the U.N. consisted of 55 members, including Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Palestine by then remained the only one of the formerly Mandated Territories not to become an independent state. No representatives from any Arab nations, however, were included in UNSCOP.¹ Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia requested that “The termination of the Mandate over Palestine and the declaration of its independence” be placed on the agenda, but this motion was rejected. The Arab Higher Committee thus announced it would not collaborate, although individual Arab states did agree to meet with representatives from UNSCOP.²

UNSCOP’s investigation included a 15-day tour of Palestine, splitting time between visits to Arab and Jewish communities. Seven days — nearly half that same amount of time spent touring Palestine itself — were spent touring Displaced Persons (D.P.) camps in Germany and Austria and witnessing the plight of the Jews there.³ The proposal to visit the D.P. camps passed by a vote of six to four with one abstention, despite the objection from two members that it would be “improper to connect the displaced persons, and the Jewish problem as a whole, with the problem of Palestine”.² More time was spent visiting D.P. camps than the total number of days spent visiting the Arab nations neighboring Palestine and meeting with representatives there.

Public hearings were held in which 37 representatives were heard, 31 of whom were Jews representing 17 Jewish organizations, but with only one representative from each of the six Arab states.⁴ Two proposals emerged: a federal State plan and a partition plan. The latter passed by a vote of seven to three with one abstention, the dissenting votes being cast by India, Iran, and Yugoslavia, who all favored the federal state plan.

On September 3, UNSCOP submitted its report to the U.N. General Assembly. The report noted that the population of Palestine at the end of 1946 was estimated to be almost 1,846,000, with 1,203,000 Arabs (65 percent) and 608,000 Jews (33 percent). Again, the growth of the Jewish population was mainly the result of immigration, whereas the Arab growth was “almost entirely” natural increase.

Complicating any notion of partition, UNSCOP observed that there was “no clear territorial separation of Jews and Arabs by large contiguous areas.” In the Jaffa district, for example, which included Tel Aviv, “Jews are more than 40 per cent of the total population”, with an Arab majority.²

Land ownership statistics from 1945 showed that Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district in Palestine. In Jaffa, with the highest percentage of Jewish ownership of any district, 47 percent of the land was owned by Arabs versus 39 percent owned by Jews. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in Ramallah district, Arabs owned 99 percent of the land and Jews less than 1 percent.⁵ In the whole of Palestine, Arabs were in possession of 85 percent of the land, while Jews owned less than 7 percent.²

UNSCOP mentioned in its report that Jewish groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang had engaged in terrorism, including the bombing of the King David Hotel. While Jewish leaders had “from time to time condemned terrorist activities, and there have been some signs of active opposition to such methods on the part of the Haganah”, terrorism was a widely enough accepted tactic among the Zionists that the British had “found it necessary to arrest and detain on grounds of public security some 2,600 Jews, including four members of the Jewish Agency Executive.”

UNSCOP also related the characterization from the British Administration in Palestine that “Since the beginning of 1945 the Jews have … supported by an organized campaign of lawlessness, murder and sabotage their contention that … nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of a Jewish State and free Jewish immigration into Palestine.”

During one of its hearings, the Arab representatives expressed their view with regard to the Zionist “recourse to terrorism”, which was that “This aggressive attitude … will not fail to give rise in turn to the creation of similar [terrorist] organizations by the Arabs.” The Arab delegates also declared that “against a [Jewish] State established by violence, the Arab States will be obliged to use violence; that is a legitimate right of self-defence.”

The case of the Zionist Jews, UNSCOP reported, was based on biblical arguments as well as on the Balfour Declaration, which, they contended, recognized their “right” to colonize Palestine. Their case also rested on the false claim that “immigrant Jews displace no Arabs” and upon the assertion that the establishment of a Jewish State would “do no political injustice to the Arabs, since the Arabs have never established a government in Palestine.”

In other words, the Arab right to self-determination could be denied now because that right had never been recognized or exercised in the past (logic which would prove problematic for democracies everywhere, but the delight of kings and tyrants, if the standard were actually applied to other cases).

The Zionists also argued that once a Jewish State is established and the Jews become a majority, the Arab minority “will be fully protected in all its rights on an equal basis with the Jewish citizenry.” This was not accompanied with any explanation as to why this should be acceptable to the then Arab majority, or why the Arabs should accept what the Zionists themselves had rejected.

The entire Zionist case was outrageous. Its arguments were spurious, prejudiced and hypocritical to the extreme. And yet UNSCOP took them quite seriously. It accepted without question the assumption that the British had the right to open Palestine for colonization while it was under occupation, an action that would be expressly forbidden under the Geneva Conventions just two years later.⁶

It accepted the argument that to allow democracy in Palestine “would in fact destroy the Jewish National Home” and on that basis explicitly rejected the right to self-determination of the Arab majority.

It mentioned in passing that the Balfour Declaration had a clause stating that nothing should be done to prejudice the rights and positions of the Arab majority, commenting only that the guarantee of “civil and religious” rights excluded “political” rights and thus did not translate into a promise of “political freedom to the Arab population of Palestine”.

UNSCOP also observed that the use of the term “National Home” instead of “State” “had the advantage of not shocking public opinion outside the Jewish world”, which is precisely why it was chosen.

Furthermore, echoing the McDonald White Paper, it also asserted that the use of this term did not preclude the possibility of establishing a Jewish State; a statement that could only be maintained by prejudicing the position and rights of the Arabs.

UNSCOP also effectively accepted the biblical argument, reiterating that the 1922 White Paper had recognized the “ancient historic connection” of the Jews to Palestine and accepting this as giving Jews from Europe and elsewhere the “right” to colonize the occupied territory. (Compare this with the conclusion of the King-Crane Commission that the claim that Jews “have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.”)

It recognized the corollary “that all Jews in the world who wish to go to Palestine would have the right to do so.” But its only reservation about this conclusion was that it “would seem to be unrealistic in the sense that a country as small and poor as Palestine could never accommodate all the Jews in the world.” Again, the rights and position of the Arab majority simply did not factor into the equation.

Astonishingly, while UNSCOP observed that “all concerned were aware of the existence of an overwhelming Arab majority”, that “the Zionist program could not be carried out except by force of arms”, and that “the basic assumption” was that the Arabs would acquiesce quietly, the committee’s only comment about any of this was that the assumption of Arab acquiescence “proved to be a false one”.

Other assumptions adopted by UNSCOP were equally astonishing. As yet a further example, it partially accepted the argument that “no political injustice would be done to the Arabs by the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine” because “not since 63 B.C., when Pompey stormed Jerusalem, has Palestine been an independent State.” This logic reflected the committee’s acceptance of the Zionists’ ludicrous argument that since the Arab Palestinians had not exercised self-determination in the past, therefore this right could continue to be denied them into the future.

Or take UNSCOP’s assertion that the solution required “the postponement of independence” until “the Jewish people become a majority” in the part of the country dedicated against the will of the Arab majority to the “Jewish National Home”.

In sum, the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine operated under assumptions that explicitly rejected the rights of the Arabs.

Having already accepted a rejectionist framework, the UNSCOP report then proceeded to examine the Arab position. Its examination is further instructive as to the absolutely pre-judicial nature of the committee. It asserted that the Arabs, for instance, only “postulate” that they have majority rights since “they are and have been for many centuries in possession of the land”, uninterrupted since “early historical times”. But, as already noted, the committee denied that Arabs had majority rights with the adoption of the Zionist argument that “they have not been in possession of it as a sovereign nation”.

The Arabs merely “claim” that “general promises and pledges officially made to the Arab people in the course of the First World War” recognized their rights and supported an independent Palestine. But this is just their “view”, not a fact; the committee held that “apparently there is no unequivocal agreement as to whether Palestine was included within the territory pledged” and “Great Britain has consistently denied that Palestine was among the territories to which independence was pledged.” In other words, since the British had rejected the rights of the Arab Palestinians, UNSCOP would also do so.

The Arabs only “allege” that the Mandate violated the Covenant of the League of Nations which prescribed that Mandate territories become independent. Here, UNSCOP actually made a reasonably strong case. The relevant article of the Covenant, they pointed out, merely discussed independence as being “permissible”, not obligatory. Moreover, the Allied Powers had accepted the policy of the Balfour Declaration, making it “clear from the beginning that Palestine would have been treated differently from Syria and Iraq” in that, in Palestine, the right to self-determination of the Arabs would be denied. There would therefore “seem to be no grounds for questioning the validity of the Mandate for the reason advanced by the Arab States.” And UNSCOP came up with none of its own reasons for doing so.

In a particularly remarkable illustration of UNSCOP’s prejudice, it implored people to remember that, as Lord Balfour had explained at the creation of the Mandate, “a mandate is a self-imposed limitation by the conquerors on the sovereignty which they obtained over conquered territories” according not to the will of the inhabitants, but to what the occupiers “conceived to be the general welfare of mankind”.² In other words, self-determination was not an inherent right, but a privilege granted to a territory’s inhabitants by their conquerors should the occupying power at its own discretion choose to bestow the gift upon them. An occupied people were not to decide for themselves what is in their best interests; this was to be dictated to them by the foreign power occupying their land.

This framework was accepted matter-of-factly by UNSCOP, despite being in direct contradiction to the principles of the U.N. Charter under which it was commissioned. In fact, just three years later, the International Court of Justice would rule that the creation of a Mandate under the Covenant of the League of Nations “did not involve any cession of territory or transfer of sovereignty”.⁷

UNSCOP offered only the slightest pretense that its findings were anything but rejectionist, finding some occasion to pay lip-service to the principles of equal rights and self-determination. It asserted, for instance, that Britain was “not free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine” while itself proposing to do just that (presumably, in their view, it took the higher authority of first the League of Nations and then the U.N. to dispose of Palestine against the will of its inhabitants).

In their report, the committee acknowledged candidly that under the Mandate “the principle of self-determination . . . was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there”, which, along with the Mandate itself, was recognized to be “counter to that principle” of democracy (presumably also “obviously” so).

UNSCOP acknowledged that if the right to self-determination of the Arabs was respected, they “would recognize the right of Jews to continue in possession of land legally acquired by them during the Mandate”, as they had offered at the London conference and again proposed to UNSCOP. But the point was moot since their rights “obviously” were not recognized.

Having established this rejectionist framework, UNSCOP proceeded to weigh the proposed solutions, which included partition, a unitary state, or a single state “with a federal, cantonal or binational structure”. Most Jewish organizations consulted wanted a Jewish State, with different views as to whether this state should constitute the whole of Palestine or only a part. But some among those consulted were opposed to the Zionist program, including in the U.S. the American Council for Judaism, which viewed any partition plan as a threat to peace, harmful to Jews, and undemocratic.

As noted, the Arab representatives reiterated something similar to what had been proposed at the conference in London a year earlier: a unitary Palestine with a democratic constitution guaranteeing full civil and religious rights for all citizens and an elected legislative assembly that would include Jewish representatives. UNSCOP dismissed this as “an extreme position”. In accordance with their adopted framework, the Arab proposal for a single democratic state was rejected as “extreme” because it didn’t take into account the desires of the Zionists, who rejected the idea. And yet the partition recommendation was not similarly “extreme” despite being “strongly opposed by Arabs”. The federal state solution, moreover, was simply “unworkable”, UNSCOP asserted in its majority recommendation, without discussion.

India, Iran, and Yugoslavia dissented, arguing that the federal state solution was “in every respect the most democratic solution” and “most in harmony with the basic principles of the Charter of the United Nations”. It was supported by “a substantial number of Jews”, whereas the partition plan was supported by no Arabs, and was the solution that would therefore “best serve the interests of both Arabs and Jews.”

The dissenting view aside, UNSCOP’s final recommendation was that the Mandate be terminated and independence “granted” to Palestine, with the caveat that there was “vigorous disagreement as to the form that independence should take.” Partition was recommended since the “claims to Palestine of the Arabs and Jews, both possessing equal validity, are irreconcilable”, the assumption being that because Jews had “historic roots” there, a Jew from Europe who had never set foot in Palestine had an equal right to the land as an Arab whose family had lived and worked there for generations.

The “demerit of the scheme” was that while there would be “an insignificant minority of Jews” in the proposed Arab State, “in the Jewish State there will be a considerable minority of Arabs.” But this was “inevitable” since the democratic solution was to be rejected.²

On October 11, 1947, a U.S. representative to the United Nations expressed the U.S. policy position of supporting the partition of Palestine to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state.⁸

The U.N. General Assembly on November 29 passed Resolution 181, recommending that UNSCOP’s partition plan be implemented. The resolution called upon “the inhabitants of Palestine to take such steps as may be necessary on their part to put this plan into effect”.⁹

One enduring myth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that “Israel was created by the U.N.” under General Assembly Resolution 181.¹⁰ This claim is absolutely false.

While the General Assembly is the more democratic of the two U.N. bodies, only Security Council resolutions are considered legally binding. Resolution 181 was nothing more than a recommendation. Naturally, any such plan would have to be acceptable to both parties, and it was not.

The plan would have awarded a majority of the territory to its minority Jewish population, who were in possession of a mere fraction of the land, and so was naturally rejected by the Arab majority who legally owned most of Palestine.¹¹

Regardless, the U.N. was no more “free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine” than Great Britain, and any U.N. resolution from either body that would have sought to do so would have been a violation of the U.N.’s own Charter and therefore null and void.

1. U.N. General Assembly Resolution 106, May 15, 1947, available online at the U.N. website: http://www.un.org. The Special Committee on Palestine consisted of representatives from Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. Also see the U.N. website for membership information. Two states were admitted membership in 1947, Pakistan, and Yemen, both admitted in September, bringing the total to 57 members.
2. UNSCOP Report.
3. “Background Story on Palestine Report”, U.N. Department of Public Information Press Release, August 31, 1947, available online at the UNISPAL website.
4. “Background Story on Palestine Report”.
5. From a map entitled “Palestine Land Ownership by Sub-Districts” showing 1945 statistics, United Nations, August 1950, available online at: http://domino.un.org/maps/m0094.jpg. Statistics were as follows (Arab versus Jewish land ownership in percentages): Safad: 68/18; Acre: 87/3; Tiberias: 51/38; Haifa: 42/35; Nazareth: 52/28; Beisan: 44/34; Jenin: 84/1, Tulkarm: 78/17; Nablus: 87/1; Jaffa: 47/39; Ramle: 77/14; Ramallah: 99/less than 1; Jerusalem: 84/2; Gaza: 75/4; Hebron: 96/less than 1; Beersheeba: 15/less than 1.
6. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” One could argue that the letter of the law does not prohibit the transfer of parts of a civilian population that was not “its own”, but such a legalistic interpretation in clear violation of the spirit of the law would be difficult to take seriously. The obvious intent is that the geo-political status of the territory not be reconstituted in a manner prejudicial to the rights of its inhabitants and that no attempts to colonize the occupied territory should occur.
7. International Court of Justice, “Advisory Opinion regarding the Status of South-West Africa”, ICJ Reports. (1950), p. 132, cited in “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988”.
8. United States Position on Palestine Question, Statement by Herschel V. Johnson, United States Deputy Representative to the United Nations, October 11, 1947, available online at the Yale Avalon Project.
9. U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947, available at the U.N. website.
10. “Israel at the UN: Progress Amid a History of Bias”, Anti-Defamation League, September 2008; Nicholas Hirshon, “Rare footage of UN vote creating Israel to screen at Flushing synagogue”, New York Daily News, November 20, 2007. These are random examples. For another, take the BBC website, which shows a map of the UN partition plan above a heading that reads “Israel founded: UN partition plan”. The text notes that the plan “was never implemented”, which can hardly be reconciled with the assertion that the plan “founded” Israel, and yet there it is (accessed March 23, 2009). For a final example, take Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2007), p. xxii. In his chronology, for the year 1947, Oren writes, “The United States, along with thirty-two other nations, votes in favor of UN Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states” (emphasis added). Oren certainly must know better, but makes the false statement anyway.
11. Richard H. Curtis, “Truman Adviser Recalls May 14, 1948 US Decision to Recognize Israel”, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1991, Page 17..

Fujita, the editorial added, is a member of “the lunatic fringe” who “have spawned a thriving subculture of conspiracy theorists at home and abroad”, and “his views, rooted as they are in profound distrust of the United States, seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought”. The piece closes by suggesting that the “fact-averse” Fujita should be removed from office.

Among Fujita’s “bizarre” views are “that shadowy forces with advance knowledge of the plot played the stock market to profit from it”, “the fantastic idea that eight of the 19 hijackers are alive and well”, and “that controlled demolition rather than fire or debris may be a more likely explanation for at least the collapse of the building at 7 World Trade Center”.

Yet while serving out a hit piece against the global “9/11 Truth” movement, it is in fact the editors of the Washington Post who are demonstrably “fact-averse”.

It happens to be an uncontroversial fact that in the days just prior to the attacks, there was a dramatic increase in trade on put options, and what made this unusual spike even more mysterious was that it was observed  only in relation to companies directly affected by the attacks, including United Airlines, American Airlines, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. (which occupied 22 floors of 2 World Trade Center).

That this occurred was, in fact, mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, which reported that the federal investigations into the suspicious trading concluded that it was all “innocuous”. Many of the trades on the airline companies, for instance, were traced to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda”.

In other words, the report acknowledges that the suspicious trades did, in fact, occur, but dismisses this as evidence of foreknowledge because the investigation didn’t lead to the proper predetermined culprits. This is illustrative of the kind of standard the 9/11 Commission employed throughout its so-called “investigation”.

The “fantastic” idea that the identity of the hijackers named by the FBI is in question is an interesting case. At the time, the Washington Post had also subscribed to this “half-baked” notion. On September 20, 2001, under the headline “Some Hijackers’ Identities Uncertain”, the Post reported, “FBI officials said yesterday that some of the 19 terrorists who carried out last week’s assault on New York and Washington may have stolen the identities of other people, and their real names may remain unknown.”

Among the evidence for this, the Post cited “Saudi government officials” as having determined “that at least two of the terrorists used the names of living, law-abiding Saudi citizens”. The man in the picture of one of the alleged hijackers, the Post reported, was Salem Al-Hazmi, who was actually alive and well, according to Gaafar Allagany, the chief of the Saudi Embassy’s information office in Washington. The real Al-Hazmi’s “passport was stolen by a pickpocket on a trip to Cairo three years” before. Another of the alleged hijackers was Abdulaziz Al-Omari, who, Allagany said, was also alive and “an electrical engineer in Saudi Arabia.”

“The uncertainty”, the Post continued, “highlights how difficult it may be to ever identify some of the hijackers who participated in the deadliest act of violence on American soil. Most of the hijackers’ bodies were obliterated in the fiery crashes.”

The Washington Post was not the only mainstream media outlet to report on the uncertainty over the hijacker’s identities. It was widely reported elsewhere, both in the U.S. and international media.

The U.K.’s Guardian, for instance, reported on September 21 under the headline “False identities mislead FBI” that “The FBI acknowledged yesterday that some of the terrorists involved in the attacks last week were using false identities”, with regard to Al-Hazmi and Al-Omari.

FBI acknowledgment of this was also reported by the BBC the same day under the headline “FBI probes hijackers’ identities”. The BBC also reported on September 22 under the headline “Hijack ‘suspect’ alive in Morocco” that Waleed Al-Shehri, another alleged hijacker, the “same Mr Al-Shahri” whose photo the FBI had released as being among the terrorists, “has turned up in Morocco, proving clearly that he was not a member of the suicide attack.”

On September 23, under the headline “Hijack ‘suspects’ alive and well”, the BBC reported that yet “Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker … has turned up alive and well” and that “The identities of four of the 19 suspects … are now in doubt.” FBI Director Robert Mueller also “acknowledged … that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.”

The London Telegraph similarly ran a story on September 23 entitled “Revealed: the men with stolen identities”.

The Washington Post itself ran a follow-up article on September 25 entitled “Some Light Shed On Saudi Suspects”, reporting that “U.S. investigators believe they have positively identified 15 of the 19 hijackers”, but that the identify of the other four was still in question.

On September 27, even while releasing the official list of hijackers along with their photos, the FBI confirmed that uncertainty remained over some of the identities. Mueller acknowledged that the FBI was still “determining whether when these individuals came to the United States these were their real names, or they changed their names for use with false identification in the United States; that false identification being used up to and on the day of September 11th, and that false identification used to purchase the tickets, and thereby being the name on the manifests of the planes that went down.”

Yet, despite these facts, neither the Washington Post nor any other mainstream media outlet has ever offered any follow-up reports explaining whether, and how, this uncertainty was finally resolved. The FBI has never clarified this matter to the public. The 9/11 Commission didn’t so much as even address the question, even to attempt to clear up the matter.

And so it remains an uncontroversial fact, as far as the public is concerned, that the identify of at least several of the hijackers remains in question. Why the government has refused to clarify this issue, and why the media now report anyone who doesn’t have a short memory about 9/11 as being part of a “lunatic fringe” are also open questions that warrant some kind of explanation.

Finally, there is the matter of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. Many people might be surprised to learn that not only two towers fell on September 11. In fact, a third skyscraper also collapsed that day neatly into its own footprint. It is also an uncontroversial fact that proper investigative procedures for such disasters, particularly in cases where a crime has been committed, were contemptuously ignored in the case of the WTC.

For starters, the evidence from the crime scene in the form of the remains of the three buildings was removed and immediately destroyed. Destruction of evidence is, itself, a crime, and yet that is what happened. Other standard procedures were also ignored, such as testing for any kinds of accelerants that may have been responsible for the building failures.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released what is supposed to be the conclusive report on the building collapses. Yet, the explanation it provides, too, is inadequate, to say the least. The computer models NIST offers for the collapse of WTC 7, for instance, look just like one would expect them to, for the kind of collapse NIST says occurred there. You first see one load-bearing column fail, leading to the progressive failure of other columns until the entire structure has eventually crumbled.

The problem is that these models look absolutely nothing like the actual collapse, documented on video. A simple look at any available footage of the collapse is enough to demonstrate that all major load-bearing columns of the building failed nearly simultaneously. You see the penthouse of the building sinking into the core just seconds before the entire structure, all perimeter columns, fail at precisely the same instant, causing the building to collapse straight down  at free-fall acceleration into what should have been the path of greatest resistance according to NIST’s own assessment.

The similarities to videos of building “implosions” under controlled demolition are astonishing. Yet NIST dismisses the possibility that charges could have been used largely on the basis that, if this had been the case, there would have been eyewitness reports of the explosions. The problem with this is that there were, in fact, a great many eyewitness reports of explosions, both prior to and during the collapse.

NIST also completely ignored the actual leading alternative hypothesis, which was that a substance called thermite (or its U.S. Department of Defense-patented variation, thermate) may have been used to cut the building’s columns, rather than, or in conjunction with, traditional explosive demolitions. Evidence for this hypothesis comes not only in form of empirical observation about the actual nature of the collapse from video footage (including the presence of molten steel), but also in traces of what appears to be thermite in the dust from the collapses.

Independent scientific inquiries into the collapse have led to the discovery of “distinctive red/gray chips in all of the samples” that, when studied, all showed “marked similarities” and were “found to be an unreacted thermitic material”. These findings were included in a report entitled, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” that was published last year in The Open Chemical Physics Journal.

Though this report was widely circulated on the internet and among alternative media sources, the Washington Post never bothered to report these findings published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Whatever theories about the events of September 11, 2001 one may subscribe to, what everyone surely can agree upon is that the facts should matter. The editors of the Washington Post might perhaps begin by acknowledging just a few of the more non-controversial facts, including the fact that suspicious trading did occur prior to 9/11, the fact that the identities of at least some of the hijackers has been cast in doubt and that this has never been clarified to the public, and the fact that the collapses of the three WTC buildings has never been adequately investigated.

Surely, that proper credible investigations into the events of 9/11 should occur — indeed, should have occurred long ago — should also be non-controversial, no matter which conspiracy theory one believes, whether it belongs to “the lunatic fringe” or to the U.S. government.

Res. 57 (Sep. 18, 1948) – Expresses deep shock at the assassination of the U.N. Mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, by Zionist terrorists.

Res. 89 (Nov. 17, 1950) – Requests that attention be given to the expulsion of “thousands of Palestine Arabs” and calls upon concerned governments to take no further action “involving the transfer of persons across international frontiers or armistice lines”, and notes that Israel announced that it would withdraw to the armistice lines.

Res. 93 (May 18, 1951) – Finds that Israeli airstrikes on Syria on April 5, 1951 constitutes “a violation of the cease-fire”, and decides that Arab civilians expelled from the demilitarized zone by Israel should be allowed to return.

Res. 100 (Oct. 27, 1953) – Notes that Israel had said it would stop work it started in the demilitarized zone on September 2, 1953.

Res. 101 (Nov. 24, 1953) – Finds Israel’s attack on Qibya, Jordan on October 14-15, 1953 to be a violation of the cease-fire and “Expresses the strongest censure of that action”.

Res. 106 (Mar. 29, 1955) – Condemns Israel’s attack on Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip on February 28, 1955.

Res. 111 (Jan. 19, 1956) – Condemns Israel’s attack on Syria on December 11, 1955 as “a flagrant violation of the cease-fire” and armistice agreement.

Res. 119 (Oct. 31, 1956) – Considers that “a grave situation has been created” by the attack against Egypt by the forces of Britain, France, and Israel.

Res. 171 (Apr. 9, 1962) – Reaffirms resolution 111 and determines that Israel’s attack on Syria on March 16-17, 1962 “constitutes a flagrant violation of that resolution”.

Res. 228 (Nov. 25, 1966) – “Deplores the loss of life and heavy damage to property resulting from the action” by Israel in the southern Hebron area on November 13, 1966, and “Censures Israel for this large-scale military action in violation of the United Nations Charter” and the armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan.

Res. 237 (Jun. 14, 1967) – Emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, emphasizes that member states have a commitment to abide by the U.N. Charter, and calls for the “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied” during the June 1967 war.

Res. 242 (Nov. 22, 1967) – Emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, emphasizes that member states have a commitment to abide by the U.N. Charter, and calls on Israel to withdraw from territories it occupied during the June 1967 war.

Res. 248 (Mar. 24, 1968) – Observes that the Israeli attack on Jordan “was of a large-scale and carefully planned nature”, “Deplores the loss of life and heavy damage to property”, “Condemns the military action launched by Israel in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and the cease-fire resolutions”, and “Calls upon Israel to desist from” further violations of resolution 237.

Res. 250 (Apr. 27, 1968) – Considers “that the holding of a military parade in Jerusalem will aggravate tensions in the area and have an adverse effect on a peaceful settlement of the problems in the area” and “Calls upon Israel to refrain from holding the military parade in Jerusalem which is contemplated” for May 2, 1968.

Res. 251 (May 2, 1968) – Recalls resolution 250 and “Deeply deplores the holding by Israel of the military parade in Jerusalem” on May 2, 1968 “in disregard of” resolution 250.

Res. 252 (May 21, 1968) – “Deplores the failure of Israel to comply with” General Assembly resolutions 2253 and 2254, considers Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem “invalid”, and calls upon Israel “to rescind all such measures already taken and to desist forthwith from taking any further action which tends to change the status of Jerusalem”.

Res. 256 (Aug. 16, 1968) – Recalls Israel’s “flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter” condemned in resolution 248, observes that further Israeli air attacks on Jordan “were of a large scale and carefully planned nature in violation of resolution 248”, “Deplores the loss of life and heavy damage to property”, and condemns Israel’s attacks.

Res. 259 (Sep. 27, 1968) – Expresses concern for “the safety, welfare and security” of the Palestinians “under military occupation by Israel”, deplores “the delay in the implementation of resolution 237 (1967) because of the conditions still being set by Israel for receiving a Special Representative of the Secretary-General”, and requests Israel to receive the Special Representative and facilitate his work.

Res. 262 (Dec. 31, 1968) – Observes “that the military action by the armed forces of Israel against the civil International Airport of Beirut was premeditated and of a large scale and carefully planned nature”, and condemns Israel for the attack.

Res.265 (Apr. 1, 1969) – Expresses “deep concern that the recent attacks on Jordanian villages and other populated areas were of a pre-planned nature, in violation of resolutions” 248 and 256, “Deplores the loss of civilian life and damage to property”, and “Condemns the recent premeditated air attacks launched by Israel on Jordanian villages and populated areas in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and the cease-fire resolutions”.

Res. 267 (Jul. 3, 1969) – Recalls resolution 252 and General Assembly resolutions 2253 and 2254, notes that “since the adoption of the above-mentioned resolutions Israel has taken further measures tending to change the status of the City of Jerusalem”, reaffirms “the established principle that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible”, “Deplores the failure of Israel to show any regard for the resolutions”, “Censures in the strongest terms all measures taken to change the status of the City of Jerusalem”, “Confirms that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel which purport to alter the status of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, are invalid and cannot change that status”, and urgently calls on Israel to rescind the measures taken to annex Jerusalem.

Res. 270 (Aug. 26, 1969) – “Condemns the premeditated air attack by Israel on villages in southern Lebanon in violation of its obligations under the Charter and Security Council resolutions”.

Res. 271 (Sep. 15, 1969) – Expresses grief “at the extensive damage caused by arson to the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem” on August 21, 1969 “under the military occupation of Israel”, reaffirms “the established principle that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible”, “Determines that the execrable act of desecration and profanation of the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque emphasizes the immediate necessity of Israel’s desisting from acting in violation” previous resolutions and rescinding measures to annex Jerusalem, calls on Israel “to observe the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and international law governing military occupation”, and condemns Israel’s failure to comply with previous resolutions.

Res. 279 (May 12, 1970) – “Demands the immediate withdrawal of all Israeli armed forces from Lebanese territory.”

Res. 280 (May 19, 1970) – Expresses conviction that “that the Israeli military attack against Lebanon was premeditated and of a large scale and carefully planned in nature”, recalls resolution 279 “demanding the immediate withdrawal of all Israeli armed forces from Lebanese territory”, deplores Israel’s violation of resolutions 262 and 270, “Condemns Israel for its premeditated military action in violation of its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations”, and “Deplores the loss of life and damage to property inflicted as a result” of Israeli violations of Security Council resolutions.

Res. 285 (Sep. 5, 1970) – “Demands the complete and immediate withdrawal of all Israeli armed forces from Lebanese territory.”

Res. 298 (Sep. 25, 1971) – Recalls resolutions 252 and 267 and General Assembly resolutions 2253 and 2254 concerning Israel’s measures to annex Jerusalem, reaffirms “the principle that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible”, notes “the non-compliance by Israel” of the recalled resolutions, deplores Israel’s failure to respect the resolutions, confirms that Israel’s actions “are totally invalid”, and urgently calls on Israel to rescind its measures and take “no further steps in the occupied section of Jerusalem” to change the status of the city.

Res. 313 (Feb. 28, 1972) – “Demands that Israel immediately desist and refrain from any ground and air military action against Lebanon and forthwith withdraw all its military forces from Lebanese territory.”

Res. 316 (Jun. 26, 1972) – Deplores “the tragic loss of life resulting from all acts of violence”, expresses grave concern “at Israel’s failure to comply with Security Council resolutions” 262, 270, 280, 285, and 313 “calling on Israel to desist forthwith from any violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon”, calls on Israel to abide by the resolutions, and condemns “the repeated attacks of Israeli forces on Lebanese territory and population in violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and Israel’s obligations thereunder”.

Res. 317 (Jul. 21, 1972) – Notes resolution 316, deplores the fact that Israel had not yet released “Syrian and Lebanese military and security personnel abducted by Israeli armed forces from Lebanese territory” on June 21, 1972, and calls on Israel to release the prisoners.

Res. 332 (Apr. 21, 1972) – “Condemns the repeated military attacks conducted by Israel against Lebanon and Israel’s violation of Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty” in violation of the U.N. Charter, the armistice agreement, and cease-fire resolutions.

Res. 337 (Aug. 15, 1972) – Notes “the violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” by Israel “and the hijacking, by the Israeli air force, of a Lebanese civilian airliner on lease to Iraqi Airways”, expresses grave concern “that such an act carried out by Israel, a Member of the United Nations, constitutes a serious interference with international civil aviation and a violation of the Charter of the United Nations”, recognizes “that such an act could jeopardize the lives and safety of passengers and crew and violates the provisions of international conventions safeguarding civil aviation”, condemns Israel “for violating Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and for the forcible diversion and seizure by the Israeli air force of a Lebanese airliner from Lebanon’s air space”, and considers that Israel’s actions constitute a violation of the armistice agreement, cease-fire resolutions, the U.N. Charter, “the international conventions on civil aviation and the principles of international law and morality”.

Res. 347 (Apr. 24, 1974) – “Condemns Israel’s violation of Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and calls once more on the Government of Israel to refrain from further military actions and threats against Lebanon”, and calls on Israel “to release and return to Lebanon the abducted Lebanese civilians”.

Res. 425 (Mar. 19, 1978) – “Calls for strict respect for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally recognized boundaries”, and “Calls upon Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory”.

Res. 427 (May 3, 1978) – “Calls upon Israel to complete its withdrawal from all Lebanese territory without any further delay”.

Res. 446 (Mar. 22, 1979) – Affirms “once more that the Fourth Geneva Convention … is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, “Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East”, “Strongly deplores the failure of Israel to abide by” resolutions 237, 252, and 298, and General Assembly resolutions 2253 and 2254, and calls on Israel “as the occupying Power” to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention, to “rescind its previous measures and to desist from any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories”.

Res. 450 (Jun. 14, 1979) – “Strongly deplores acts of violence against Lebanon that have led to the displacement of civilians, including Palestinians, and brought about destruction and loss of innocent lives”, and calls on Israel to cease actions against Lebanon, “in particular its incursions into Lebanon and the assistance it continues to lend to irresponsible armed groups”.

Res. 452 (Jul. 20, 1979) – Strongly deplores “the lack of co-operation of Israel” with the Security Council Commission “established under resolution 446 (1979) to examine the situation relating to settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem”, considers “that the policy of Israel in establishing settlements in the occupied Arab territories has no legal validity and constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”, expresses deep concern at Israel’s policy of constructing settlements “in the occupied Arab territories, including Jerusalem, and its consequences for the local Arab and Palestinian population”, and calls on Israel to cease such activities.

Res. 465 (Mar. 1, 1980) – Strongly deplores Israel’s refusal to co-operate with the Security Council Commission, regrets Israel’s “formal rejection of” resolutions 446 and 452, deplores Israel’s decision “to officially support Israeli settlement” in the occupied territories, expresses deep concern over Israel’s settlement policy “and its consequences for the local Arab and Palestinian population”, “Strongly deplores the decision of Israel to prohibit the free travel” of the mayor of Hebron “to appear before the Security Council”, and “Determines that all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”.

Res. 467 (Apr. 24, 1980) – “Condemns all actions contrary to” resolutions 425, 426, 427, 434, 444, 450, and 459 “and, in particular, strongly deplores” any “violation of Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “Israel’s military intervention into Lebanon”.

Res. 468 (May 8, 1980) – Expresses deep concern “at the expulsion by the Israeli military occupation authorities of the Mayors of Hebron and Halhoul and the Sharia Judge of Hebron” and “Calls upon the Government of Israel as occupying Power to rescind these illegal measures and facilitate the immediate return of the expelled Palestinian leaders so that they can resume the functions for which they were elected and appointed”.

Res. 469 (May 20, 1980) – Recalls the Fourth Geneva Convention “and in particular article 1, which reads ‘The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances,’ and article 49, which reads ‘Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from the occupied territory to the territory of the occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive”, “Strongly deplores the failure of the Government of Israel to implement Security Council resolution 468”, “Calls again upon the Government of Israel, as occupying Power, to rescind the illegal measures taken by the Israeli military occupation authorities in expelling the Mayors of Hebron and Halhoul and the Sharis Judge of Hebron, and to facilitate the immediate return of the expelled Palestinian leaders, so that they can resume their functions for which they were elected and appointed”.

Res. 471 (Jun. 5, 1980) – Recalls “once again” the Fourth Geneva Convention, “and in particular article 27, which reads, ‘ Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons… They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof…’”, reaffirms the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention “to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, expresses deep concern “that the Jewish settlers in the occupied Arab territories are allowed to carry arms, thus enabling them to perpetrate crimes against the civilian Arab population”, “Condemns the assassination attempts against the Mayors of Nablus, Ramallah and Al Bireh and calls for the immediate apprehension and prosecution of the perpetrators of these crimes”, “Expresses deep concern that Israel, as the occupying Power, has failed to provide adequate protection to the civilian population in the occupied territories in conformity with the provisions of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”, calls on Israel “to provide the victims with adequate compensation for the damage suffered as a result of these crimes”, “Calls again upon the government of Israel to respect and to comply with the provisions of” the Fourth Geneva Convention and “the relevant resolutions of the Security Council”, “Calls once again upon all States not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically in connexion [sic] with settlements in the occupied territories”, “Reaffirms the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”.

Res. 476 (Jun. 30, 1980) – Reaffirms that “the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible”, deplores “the persistence of Israel, in changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and the status of the Holy City of Jerusalem”, expresses grave concern “over the legislative steps initiated in the Israeli Knesset with the aim of changing the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem”, reaffirms “the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, “Strongly deplores the continued refusal of Israel, the occupying Power, to comply with the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly”, “Reconfirms that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which purport to later the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”, “Reiterates that all such measures … are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with the relevant resolutions of the Security Council”, and “Urgently calls on Israel, the occupying Power, to abide by this and previous Security Council resolutions and to desist forthwith from persisting in the policy and measures affecting the character and status of the Holy city of Jerusalem”.

Res. 478 (Aug. 20, 1980) – Reaffirms “again that the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible”, notes “that Israel has not complied with resolution 476”, “Censures in the strongest terms the enactment by Israel of the ‘basic law’ on Jerusalem and the refusal to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions”, “Affirms that the enactment of the ‘basic law’ by Israel constitutes a violation of international law”, “Determines that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and in particular the recent ‘basic law’ on Jerusalem, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith”.

Res. 484 (Dec. 19, 1980) – Expresses “grave concern at the expulsion by Israel of the Mayor of Hebron and the Mayor of Halhoul”, “Reaffirms the applicability of” the Fourth Geneva Convention “to all the Arab territories occupied by Israel in 1967”, “Calls upon Israel, the occupying Power, to adhere to the provisions of the Convention”, and “Declares it imperative that the Mayor of Hebron and the Mayor of Halhoul be enabled to return to their homes and resume their responsibilities”.

Res. 487 (Jun. 19, 1981) – Expresses full awareness “of the fact that Iraq has been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since it came into force in 1970, that in accordance with that Treaty Iraq has accepted IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear activities, and that the Agency has testified that these safeguards have been satisfactorily applied to date”, notes “furthermore that Israel has not adhered to the non-proliferation Treaty”, expresses deep concern “about the danger to international peace and security created by the premeditated Israeli air attack on Iraqi nuclear installations on 7 June 1981, which could at any time explode the situation in the area, with grave consequences for the vital interests of all States”, “Strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct”, “Further considers that the said attack constitutes a serious threat to the entire IAEA safeguards regime which is the foundation of the non-proliferation Treaty”, “Fully recognizes the inalienable sovereign right of Iraq, and all other States, especially the developing countries, to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development to develop their economy and industry for peaceful purposes in accordance with their present and future needs and consistent with the internationally accepted objectives of preventing nuclear-weapons proliferation”, and “Calls upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards”.

Res. 497 (Dec. 17, 1981) – Reaffirms “that the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible, in accordance with the United Nations Charter, the principles of international law, and relevant Security Council resolutions”, “Decides that the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect”, “Demands that Israel, the occupying Power, should rescind forthwith its decision”, and “Determines that all the provisions of the” Fourth Geneva Convention “continue to apply to the Syrian territory occupied by Israel since June 1967”.

Res. 501 (Feb. 25, 1982) – Reaffirms resolution 425 calling upon Israel to cease its military action against Lebanon.

Res. 509 ( Jun. 6, 1982) – “Demands that Israel withdraw all its military forces forthwith and unconditionally to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon”.

Res. 515 (Jul. 29, 1982) – “Demands that the Government of Israel lift immediately the blockade of the city of Beirut in order to permit the dispatch of supplies to meet the urgent needs of the civilian population and allow the distribution of aid provided by United Nations agencies and by non-governmental organizations, particularly the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)”.

Res. 517 (Aug. 4, 1982) – Expresses deep shock and alarm “by the deplorable consequences of the Israeli invasion of Beirut on 3 August 1982”, “Confirms once again its demand for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon”, and “Censures Israel for its failure to comply with” resolutions 508, 509, 512, 513, 515, and 516.

Res. 518 (Aug. 12, 1982) – “Demands that Israel and all parties to the conflict observe strictly the terms of Security Council resolutions relevant to the immediate cessation of all military activities within Lebanon and, particularly, in and around Beirut”, “Demands the immediate lifting of all restrictions on the city of Beirut in order to permit the free entry of supplies to meet the urgent needs of the civilian population in Beirut”.

Res. 520 (Sep. 17, 1982) – “Condemns the recent Israeli incursions into Beirut in violation of the cease-fire agreements and of Security Council resolutions”, and “Demands an immediate return to the positions occupied by Israel before” September 15, 1982 “as a first step towards the full implementation of Security Council resolutions”.

Res. 521 (Sep. 19, 1982) – “Condemns the criminal massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut” in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Res. 573 (Oct. 4, 1985) – “Condemns vigorously the act of armed aggression perpetrated by Israel against Tunisian territory in flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, international law and norms of conduct”.

Res. 592 (Dec. 8, 1986) – Reaffirms that the Fourth Geneva Convention “is applicable to the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, and “Strongly deplores the opening of fire by the Israeli army resulting in the death and the wounding of defenceless students”.

Res. 605 (Dec. 22, 1987) – “Strongly deplores those policies and practices of Israel, the occupying Power, which violate the human rights of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and in particular the opening of fire by the Israeli army, resulting in the killing and wounding of defenceless Palestinian civilians”, and reaffirms the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention “to the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”.

Res. 607 (Jan. 5, 1988) – Expresses “grave concern over the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories”, notes “the decision of Israel, the occupying Power, to ‘continue the deportation’ of Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories”, “Reaffirms once again” the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention “to Palestinian and other Arab territories, occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, “Calls upon Israel to refrain from deporting any Palestinian civilians from the occupied territories”, and “Strongly requests Israel, the occupying Power, to abide by its obligations arising from the Convention”.

Res. 608 (Jan. 14, 1988) – Reaffirms resolution 607, expresses “deep regret that Israel, the occupying Power, has, in defiance of that resolution, deported Palestinian civilians”, and “Calls upon Israel to rescind the order to deport Palestinian civilians and to ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied Palestinian territories of those already deported”.

Res. 611 (Apr. 25, 1988) – Notes “with concern that the aggression perpetrated” by Israelis on April 16, 1988 “in the locality of Sidi Bou Said”, Tunisia, “has caused loss of human life, particularly the assassination of Mr. Khalil El Wazir”, and “Condemns vigorously the aggression perpetrated … against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Tunisia in flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, international law and norms of conduct”.

Res. 636 (Jul. 6, 1989) – Reaffirms resolutions 607 and 608, notes “that Israel, the occupying Power, has once again, in defiance of those resolutions, deported eight Palestinian civilians on 29 June 1989”, Expresses deep regret “the continuing deportation by Israel, the occupying Power, of Palestinian civilians”, “Calls upon Israel to ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied Palestinian territories of those deported and to desist forthwith from deporting any other Palestinian civilians”, and “Reaffirms that” the Fourth Geneva Convention “is applicable to the Palestinian territories, occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem, and to other occupied Arab territories”.

Res. 641 (Aug. 30, 1989) – Reaffirms resolutions 607, 608, and 636, notes that Israel “has once again, in defiance of those resolutions, deported five Palestinian civilians on 27 August 1989”, and “Deplores the continuing deportation by Israel, the occupying Power, of Palestinian civilians”.

Res. 672 (Oct. 12, 1990) – “Expresses alarm at the violence which took place” on October 8, 1990, “at the Al Haram al Shareef and other Holy Places of Jerusalem resulting in over twenty Palestinian deaths and to the injury of more than one hundred and fifty people, including Palestinian civilians and innocent worshippers”, “Condemns especially the acts of violence committed by the Israeli forces resulting in injuries and loss of human life”, and “Requests, in connection with the decision of the Secretary-General to send a mission to the region, which the Council welcomes, that he submit a report to it before the end of October 1990 containing his findings and conclusions and that he use as appropriate all the resources of the United Nations in the region in carrying out the mission.”

Res. 673 (Oct. 24, 1990) – “Deplores the refusal of the Israeli Government to receive the mission of the Secretary-General to the region”, and “Urges the Israeli Government to reconsider its decision and insists that it comply fully with resolution 672 (1990) and to permit the mission of the Secretary-General to proceed in keeping with its purpose”.

Res. 681 (Dec. 20, 1990) – Reaffirms “the obligations of Member States under the United Nations Charter”, reaffirms “also the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, expresses alarm “by the decision of the Government of Israel to deport four Palestinians from the occupied territories in contravention of its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention” in contravention to resolutions 607, 608, 636, and 641, “Expresses its grave concern over the rejection by Israel of Security Council resolutions” 672 and 673, and “Deplores the decision by the Government of Israel, the occupying Power, to resume deportations of Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories”.

Res. 694 (May 24, 1991) – Reaffirms resolution 681 calling on Israel to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention, notes “with deep concern and consternation that Israel has, in violation of its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and acting in opposition to relevant Security Council resolutions, and to the detriment of efforts to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, deported four Palestinian civilians” on May 18, 1991, “Declares that the action of the Israeli authorities of deporting four Palestinians … is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention …, which is applicable to all the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, and “Deplores this action and reiterates that Israel, the occupying Power, refrain from deporting any Palestinian civilian from the occupied territories and ensure the safe and immediate return of all those deported”.

Res. 726 (Jan. 6, 1992) – Recalls resolutions 607, 608, 636, 641, and 694 calling on Israel to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention, “Strongly condemns the decision of Israel, the occupying Power, to resume deportations of Palestinian civilians”, “Reaffirms the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention … to all the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem”, and “requests Israel, the occupying Power, to ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied territories of all those deported”.

Res. 799 (Dec. 18, 1992) – Reaffirms resolutions 607, 608, 636, 641, 681, 694, and 726 calling on Israel to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention, notes “with deep concern that Israel, the occupying Power, in contravention of its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention …, deported to Lebanon” on December 17, 1992 “hundreds of Palestinian civilians from the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jersualem”, “Strongly condemns the action taken by Israel, the occupying Power, to deport hundreds of Palestinian civilians, and expresses its firm opposition to any such deportation by Israel”, “Reaffirms the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention … to all the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem, and affirms that deportation of civilians constitutes a contravention of its obligations under the Convention”, and “Demands that Israel, the occupying Power, ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied territories of all those deported”.

Res. 904 (Mar. 18, 1994) – Expresses shock at “the appalling massacre committed against Palestinian worshippers in the Mosque of Ibrahim in Hebron” on February 25, 1994 by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein “during the holy month of Ramadan”, expresses grave concern with “the consequent Palestinian casualties in the occupied Palestinian territory as a result of the massacre, which underlines the need to provide protection and security for the Palestinian people”, notes “the condemnation of this massacre by the entire international community”, “Strongly condemns the massacre in Hebron and its aftermath which took the lives of more than fifty Palestinian civilians and injured several hundred others”, and “Calls upon Israel, the occupying Power, to continue to take and implement measures, including, inter alia, confiscation of arms, with the aim of preventing illegal acts of violence by Israeli settlers”.

Res. 1073 (Sep. 28, 1996) – Expresses “deep concern about the tragic events in Jerusalem and the areas of Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and the Gaza Strip, which resulted in a high number of deaths and injuries among the Palestinian civilians, and concerned also about the clashes between the Israeli army and the Palestinian police and the casualties on both sides”, and “Calls for the safety and protection for Palestinian civilians to be ensured”.

Res. 1322 (Oct. 7, 2000) – Expresses deep concern “by the tragic events that have taken place” since September 28, 2000 “that have led to numerous deaths and injuries, mostly among Palestinians”, “Deplores the provocation carried out at Al-Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem” on September 28, 2000 “and the subsequent violence there and at other Holy Places, as well as in other areas throughout the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, resulting in over 80 Palestinian deaths and many other casualties”, “Condemns acts of violence, especially the excessive use of force against Palestinians, resulting in injury and loss of human life”, and “Calls upon Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and its responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention”.

Res. 1402 (Mar. 30, 2002) – Expresses grave concern “at the further deterioration of the situation, including the recent suicide bombings in Israel and the military attack against the headquarters of the president of the Palestinian Authority”, “Calls upon both parties to move immediately to a meaningful cease-fire” and “calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah”.

Res. 1403 (Apr. 4, 2002) – Expresses grave concern “at the further deterioration of the situation on the ground” and “Demands the implementation of its resolution 1402 (2002) without delay”.

Res. 1405 (Apr. 19, 2002) – Expresses concern for “the dire humanitarian situation of the Palestinian civilian population, in particular reports from the Jenin refugee camp of an unknown number of deaths and destruction”, calls for “the lifting of restrictions imposed, in particular in Jenin, on the operations of humanitarian organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East”, and “Emphasizes the urgency of access of medical and humanitarian organizations to the Palestinian civilian population”.

Res. 1435 (Sep. 24, 2002) – Expresses grave concern “at the reoccupation of the headquarters of the President of the Palestinian Authority in the City of Ramallah that took place” on September 19, 2002, demands “its immediate end”, expresses alarm “at the reoccupation of Palestinian cities as well as the severe restrictions imposed on the freedom of movement of persons and goods, and gravely concerned at the humanitarian crisis being faced by the Palestinian people”, reiterates “the need for respect in all circumstances of international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”, “Demands that Israel immediately cease measures in and around Ramallah including the destruction of Palestinian civilian and security infrastructure”, and “Demands also the expeditious withdrawal of the Israeli occupying forces from Palestinian cities towards the return to the positions held prior to September 2000”.

Res. 1544 (May 19, 2004) – Reaffirms resolutions 242, 338, 446, 1322, 1397, 1402, 1405, 1435, and 1515, reiterates “the obligation of Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”, calls “on Israel to address its security needs within the boundaries of international law”, expresses “grave concern at the continued deterioration of the situation on the ground in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967”, condemns “the killing of Palestinian civilians that took place in the Rafah area”, expresses grave concern “by the recent demolition of homes committed by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Rafah refugee camp”, reaffirms “its support for the Road Map, endorsed in resolution 1515”, “Calls on Israel to respect its obligations under international humanitarian law, and insists, in particular, on its obligation not to undertake demolition of homes contrary to that law”, and “Calls on both parties to immediately implement their obligations under the Road Map”.

Res. 1701 (Aug. 11, 2006) – Expresses “its utmost concern at the continuing escalation of hostilities in Lebanon and in Israel” that “has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries” and “extensive damage to civilian infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons”, and “Calls for a full cessation of hostilities” including “the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations”.

Res. 1860 (Jan. 8, 2009) – Expresses “grave concern at the escalation of violence and the deterioration of the situation, in particular the resulting heavy civilian casualties since the refusal to extend the period of calm”, expresses “grave concern also at the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza”, “calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza”, “Calls for the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”, and “Condemns all violence and hostilities directed against civilians and all acts of terrorism”.

This includes only those killed directly by military attacks. The actual casualty figure from Israel’s policies towards Gaza, including the number of deaths attributable to its ongoing siege of the territory, is unknown.

The official pretext for the operation given by Israel and parroted unquestioningly in the Western media is that Israel had to respond with force as an act of self-defense against to an onslaught of rocket attacks against southern Israel from Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.

Even if this were true, nations acting in self-defense against armed attacks must respect international law designed to protect civilians in time of war. Israel flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties governing the use of force during the course of its operation, committing numerous war crimes.

But the stated pretext itself does not stand up to scrutiny. Six months prior to the assault on Gaza, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Under the terms of the truce agreement, Hamas would end its rocket attacks against Israel and Israel would similarly cease attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and lift its siege on the territory.

Hamas, for its part, lived up to its obligations under the truce. It fired no rockets into Israel and actively pressured other groups to similarly refrain from launching attacks.

Israel, on the other hand, never lived up to its obligations under the truce. From the beginning, Israel declared a “security zone” on Gaza’s side of the border and Israeli soldiers repeatedly violated the truce by firing at Palestinians, guilty of merely trying to access their own land.

Israel also never eased its siege of Gaza. Israel controlled (and continues to control) the borders of Gaza, its airspace, and its coast, and implementing a near total blockade, including preventing by force the delivery of humanitarian goods into the territory.

Rather than easing the siege, Israel continued to let in only minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies (a practice that also continues today), just enough to prevent a total humanitarian catastrophe, thus keeping the population of Gaza in a state of despair and on the verge of human limits, with untold consequences on the health and mental well-being of the Palestinians.

The complete breakdown of the truce agreement came on November 4, when Israel launched airstrikes and a ground incursion into Gaza, killing four Palestinians. This violation of the cease-fire resulted in its effective undoing.

Israel’s official reason for the attack was its claim that militants were digging a tunnel under the border. The more credible explanation, however, was that Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into launching rockets and thus to claim a pretext for the full-scale military assault that Israel had, at that time, by its own account, already been planning.

Indeed, from the beginning of the truce, it appeared Israel’s intent was to provoke a violent response in order claim a pretext for its military assault. While Hamas scrupulously observed the cease-fire, Israel took deliberate actions to undermine it. Besides those already noted, Israel also stepped up operations against Palestinians in the West Bank, such as the assassination of members of Islamic Jihad shortly after the announcement of the truce.

Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza responded to that incident by firing rockets into Israel, but Hamas criticized the attacks and pressured Islamic Jihad to cease, including with the threat of arrests, and the tenuous truce continued to hold, for a time.

A greater and more provocative action was necessary in order to completely undermine the truce, and Israel’s November 4 attack proved to be that action. From that day forward, the so-called “cease-fire” consisted of tit-for-tat attacks on a daily basis, with Israel launching repeated attacks on Gaza and Hamas and other militant groups launching rockets into Israel.

Israel had achieved the pretext it was looking for in order to gain the political cover necessary to wage its assault on the civilian population of Gaza.

And make no mistake; Operation Cast Lead was a war on a civilian population, an extremely murderous act of collective punishment.

The death toll itself stands as an undeniable testament to that, but the manner in which Israel waged its operation also leaves no doubt as to its true objective.

As already noted, Israel claims its operation was designed to end rocket attacks. In truth, it was Israel that deliberately violated and undermined the truce.

Israel also claims its operation was aimed at militants. As evidence of its respect for international law and extraordinary efforts to prevent the loss of innocent life, Israel notes the fact that it dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza prior to its operations warning civilians to flee the oncoming assault.

But the fact is this is not evidence of Israel’s respect for innocent life, but rather strong evidence that its killing of civilians was deliberate and intended. For starters, civilians, told to flee, had nowhere to go. No place in Gaza was safe from Israel’s attacks. Furthermore, in some cases civilians were told to go to city centers, and, after many had done so, those same locations were then purposefully bombed by Israel.

Israel’s claimed respect for innocent life is also belied by its means of indiscriminate warfare. Israel heavily bombarded civilian population centers. It deliberately and systematically targeted civilian locations with protected status under international law, including schools and hospitals.

Israel also used indiscriminate weaponry, including white phosphorus munitions. The use of white phosphorus is permitted under international law for illuminating the battlefield or creating smokescreens. However, its use as an incendiary weapon (it is also a chemical weapon, in that its incendiary effect is the result of a chemical reaction) is a violation of international law and a war crime, particularly when used indiscriminately against populated areas and civilian locations such as schools, as it was in Gaza.

Moreover, Israel, demonstrated extreme contempt for and defiance to the United Nations and the international community by deliberately targeting U.N. sites within Gaza. It targeted U.N. clinics, schools, and other compounds.

Israel attacked humanitarian convoys attempting to deliver much needed supplies to the desperate people of Gaza, and in other cases prevented medical teams, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from reaching victims of its assault, also a war crime.

Israel also deliberately targeted a U.N. warehouse where humanitarian supplies were being stored, attacking the site with white phosphorus munitions, resulting in the warehouse and goods inside catching fire and nearly burning to the ground.

All of these actions by Israel, all well documented and incontrovertible, constitute grave war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties of international law.

The U.S. Role

Israel’s contempt for innocent life, for the international community, and for international law is perhaps matched only by the U.S. willingness to support Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Simply stated, without U.S. support, none of this could go on.

The U.S. supports Israel financially. Aid to Israel is on the order of $3 billion a year. This money is given, unlike aid to other countries, with no strings attached, and with little to no oversight about how it is to be used.

Even if it is not used directly to finance Israeli policies and activities in violation of international law, such as its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, construction of settlements in the West Bank, construction of a its “separation barrier” within the West Bank, destruction of Palestinian homes and other property, killing of Palestinian civilians, etc., U.S. financial support allows Israel to free up other funding for these illegal activities. It effectively rewards Israel for criminal actions.

The U.S. supports Israel militarily. And military equipment provided by the U.S. is used by Israel for actions constituting war crimes under international law. The massacre in Gaza was carried out with the help of U.S.-provided Apache helicopter gunships, U.S.-provided F-16 fighter bombers, and U.S.-provided munitions, including white phosphorus and cluster munitions.

This military support to Israel is not only a violation of international law and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on member states not to provide material support for Israeli crimes, but it is also a violation of U.S. law. Besides international treaties such as the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions constituting “the supreme Law of the Land” under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law forbids the exporting of military equipment to countries that routinely violate international law and commit offenses against human rights. Yet U.S. military support for Israel continues unabated.

The U.S. supports Israel diplomatically. The principle means by which the U.S. does so is through the use of its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. While Israel was using U.S. military hardware to murder innocent Palestinians, the U.S. was actively trying to stall a cease-fire resolution to give Israel more time to carry out its assault. A watered-down version of the resolution was finally found acceptable to the U.S., which reportedly was ready to vote in favor, but after receiving a call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, while not going so far as to cast a veto, instead abstained rather than casting a vote for a resolution rightfully critical of Israel.

The Role of the U.S. Media

The U.S. mainstream corporate media also play a significant role in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and reporting on Operation Cast Lead provides a useful case study into the nature of its role. To describe U.S. media accounts of Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza as “biased” would be a sore understatement.

Take the reporting of the New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record” reporting “all the news that’s fit to print”. Arguably the most widely read and important newspaper in the world, what the Times reports is regularly picked up by other major media, with the newspaper effectively serving as a trend-setter for the news Americans consume. Its impact on the perceptions Americans have of conflicts such as Israel’s war on the civilian population of Gaza is enormous.

The New York Times’ reporting on Israel’s assault was reminiscent of its reporting on Iraq with respect to that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, prior to the initiation of the U.S. war of aggression against that country based on such lies and deceptions as then reported matter-of-factly by the Times.

Propaganda devices employed by the Times in this case, as in the case of Iraq, included the use of euphemisms and the selective reporting of facts.

For instance, although the Times did report initially on Israel’s November 4 violation of the truce, it exercised selective amnesia in its subsequent reporting and described only the “breakdown” of the cease-fire and thus failing to inform readers of the single identifiable causal factor for that “breakdown”.

Moreover, the Times accepted without scrutiny and parroted the official line from Israeli officials that its operation was launched in response to rocket attacks and the violation by Hamas of the truce, thus implicitly and falsely attributing the failure of the cease-fire to its violation by Hamas.

The Times repeatedly and consistently downplayed the true nature of Israel’s assault on Gaza. In one notable example, the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner wrote in an article that Palestinians had “claimed” that Israel was using white phosphorus munitions, employing this propaganda device to intentionally cast doubt in the mind of the reader as to the veracity of the so-called “claim”.

The truth is that Bronner knew perfectly well this was not a “claim” but a known fact. He could just as well have written at that time that human rights organizations had criticized Israel for its known use of white phosphorus, rather than attributing it as mere a Palestinian “claim”.

By this time, although reporters were banned from entering Gaza, there was no question that Israel was doing so, including proof in photographs showing the unmistakable smoke trails and incendiary projectiles of white phosphorus being used over residential neighborhoods.

Remarkably, the same day Bronner’s article appeared, another article also appeared, written by his Palestinian colleague Taghreed El-Khodary, the Times’ only correspondent actually reporting from inside of Gaza, who reported on finding white phosphorus casings with markings showing that they were U.S.-made.

In El-Khodary’s reports from Gaza, one could find a more reliable account of what was actually happening on the ground, but even her articles were heavily edited and/or rewritten by the Times’ editorial staff, and it was the dishonest and propagandistic reporting of Bronner and his Jerusalem-based British-Israeli colleague Isabel Kershner that generally typified the nature of the Times’ reporting on the massacre.

Countless other examples abound, but it’s beyond the scope of this article and would be superfluous to continue to list them.

The Role of the American People

In short, Americans reading about the violence in U.S. newspapers or watching it on TV received a heavily distorted account of what was going down.

But this is no excuse for ignorance. The facts are known and available to every American with access to the internet. One may turn to the healthy alternative media in the U.S. One may turn to international media sources, including Israeli sources like the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, or Ynet (Yedioth Ahronoth online). One may turn to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, or the Israeli group B’tselem.

One may also turn to the report of the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry into the violence, headed up by the respected international jurist Richard Goldstone, who himself happens to be Jewish (a fact worthy of mention due to Israeli and U.S. charges that the report is biased; in another example of U.S. diplomatic support for Israeli crimes, the U.S. has actively sought to block implementation of its recommendations or any Security Council follow-up actions).

Goldstone himself has concluded that Israel’s actions were targeted at the civilian population of Gaza as an act of collective punishment, and his conclusion is well supported by his final report and the evidence it presents.

The facts are beyond dispute. The conclusions are obvious and incontrovertible. It is well past time that the American people wake up to the realities on the ground in the Palestinian territories. Many Americans already demonstrate the modicum of moral integrity required to speak out against their government’s support for Israeli crimes, but it is not enough.

Without massive public opposition to the U.S. policy of supporting Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, the crimes will continue. Israel will continue to act with impunity and continue to violate international law under U.S. cover.

The fact of the matter is that the American people have more power in their hands than any other body to bring about an end to the violence and to create the conditions for a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East.

Americans themselves may not realize this truth, but the international community well recognizes it. And the world is watching, and waiting.

Will the American people continue to turn their heads away and wash their collective hands of the affair, deceiving themselves into believing they have no responsibility for what goes on “over there” and that they have no influence to change things, anyway?

Or will the American people cast away ignorance and apathy and demonstrate intellectual honesty, moral integrity, compassion, and strength of will by standing up and acting to pressure their government to change its policies?

The answer to these questions remains to be seen. Only time will tell. In the meantime, the Palestinian people continue pay the price for the willingness of Americans to allow their government to pursue criminal policies contrary to their own interests and antithetical to the very principles of justice and humanity every American would like to think their country stands for.

In fact, Iran has said it is still open to discussion with the U.S. about its nuclear program, but that if meaningful dialogue is to continue, the threats of sanctions and military aggression must first cease.

The U.S., however, continues to threaten yet further sanctions, while also insisting that the threat of force must remain “on the table” — a threat of aggression that itself violates the U.N. Charter, which forbids member nations from threatening the use of force as a tool for leverage in international relations.

Kuperman’s reason for why Obama should be happy is that the deal, under which Iran would export uranium to Russia, which would enrich it to 20 percent (not the 90 percent required for weapons-grade uranium) and return it as fuel rods for use in Tehran’s research reactor, “was ill conceived from the start” since Iran would “thus be rewarded with much-coveted reactor fuel despite violating international law.”

His reference is to U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran halt its uranium enrichment activities. The problem with these resolutions, as Iran is not hesitant to point out, is that they themselves directly violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which clearly states that parties to the treaty have an “inalienable” right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and that the international community may take no action prejudicial towards that right.

The U.N. resolutions, needless to say, prejudice that “inalienable” right, particularly given the fact that there is no credible evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program – as both the U.S. intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have pointed out.

In other words, under U.S. influence, the Security Council in this case has acted as a rogue body itself in violation of relevant treaties constituting international law and the very Charter under which it ostensibly operates.

Iran, on the other hand, remains in compliance with the terms of the NPT and is meeting its obligations in allowing the IAEA to monitor and inspect its nuclear program, despite much talk to the contrary.

Take the most recent example, the charge that Iran’s uranium enrichment facility near Qom, still under construction, was a violation of its obligation to declare any such facility prior to the beginning of construction. We’re told that Iran agreed to an updated version of its safeguards agreement with the IAEA containing a clause specifying that obligation.

What we’re not told is that at that time, Iran had agreed to implement the terms of the Additional Protocol and revised safeguards agreement on a strictly voluntary basis. The voluntary nature of Iran’s implementation of these measures was explicitly, and in writing (see the so-called Paris Agreement), recognized by the IAEA. Iran was under no legal obligation to do so and had done so simply as a “confidence-building measure”.

In return, Iran got nothing but further threats of sanctions and bombing. So it ended its voluntary observance of measures above and beyond that which was legally required of it.

The fact is that Iran has never ratified the revised safeguards agreement, as would be required for the revisions to be legally binding upon Iran. Under the safeguards agreement Iran has formally and legally obligated itself to, it need only declare such facilities six months prior to the introduction of nuclear material (i.e., introduction of uranium into enrichment centrifuges), which is exactly what Iran did in declaring the site several months ago.

In response to meeting its obligations under its safeguards agreement, the West responded by declaring that the “secret” site (an adjective irreconcilable with the fact Iran voluntarily declared it to the IAEA, but obligatorily used in the media anyways) was evidence of Iran’s intentions to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Summarily dismissed was Iran’s quite credible explanation for the site it voluntarily disclosed, which was that it was attempting to diversify its uranium enrichment capabilities under the threat of certain countries to bomb their nuclear facilities.

The demonization and punishment of Iran for its compliance with its obligations under international law is not entirely unlike the charges against Iraq that it was in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding it disarm because it had not disarmed, when in fact it had disarmed, and when in fact there was no credible evidence that it still possessed stockpiles or was still in production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The IAEA, for its part, has continuously and consistently reported that it has verified Iran has diverted no nuclear materials towards a weapons program. Former Director General of the IAEA Mohammed ElBaradei, whose term ended just last month, has repeatedly said that there is no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons program. His successor, Yukiya Amano, has made the same observation.

Then, of course, there is the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from the U.S. intelligence community that stated Iran today has no nuclear weapons program, which according to Newsweek, is an assessment analysts still stand by. The NIE did claim that Iran once had such a program in the past, but that it ended it in 2003. The IAEA, on the other hand, recently issued a statement saying there is no evidence Iran ever had a weapons program.

Kuperman continues by suggesting that the goal of the international community should be to “compel” Iran “to halt its enrichment program”, which, he claims, the proposal to send its uranium abroad would not have done. It’s worth noting the fact that this is an explicit rejection of the NPT.

He adds, “In addition, the vast surplus of higher-enriched fuel Iran was to get under the deal would have permitted some to be diverted to its bomb program”, claiming that taking uranium from the fuel rods for further enrichment to weapons-grade “is a straightforward engineering task requiring at most a few weeks.”

The truth of the latter assertion aside, which is contrary to most reports on the subject and contrary to the whole supposed point of the deal, what’s notable here is the assumption that Iran has a “bomb program”, despite, as was the case with Iraq, the total lack of credible evidence to support the claim.

It’s enough in the mainstream corporate media simply to take Iran’s “bomb program” as a matter of faith. Evidence is simply not required, and it’s considered perfectly acceptable by the editors of the New York Times and other mainstream sources to print assumptions expressed as statements of fact.

Again, for those who don’t suffer from selective amnesia and aren’t prone to intentional ignorance, the kind of reporting we saw from the Times, et al., prior to the invasion of Iraq might perhaps serve as a lesson about the nature of the role U.S. corporate media play in “manufacturing consent” from the American public for U.S. foreign policies.

Kuperman next begs the question, “if the deal would have aided Iran’s bomb program, why did the United States propose it, and Iran reject it?” Oblivious to the fallacies underlying the question, his own answer is: “The main explanation on both sides is domestic politics.”

Obama simply wanted to “blunt Republican criticism that his multilateral approach was failing” and was seeking a short-term gain.

Iran, for its part, “rejected” the deal that, by Kuperman’s own account, would have helped it towards the presumed goal of achieving the bomb because “such a headlong sprint” towards that goal “is the one step most likely to provoke an international military response that could cripple the bomb program before it reaches fruition.”

In other words, while Israel regularly threatens that it won’t wait much longer for the U.S. to come to some agreement with Iran before it launches an attack against Iran’s nuclear sites that Iran’s possession of the bomb would surely deter, Iran is willing to pass up an offer that would constitute “a headlong sprint” towards such a deterrent because doing so could actually jeopardize the possibility of it obtaining the bomb, since if Iran accepted the deal ostensibly designed to prevent it from being able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, Israel would be even more likely to bomb their nuclear sites even sooner than if it Iran just rejects the proposal.

Truly, Kuperman has a dizzying intellect.

“In sum,” writes Kuperman, “the proposal would not have averted proliferation in the short run, because that risk always was low, but instead would have fostered it in the long run – a classic example of domestic politics undermining national security.”

In sum, Iran is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.

Thus, the bombing of Iran is a foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of the present U.S. policy towards Iran. This consequence, admittedly, might very well be disastrous, but the obvious solution – to alter U.S. policy – is simply inconceivable. A change of policy is off the table. The resort to violence is not.

It’s worth noting that Kuperman acknowledges that the “risk” of Iran obtaining the bomb anytime soon (assuming it actually is seeking it) “always was low”. This is an interesting admission given the tendency of Western media to portray Iran as being practically right on the verge of being able to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

Returning to Iran’s “rejection of the deal”, Kuperman suggests the so-called “rejection” was “likewise propelled by domestic politics – including last June’s fraudulent elections and longstanding fears of Western manipulation.”

The “fears of Western manipulation” is a valid enough observation, the fears warranted enough. But again, as with the presumption of an Iranian bomb program, it’s enough in U.S. mainstream media to assert the claim of “fraudulent elections” as fact, despite the spurious nature of the evidence for fraud and many strong indications that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad legitimately won, including polls conducted by Western organizations both prior to the vote and since showing strong support for his presidency.

Like the “rejection” of the deal, Kuperman goes on to repeat what has become another unquestioned part of the official narrative. Suggesting that President Ahmadinejad “initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran’s bomb program,” he adds, “But his domestic political opponents, whom he has tried to label as foreign agents, turned the tables by accusing him of surrendering Iran’s patrimony to the West.”

The possibility that Iran has not accepted the deal because it consists of an implicit rejection of their right to enrich uranium for themselves is, like the thought of changing U.S. policy, simply inconceivable.

The claim that Ahmadinejad “initially embraced the deal,” only to “renege,” has become standard. But the claim, though widely reported, cannot stand up to scrutiny based on the actual facts that have been reported about the talks. Every indication is that Ahmadinejad himself was open to the proposal, which he continues to be, on the condition that the West cease its threatening and aggressive posture towards Iran, and that the Iranian negotiators during the talks agreed with the proposal on principle, in anticipation of further talks, without formally accepting the deal – something, Iran has pointed out, the negotiators were given no authority to do.

This is part of a larger narrative in Western media in which the Iranian leadership is fractured and the regime in a state of crisis due to the enormity of the opposition to Ahmadinejad’s rule (part of the “fraudulent elections” narrative). While there are elements of truth to this story line, it’s chiefly a product of wishful thinking and the willingness of commentators to succumb to their own propaganda.

Take, for example, reporting on the massive gathering of people honoring the influential Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri upon his death just last week. The opposition, we were told, of whom Montazeri was a leader, effectively took over the rally and was able to turn it into a massive anti-regime protest. Evidence for this was given in the form of amateur videos apparently from cell phones posted to opposition websites showing close-up shots of protesters shouting anti-regime slogans and holding up anti-regime banners.

Wider video shots of the actual funeral march, however, showed only an enormous crowd solemnly and respectfully marching along with the casket, holding up only photos of the cleric, not anti-regime banners. (The London Times, a leading outlet for anti-Iran propaganda, acknowledges that, with no journalists in the country due to restrictions on foreign media operations, much of its reporting comes from anti-regime elements, but insists that its sources are trustworthy, essentially a “just trust us” assertion that depends upon the questionable trustworthiness of the Times itself as a source for news on Iran.)

“Under such domestic pressure, Mr. Ahmadinejad reneged”, claims Kuperman, and then “threatened to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 percent level.” Notice how remarks from Iranian leaders that Iran would do what it has an “inalienable” right to do as a party to the NPT is characterized by the verb “threatened”.

The underlying and familiar assumption is that the rules are set by Washington, not by treaties comprising the body of international law. A dubious enough assumption, but unquestionable in the mainstream.

Iran’s “rejection” of the proposal shows that it “cannot make even temporary concessions on its bomb program”, and therefore, “Since peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work,” – (more the stick than the carrot) – “and an invasion would be foolhardy, the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

There are numerous and obvious other options: to assume that evidence should be required of an Iranian nuclear program rather than establishing confrontational and aggressive policies based on the assumption that this is so; to cease from violating international law with threats of military aggression; to cease from deliberately isolating and provoking Iran and instead meaningfully engaging the country in a dialogue that actually recognizes Iran’s rights under the NPT; to live up to the additional obligation under the NPT for the U.S. and other nuclear-armed countries to provide member nations with nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, etc.

But it is simply inconceivable that mainstream sources like the Times would actually find “fit to print” such elementary alternatives.

Without reading further, the conclusion Kuperman would like his readers to draw (and here the headline, “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran,” is relevant) is clear: obviously, we cannot acquiesce to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons; therefore, the only logical choice is to bomb Iran.

To underscore the unacceptability of Iran obtaining the bomb, Kuperman employs a theme that should not be unfamiliar to Americans: “If Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal,” he writes, “the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon.”

He draws just short of saying that if we don’t bomb Iran, the consequences could come “in the form of a mushroom cloud,” the familiar official refrain prior to the invasion of Iraq – which had no nuclear program at all, much less a weaponized one (Kuperman states further in the article that this fact “eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion.” U.S. intelligence analysts, we are apparently supposed to believe, never bothered themselves to read IAEA reports noting that the agency had completely dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program by the mid-90s).

And so we must bomb Iran. Now, “admittedly, aerial bombing might not work.” It could “backfire” by “undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region.”

All three are credible consequences widely predicted among analysts. Iran may not have a nuclear weapons program now, but if it is bombed, the likelihood that it would withdraw from the NPT, move its nuclear weapons program underground, and begin work towards obtaining a nuclear deterrent to further such attacks would be increased in no inconsiderable measure.

Again, Iraq provides a useful lesson. It was a direct consequence of Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, according to the U.S.’s own intelligence assessments, that prompted Saddam Hussein to begin pursuing his nuclear program clandestinely and also to begin his pursuit to obtain nuclear weapons.

Kuperman actually mentions the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor to support his assertion that bombing Iran – the very thing he advocates – might actually result in Iran “accelerating” efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon, but he obscures the obvious lesson to be had from it by suggesting an opposite and much more dubious conclusion: that the bombing slowed down, rather than accelerated, Saddam’s efforts to obtain the bomb.

In other words, bombing Iran might predictably and admittedly result in the very thing the bombing would ostensibly be aimed at preventing. The obvious corollary is that the bombing would not really be carried out in order to prevent that end.

Again, further lessons from Iraq are instructive. Consider that the war ostensibly fought to make the world safer from WMD and to fight terrorism resulted in the single most probable situation, had Iraq actually had WMD, Saddam Hussein would have provided them to terrorists. Again, that was the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community prior to the invasion.

Fortunately, Iraq didn’t have WMD, so this never occurred. But among the direct consequences of the war that did occur was a considerable increase in the threat of terrorism, again according to the U.S.’s own intelligence assessments. Whereas prior to the invasion, terrorist attacks within Iraq were virtually unknown, since the war began, the Iraq people continue to be plagued by terrorism as a direct consequence of the war.

The war, analysts have observed, served as a virtual billboard for terrorist organizations to recruit individuals willing to commit acts of violence in response to U.S. foreign policy – just as U.S. support for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians was a principle causal factor for the 9/11 attacks, if we are to believe the stated grievances of the originally accused mastermind of those attacks himself.

Again, the corollary is obvious: the official reasons for committing such acts of aggression against foreign nations, if we presume leading policymakers are sane and rational, cannot possibly be the actual rationale for them. That is perfectly elementary, albeit a virtual heresy to actually point out in respectable circles.

The war against Iraq had nothing to do with WMD or terrorism. Equally elementary is the observation that U.S. policy towards Iran has nothing to do with preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapons.

A further example is NATO’s bombing campaign in 1999 against Yugoslavia, which was ostensibly carried out to end atrocities on the ground, but which instead resulted in a sharp escalation of the violence – a consequence of the bombing predicted by the NATO leadership.

Kuperman also happens to mention that campaign, but, again, as with his mention of Osirak, arrives at other conclusions. Here, ignoring perhaps the most obvious lessons from his own argument and examples, his conclusion is that “Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Bombing once won’t work, so Iran must be bombed repeatedly. This logic is akin to arguing that since poking a snake with a stick once might cause it to strike, it must be poked continually in order to prevent it from being able to do so.

Similarly, Kuperman draws other lessons from Iraq. “If nothing else,” he writes, “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to.”

Indeed. But if we set aside intentional ignorance, other relevant lessons just might perhaps be drawn. Kuperman, rather like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy and friends to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, goes to extraordinary efforts to deflect attention away from these, though.

Casting aside some of the most obvious lessons from Iraq, Kuperman, having acknowledged the, shall we say, “drawbacks” of his proposed solution, concludes simply that air strikes “are worth a try.”

One might note the rather cavalier attitude towards the use of violence against civilian targets for political ends (the very definition of “terrorism”), an incitement to violence that might raise questions about the nature of American intellectual culture, and the moral values (or lack thereof) of the intelligentsia, if we bother to ponder on the subject.

Kuperman, needless to say, doesn’t. Instead, he has just one “final question”: “who should launch the air strikes?”

The obvious answer is Israel, which “has shown an eagerness” to bomb Iran, the option “some hawks in Washington favor” in order “to avoid fueling anti-Americanism in the Islamic world” – a rationale of astounding ignorance; the Islamic world surely would recognize that were Israel to bomb Iran, it would be with a “green light” from Washington, a wink and a nod. But never mind that.

Kuperman continues, however, with “three compelling reasons that the United States itself should carry out the bombings”, the obvious fueling of anti-Americanism and other predicted and potentially disastrous consequences aside. The U.S. has better equipment to do the job, could more credibly threaten “to expand the bombing campaign” (that is, to repeatedly bomb the country), and it would be an opportunity to send “a strong warning” to other countries.

This latter rationale for the U.S. bombing of Iran provides a more credible explanation for what the actual purpose of such a bombing would be.

Kuperman, in line with the official rationale for keeping the military “option” “on the table” – an explicit rejection of principle that force should be used only as a last resort, as well as a direct violation of international law – suggests the “strong warning” would be for “other would-be proliferators”.

Proliferation being obviously of little to no consideration to U.S. policymakers – an elementary observation drawn even from the arguments provided here – “proliferators” clearly isn’t the right word here. “Nations seeking to act independently from and in opposition to Washington” might be more accurate.

“The sooner the United States takes action” – that is, the sooner it bombs Iran – “the better,” concludes Kuperman.

At stake is U.S. “credibility,” in the Mafioso sense of the word. Washington simply can’t have a country defying its orders. That’s the bottom line. That’s the underlying foundation of the policy of the Obama administration, carried over from the policy of his predecessor.

But, of course, just as the war in Iraq couldn’t be sold to the American public on the basis of its actual rationale, expanding U.S. global hegemony, neither can the true reasons for Washington’s policies towards Iran be mentioned. It just wouldn’t do.

Better, as with Iraq, to construct nonsensical arguments dependent upon an extraordinary level of intentional ignorance and consisting at the most fundamental level of claims for which there is little, if any, evidence to support.

Whether the American public has learned the more obvious and crucial lessons from Iraq and has the moral integrity to act on them remains to be seen. But what is for certain is that without massive public pressure on Washington to alter its Iran policy, the U.S. will maintain a course the consequences of which might very well prove, as with Iraq, to be disastrous.

“Al Qaeda’s base of operations”, he said, “was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban”, who “refused to turn over Osama bin Laden”.

In fact, the Taliban offered to either try bin Laden in their court system or hand him over to a third country if the U.S. provided evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The evidence, however, was not forthcoming, and so the Taliban did indeed refuse on that basis.

There’s another half-truth in this remark, which suggests that the reason we went into Afghanistan was to get bin Laden. This is belied by the fact that there were plans to overthrow the Taliban that predated 9/11.

The consideration then had mostly to do with U.S. interests in seeing oil and gas pipelines constructed in transit through the country. It cannot have been coincidence that President Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan following the overthrow of the Taliban was Zalmay Khalilzad, who had previously conducted risk analysis for Unocal, the company trying to woo the Taliban and heading the consortium to establish a pipeline across Afghanistan until 1998, when company Vice President John J. Maresca testified to the House Committee on International Relations that unless there was a change in regime, no such pipelines could be built.

Unocal was later bought by Chevron, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s former company, which is heavily invested in the region. Then Vice President Dick Cheney was also very personally involved in the region. He served, for example, as a member of Kazakhstan’s Oil Advisory Board. The list goes on.

So far, the proposed TAPI and other pipelines haven’t quite panned out as desired, but the plans are still on the table. TAPI, for example, the main proposal presently backed by the U.S. (which is opposed to an alternative route through Iran), which evolved from the Unocal consortium, is to be financed by the Asian Development Bank, of which the U.S. and Japan are the major shareholders with significantly more voting power than the rest of its members, thus rendering the ADB a useful instrument of U.S. foreign policy.

Obama’s suggestion that the war was about getting bin Laden is also belied by the fact that both General Tommy Franks – then commander of U.S. Central Command who oversaw the U.S. military action against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan – and Richard Myers – then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – denied that getting bin Laden was ever a goal of the U.S.-led war. These denials were no doubt self-serving, in light of the failure to capture or kill bin Laden; but that does not mean they were not also honest admissions.

Obama’s remarks also suggest the 9/11 attacks were planned and executed from Afghanistan. He added further into his speech, “it is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

The latter part of this statement is simply the politics of fear and nothing more, akin to the statements from government officials prior to the invasion of Iraq that the “smoking gun” of Iraqi WMD and ties to al Qaeda “could come in the form of a mushroom cloud” – a claim those making it knew was absolute nonsense. This is not to say there aren’t terrorists plotting against the U.S. But they hardly need to be confined to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and it’s our policies, including the continuing war in Afghanistan, that serve as the catalyst for such extremism in the first place.

The former part of this remark, needless to say, is just false. 9/11 was neither planned in nor executed from Afghanistan. The attacks were planned in places like Hamburg, Germany and Venice, Florida — or Malaysia, where the CIA had tracked two of the would-be hijackers, both known al Qaeda associates. (Despite being on the terrorist watch-list, and despite the agency having known that they had visas to enter the U.S., the CIA still chose not to notify the State Department, the Department of Immigration, or the FBI). They were executed from American soil.

Continuing, Obama attempted again to associate the Afghan insurgency with al Qaeda, saying “the Taliban has maintained common cause with al Qaeda, as both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government”.

9/11. Al Qaeda. Taliban.

Similarly deceptive rhetoric was employed to convince Americans the U.S. had to invade Iraq:

9/11. Al Qaeda. WMD. Saddam Hussein.

Obama certainly must know of the public opinion surveys showing that most Afghans are opposed to the Taliban. He must certainly know those same polls also reveal that most Afghans want foreign forces out of their country. He must also certainly have been advised of the fact that most Afghans who join the insurgency do so not out of allegiance to the Taliban or al Qaeda, but because they oppose the presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil, or because they are fed up with the corruption and ineffectual rule of the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

In other words, the insurgency has nothing at all to do with Al Qaeda. The only connection between most insurgents and Al Qaeda is a common goal to rid the country of foreign troops and/or replace the U.S. puppet regime. It’s instructive that Obama noted the overthrow of the Afghan government as a goal, but not the ousting of foreign forces from their soil. It’s no insignificant omission, given that the policy just announced will predictably serve to fuel the insurgency, following the trend of strengthened insurgency as the number of troops has increased over the years.

As an elementary observation, the increase in troop numbers has nothing to do, therefore, with quelling the insurgency – any more than invading Iraq was about ridding the world of WMD.

The insurgency having nothing to do with Al Qaeda, therefore the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan has nothing to do with fighting Al Qaeda. That’s equally elementary, despite Obama’s claim that “Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda”.

But Obama couldn’t very well tell the truth to the American people and still expect to garner their support for yet another escalation of troops to Afghanistan. Much better to use the old Bush formula: We need to send more troops because we were attacked on 9/11. If we don’t escalate the war there, al Qaeda will attack us on our own soil.

And so on.

On the matter of Afghanistan’s corrupt government, Obama had this to say: “although it was marred by fraud”, Afghanistan’s recent election “produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and constitution.” How a government maintained through fraudulent elections could possibly be “consistent with” the law and constitution Obama chose not to bother explaining. We’re just supposed to take his word for it that two plus two equals five.

Another omission in Obama’s speech was the rationale for the 9/11 attacks to begin with: principally, the fact that it was a response to U.S. foreign policy, including U.S. support for Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people and other violations of international humanitarian law.

It would be difficult to argue that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t similarly increased the threat of terrorism against the U.S. for the same reasons we were attacked on 9/11 in the first place and the legitimate grievances that served as the rationale behind the unjustifiable attacks.

One obvious corollary is that fighting terrorism simply isn’t high on the list of priorities for U.S. foreign policy, rhetoric to the contrary aside. Much as with democracy and the principle of self-determination, it isn’t that U.S. policy is opposed to the idea; it’s fine, just so long as the goal doesn’t interfere with the actual policy considerations, which don’t actually have anything to do with democracy (or fighting terrorism, etc.).

This contempt for democracy is illustrated by Obama’s decision on escalating the war, opposed by many, if not most, Americans, and also opposed by most Afghanis, according to surveys. It is also illustrated by the necessity of government officials to lie in order to justify war.

Obama’s decision to wait to announce the troop increase until after the Afghanistan election and its immediate aftermath was perhaps in part a result of deliberations over whether or not to do so. But it’s equally likely that the decision was made before the election even took place, and the delay was simply necessary to give the administration time to engage in a public relations campaign to preempt criticism that the U.S. was backing a corrupt regime.

The principle means of doing so was for the administration officials to make tough statements about the need for Afghan President Hamid Karzai to act against corruption – statements difficult to take seriously for anyone familiar with the situation there who is not inclined to take such rhetoric at face value.

Take, for instance, Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose name was bandied about as a prime example of the kind of guy Karzai should not include in his government. This is the same General Dostum whom the CIA handed suitcases of cash to as a Northern Alliance ally in the initial effort to overthrow the Taliban, who is among the same group of warlords the U.S. itself dealt with and helped to empower. The lectures to Karzai about the need to rid his government of corruption ring hollow in light of the U.S. role in empowering warlords such as Dostum in the first place, people whom the U.S. obviously has no qualms about dealing with itself.

But the admonitions served the purpose of preemptively fending off criticism that the war effort simply serve to prop up a corrupt regime before the announcement of a troop increase was actually made – the predictable outcome since General Stanley McChrystal first made his request for additional forces. Thus, Obama included in his speech the statement that “We’ll support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people. We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable.”

Just how serious his administration is about that is reflected in the anti-opium policy announced this summer. Under the new policy, drug lords associated with the insurgency – and only those with connections to the Taliban or other insurgent groups – are to be targeted. In other words, the drug lords responsible for the vast majority of Afghanistan’s drug trade – including individuals within or allied to the Karzai government or occupying forces (the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai himself is reportedly a leading drug lord, as well as a CIA asset, according to the New York Times) – are specifically excluded from the scope of the U.S. “anti-drug” policy in Afghanistan.

Or, to put it yet another way, the U.S. policy serves to help the biggest drug lords consolidate their control over the opium and heroin trade. The mainstream media, meanwhile, follows the government’s lead in focusing instead on the Taliban’s relatively meager profits from its indirect role in the drug trade, such as by ushr, a tax on all agriculture, including poppy cultivation.

Obama’s only arguments against a withdrawal from Afghanistan were far from convincing. His first was that, “Unlike Vietnam”, in Afghanistan, the U.S. has “a broad coalition” that “recognizes the legitimacy of our action”. The central fallacy here is the assumption that because a deed has international complicity, it is therefore “legitimate”.

His second argument against withdrawal consisted of a simple denial that the U.S. is “facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Well, if the U.S. isn’t facing a broad-based popular insurgency, then why does Obama feel it necessary to send more troops in the first place? What is all the talk about counterinsurgency (“COIN”) and the need to win hearts and minds, if the insurgency is not broad-based and popular in many parts of the country? This argument is false on its face, another case of two-plus-two-equals-five.

Obama’s only other argument withdrawal was a repetition that “unlike Vietnam”, we’re there because “the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border”, an argument for which the central fallacy has already been addressed.

These arguments against withdrawal, like his arguments in favor of escalation, are as ridiculous as Obama’s assertion that, “unlike the great powers of old”, the U.S. has “not sought world domination.” The sane, rational people of the world must surely remain unconvinced, in light of the actual facts of history and current U.S. foreign policy – Obama’s announcement of an increase in troop numbers being no exception.

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.”