Let’s examine the administration’s political prose in claiming that its drone strikes are efficacious, ethical, legal, and wise.

On the Orwellian Claim that Drone Strikes are Efficacious

To be efficacious, drone strikes must a) actually achieve their objective and by a reasonable deadline; b) pursue the right objective; c) pursue a credible objective; d) be the best means available to achieve the objective; and e) avoid undesirable side effects and chain reactions.

a. Drone strikes can never achieve the objective of eliminating al-Qaeda and ending terrorism against the U.S. Drone strikes anger people in the countries struck, guaranteeing that al-Qaeda or mutations of it will keep the U.S. war on terror in perpetuity.

b. The objective of eliminating terrorism by eliminating al-Qaeda is not the right one. An unachievable objective can never be the right one.

c. Despite the propagandizing for it, the objective isn’t credible. Not everyone is gullible.  Consider these two truly patriotic and knowledgeable Americans. Paul Craig Roberts, a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration thinks the war on terror is a hoax designed to make Americans fearful and subservient. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink wasn’t fooled either. She was in the audience and interrupted the speaker to dispute his claims before being whisked away and handcuffed.

Another benefit to the administration is that its war propaganda and warring help distract Americans from the growing deterioration of socioeconomic conditions at home while U.S. militarism and imperialism continue to starve the domestic part of the federal budget solely for corporate and political self interests.

d. Drone strikes are the worst means for eliminating terrorism. The best means would be those designed to end the U.S. support of Israel’s militarism and her illegal building of settlements; substantially reduce U.S. military presence in the Great Middle East; substantially reduce welfare to the war industry; reduce dependence on foreign oil; and stop aiding global exploitation by multinational corporations headquartered in the U.S. or doing business primarily in the U.S.

e. Drone strikes can never avoid the so-called “collateral” killing and maiming of hundreds of non-targeted men, women and children and might not be able to avoid eventual retaliation worse than the attack on the twin towers.

On the Orwellian Claim that Drone Strikes are Ethical

Throughout history and across very different cultures certain ethical values have remained constant such as accountability, caring for others, excellence, fairness, fidelity, honesty, integrity, promise keeping, respecting others, and responsible citizenship. Only an Orwellian claim could twist those universal values to justify drone strikes; could argue that the “principle of humanity,” whatever that means to the administration “requires it to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering;” could cite abstruse principles of “necessity,” “distinction,” and “proportionately” as additional proof that drone strikes are ethical; and could assert that the administration is “harnessing every element of American power— [including] the power of our values.”

While acknowledging that many innocent, noncombatant men, women and children have been killed and wounded by U.S. drone strikes, the speaker claims the “administration puts a “premium—on protecting human life, including innocent civilians” but does not go on to say what exactly this premium is and what limit, if any, the administration has set on the toll taken by drone strikes before it decides that they are no longer efficacious and ethical. In truth, the administration, like those before it put a premium on sustaining the corpocracy, the Devil’s marriage between powerful corporate and political interests.

On the Orwellian Claim that Drone Strikes are Legal

Purportedly authoritative legal sources are cited, one after another, to substantiate the claim that drone strikes are legal but no mention is made of counter arguments such as, for instance, one made by the U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich that “Drones [are] a direct hit upon rule of law” or one made by Philip Ashton, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings suggesting that in certain circumstances (e.g., when the CIA is conducting the strikes) “U.S. drone strikes may violate international law.”

There is no acknowledgement by the administration that it is relying on legal loop holes to claim the legality of drone strikes; loop holes such as not declaring drone strikes to be an act of war since the Constitution requires Congress to declare war and using the CIA because it is somehow not bound by the same legal accountabilities.

Like Mafia bosses with their hit men, it can be argued that the war industry and war politicians are committing surrogate murders. What is ethical and legal about surrogate murdering?

On the Orwellian Claim that Drone Strikes are Wise

Drone strikes compared to other military means are a wise choice according to the Orwellian claim. Drone strikes are less constrained by geographical considerations; can be done more quickly; avoid danger to U.S. personnel by remotely flying the drones; reduce the danger to innocent people in the targeted area; can aim precisely at the intended targets; and strategically avoid troublesome consequences that can ensue from “deploying large armies.”

In assessing the wisdom of its choice the speaker side steps the issue of whether a wiser choice in the long run would be to persistently pursue peaceful means to eliminating al-Qaeda.

Only an Orwellian spokesperson would brag about the precautions the administration takes to ensure that its drone strikes demonstrate that the administration is a “standard bearer,” on the insistence of President Obama, in the conduct of war, including the use of drone strikes, adding that “if we want other nations to use these technologies responsibly, we must use them responsibly.” Welcome world to the Devil’s premium quality drones!

In Closing

Reading the transcript also reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil” that she coined to characterize the thoughtless mind of Adolph Eichmann, whose trial she was reporting on for The New Yorker. Well, some of us have looked banal evil in the eye and it did not blink.

America’s worse enemy is not al-Qaeda, as treacherous as it may be according to the administration. America’s worse enemy is her own corpocracy. The only way to end it for good in this writer’s opinion is for Americans to organize and launch “two-fisted democracy power,” with one fist being a virtual network of organizations and groups carrying out a strategic plan of political, legislative, judicial and economic reform initiatives and the other fist being a large coalition of different segments of the populace applying pressure behind the reform initiatives (see further details here). The corpocracy is united. Its opposition is divided and weak.

The grip of this fiction on the American collective mind reflects a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt for Arabs and Muslims.

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse … Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

The justice of the Palestinian cause is increasingly recognized in the West, particularly at the grassroots level. This is due, above all, to the courage and persistence of the Palestinians themselves. But scholars—Arab, Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives also deserve credit. One such scholar is Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-born professor at the University of London and author of several books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

A smear campaign

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Henry Holt and Company, 2010), Achcar’s most recent book, is an ambitious attempt to present an accurate history of Arab attitudes toward Nazism, Jews, and the Holocaust. It refutes the story told by pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.

The book has been well received by Middle East and Jewish Studies scholars, and Achcar has been invited to give talks on many university campuses. This raised the ire of David Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which, according to its mission statement, “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country … The leftist offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center protects students from indoctrination and political harassment.”

Last November, an article in the web FrontPage Magazine, edited and published by Horowitz, launched a smear campaign against Achcar. Focusing on a presentation by Achcar under the auspices of Middle East Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, the article appeared on a host of kindred websites, such as that of Campus Watch, an organization founded by Daniel Pipes, a main purveyor with Horowitz of Islamophobic material and whitewashing of Israel.¹

Another attack, directed at Achcar’s lecture in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of California at Davis, came from BlueTruth, a blog devoted to “refuting the accusations and exposing the lies that are being told … about Israel, Jews and pro-Israel organizations …” One such lie, to judge by the article, is that Israel was “built on Arab land.”

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.

The Arabs and the Holocaust

In his talk at Berkeley, Achcar described the book’s main purpose as deconstructing the image, dominant in the West and Israel, of Arabs as pro-Nazi. Relying on an extensive array of primary sources and historical studies, Achcar presents an “Arab world” with a great diversity of beliefs and opinions, a multiplicity of evolving ideological currents—just as in the West. The many Arab countries are not peopled by an indistinct mass of millions animated by ancestral hatred of the Jews. “The Arabs,” Achcar writes, do not exist “as a politically and intellectually uniform group.”²

The first part of Achcar’s book covers the period from 1933, when Hitler acceded to power, until Israel’s foundation in 1948. At that time, “liberal Westernizers” and Marxists took a strong stand against both Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the various Arab nationalist movements, sympathy for the Axis varied but was overall low, and opposition to Zionism did not translate into hatred of “the Jews.” It is only among “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists” that significant anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.

Several recent studies confirm this. For example, Achcar’s book quotes Israel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, who wrote that in the 1930s:

the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices—in the political arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle classes and even in the literate popular cultures—rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”³ [a reference to “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a view which did create some support for Nazi Germany among Arabs living under the yoke of French and British colonization.]

Those painting Arabs as heirs to Nazism use as “proof” one particular episode: the 1941 Baghdad “pogrom” (the Farhud). In April 1941, Iraqi pro-German nationalists led a coup against Iraq’s pro-British regent. Propaganda by the German legation, reinforced by the presence of the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, had whipped up anti-Jewish feeling in Baghdad. British forces invaded Iraq, put the pro-German government to flight, and secured Baghdad, but their troops remained posted on the outskirts. Rumors circulated that the Jews were helping the much-hated British. There followed two days of killing and plunder; about 180 Jews were murdered. The rioters were stopped when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad and reestablished order, killing many of the mob.

Achcar notes that the vast majority of Muslim Iraqis condemned the violence and many protected their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives. Looters from Baghdad’s slums, driven by need rather than anti-Jewish sentiment, joined in the action. With the regent back in power, the Iraqi government granted compensation to the families of Jewish victims.

Achcar’s account of the Farhud agrees with that of several authors, such as Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer of Baghdadi origin.⁴ There is little evidence that the Farhud was indicative of widespread and deeply rooted hatred toward Jews in the whole of “the Arab world.” Note that no anti-Jewish rioting occurred in any other Arab country during WWII, despite the calls to jihad broadcast from Berlin by the Mufti from November 1941 on.

In fact, Arabs played a truly remarkable role in defeating Hitler, a fact so carefully suppressed by the French after the war that I did not learn of it in 15 years of schooling in France. As part of De Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Arab troops from French North Africa contributed massively to the liberation of Europe. They fought alongside the Allies from the landing in Sicily in July 1943 to the invasion of Germany in 1945, with great loss of life. For instance, 233,000 of the 550,000 Free French troops landing on the Mediterranean coast in Nazi-occupied France in November 1944 were North African Muslims.⁵

The second part of Achcar’s book traces the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world after the founding of Israel in 1948. Western anti-Semitic themes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found their way into public discourse. Achcar does not excuse or minimize Arab anti-Semitism. He deplores the “abysmal stupidity” of these “anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust.” But do these ravings indicate an Arab wish to exterminate the Jews, a project they supposedly inherited from the Nazis? These claims are absurd, according to Achcar and many others. Nissim Rejwan, for instance, writes:

Neither their religious culture nor their historical record lends credence to the claim that the Muslim Arabs of today are capable of the kind of historical consummation that found expression in Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps … Viewed in anything like the correct historical perspective, the idea of “Arab Auschwitz” is an absurdity.⁶

And, of course, there are parallel ravings in Israeli/Jewish political discourse: referring to Arabs by animal names, calling for their expulsion and annihilation, and so on. See Israeli General Rafael Eitan’s infamous statement: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”⁷

Achcar writes: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons” [emphasis mine].⁸ These historical reasons, which are indeed obvious, were they not again and again obfuscated by pro-Israel apologists, include: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948-1949 and its systematic destruction of 418 Palestinian villages to prevent the refugees’ return: creating 300,000 more Palestinian refugees in 1967; a brutal and tyrannical occupation accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing ever since; and atrocities against civilian populations in wars in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon.

Contemporary Arab anti-Semitism is not unmotivated, atavistic hatred. It is rooted in anger at Israel’s very real aggressive and destructive policies. Even Bernard Lewis, a historian favored by defenders of Israel, wrote “for Christian anti-Semites, the Palestine problem is a pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-Semites, it is the cause.”⁹ Remove the cause—that is, end Israel’s ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.

Achcar shows how Arab anti-Semitism is “reactive” and changeable—dependent on Israel’s actions, its violence, its propaganda (e.g., calling Arabs “Nazis”), and on the particular historical and political circumstances of the various Arab/Muslim countries. It is not “the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists.”¹⁰

I surmise that The Arabs and the Holocaust was written with an Arab audience in mind as well as a Western one. The book has been translated into Arabic and it is, among other things, an attempt to build bridges, a call for each side to listen to the other. He writes:

It is faith in human reason that justifies the hope that what counts as truth on one side of the Green Line or, rather, of the separation wall, will not forever count as error on the other.¹¹

In the conclusion, describing “statist Zionism” as “a Janus, one face turned toward the Holocaust, the other toward the Nakba, one toward persecution endured, the other toward persecution inflicted,” Achcar returns to the need for each side to acknowledge the sufferings of the other:

Only recognition of both of Janus’ faces—of the Holocaust and the Nakba—can bring Israeli, Palestinians, and other Arabs in genuine dialogue.¹²

Achcar’s book displays a formidable knowledge of the currents of thought on both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide as well as a brilliant analytic mind. By placing Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust in historical and psychological contexts, he opens up vistas to Western readers beyond the shallow, warped views of U.S. main media. He understands and has compassion for the historical wounds of the Jews. His integrity and openness shine throughout.

Hasbara

The authors of the FrontPageMag article, Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene, seem not to be concerned about historical context. They mix innuendo, distortion and falsehood, quote out of context and misquote, then add in one or another point of dogma. They do not at any point counter Achcar with contrary evidence. Instead, they speak in generalities, e.g., Achcar’s book “masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle East studies establishment.”

The “Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus” (hasbara is Hebrew for “public relations, “ or “propaganda”), published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students, gives advice on how to score points “whilst avoiding genuine discussion”: rather than addressing your opponent’s arguments, make “as many comments that are positive about Israel as possible whilst attacking certain Palestinian positions, and attempting to cultivate a dignified appearance”; repeat points again and again, “If people hear something often enough, they come to believe it.” The same tactics seem to be used in the writing of most FrontPageMag articles.

Nakba vs. Holocaust

Stillwell and Greene write: “Achcar concluded by drawing an asinine correlation between the Holocaust … and the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe,’ the Arabic term to describe the creation of the state of Israel: ‘The Shoah ended in 1945, but the suffering of the Palestinians is never-ending.’”

In fact, Achcar, in his talk characterized the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of ethnic cleansing.” He went on to say that real dialogue conducive to peace requires

the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of what Palestinians have suffered. Not only the ordeal of the Palestinians is continuing … But they went through … the worst kind of experience just recently in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009.

In his book, Achcar condemns making “no distinction between colonialist usurpation of a territory and the racist extermination of a whole population.”¹³ He quotes Edward Said: “Who would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”¹⁴ But he also states that Palestinian suffering is ongoing, and getting worse.

In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of either. Sixty-four years have elapsed since the Nakba, 64 years during which Palestinians have been subjected to further wars, expulsions, and dispossession. They have been denied political, economic, and human rights. At present, in Gaza, 1.5 million people, half of them children, are imprisoned behind a 25-foot high fence and regularly attacked by Israeli drones and Apache helicopters, killed by fire from tanks and snipers on Gaza’s borders; in the West Bank, Palestinians are evicted from their land to make way for Israeli settlers who harass and kill with impunity; and East Jerusalem is being “judaized,” i.e., emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?

Anti-Arab racism in Israel

Stillwell and Greene claim that, unlike anti-Semitism in the Arab world, “’anti-Arab attitudes in Israel’ are neither widespread, [nor] promulgated through state-provided education and other official means.” But all polls of Israeli Jews reveal deep anti-Arab feeling. For instance, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll in January 2011, which found that nearly half of Israeli Jews would not want to live next door to an Arab.¹⁵ Racism is strongest among the young: the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that civics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students.¹⁶

Nuri Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education and author of a book on Israeli school books,¹⁷ thinks “state-provided education” is a main culprit in promoting racism. Interviewed in the Guardian, she said Israeli school books describe Arabs “as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop… The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists.”

She added: “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the major reason for that is education.”

“Other official means” of promulgating racism include laws that are the very foundation of the Israeli state: the 1950 Law of Return and 1952 Citizenship Law, which allow every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. These same laws forbid the return of Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes from 1947 to 1952. This inequity may have made sense to those in the West who lived through the years after WWII, when the horrors of the Holocaust and general acceptance of colonialism blinded almost everyone to the injustice perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs. But it is much past time to look at the situation through Palestinian eyes.

More recent laws show racism becoming increasingly institutionalized in Israel. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that “the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and discriminatory bills.” One such bill legalizes “admission committees” operating in nearly 700 small towns, allowing them to reject applicants deemed “unsuitable to the social life of the community … or the social and cultural fabric of the town”—for “unsuitable applicants,” read principally “Arabs.”¹⁸

Holocaust denial, Nakba denial

Israel’s recent Nakba Law effectively forbids the public commemoration of the Nakba. Israel lodged a protest when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon used the word in a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Abbas on May 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, declared: “The Palestinians can celebrate an Independence Day if, on that day, they eliminate the word Nakba from their vocabulary.”

Speaking with her usual icy self-assurance, Livni was essentially telling the Arab minority to shut up about a fact no historian denies, not even Zionist historian Benny Morris, who said: “I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”¹⁹ Because she speaks as a government minister of a state with a very powerful military and several hundred nuclear weapons, her pronouncements are alarming.

Livni makes luminously clear that Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens. For the Jews, yes, although the rights of dissenters are increasingly restricted. In effect, “a Jewish and democratic state” is an oxymoron, no matter how much ink has been spent to deny it: a state so defined must privilege the Jews over other citizens. And being Jewish is unlike being, for example, French. One can become French by participating in the country’s communal life for five years, but there is no way to become Jewish and qualify for the Law of Return except by converting to Judaism, or by being “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.”

Israel: innocent, victimized, maligned …

Gail Rubin J.D. author of the BlueTruth article, waxes indignant at Achcar for describing Israel as a “’settler colonial project’ built on ‘Arab land,’” and “accusing Zionists of ‘ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.’”

That Israel was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable. As for “ethnic cleansing,” Benny Morris, who argued in his early books that the Palestinians had fled because of the war, now concedes the role of deliberate Zionist policy: “I have concluded that pre-1948 thinking had a greater effect on what happened in 1948 than I had allowed for…”²⁰

In any case, no one denies that Israel prevented the return of refugees, a violation of international law. It was Israeli policy to shoot as “infiltrators” Palestinians trying to return to their villages in the night. Hundreds of villages were destroyed to foreclose their former inhabitants’ return.

Arguments about the colonial nature of the Israeli state usually take the form of semantic nitpicking. Sociologist Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew who first broke the taboo against calling Israel a “colonial-settler state,” concludes his remarkable 1967 essay:

… the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically and politically. This is, moreover, an obvious diagnosis, and if I have taken so many words to state it, it is only because of the desperate efforts that have been made to conceal it.²¹

Stillwell and Greene recommend a review of Achcar’s book by “atypical professors” Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade. The lengthy review²² takes up the themes of Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11, such as: Islamist movements—al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s regime—originated in the lethal link between Islamism and Nazism; the Arabs have inherited “eliminatory anti-Semitism” from the Nazis; jihadism and jihadist anti-Semitism are the greatest threats to the world today. According to Achcar, his book is “a fantasy-based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and third-hand reports.”²³

In Küntzler’s view, responsibility for the Palestine-Israel conflict lies entirely with the Palestinians and Arabs:

… it is not the escalation of the Middle East conflict that has given rise to anti-Semitism; it is rather anti-Semitism that has given rise to the escalation of the Middle East conflict – again and again…. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb.²⁴

This is yet another version of the myth that Israel acts only in response to Arab aggression. In fact, following the conquest of land and expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants, Israel again and again inflicted great harm on Arabs and Muslims—primarily the Palestinians, but also those living in the border states—through actions that cannot be attributed to Israel’s need to survive. Consider the annexation of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Islam; the occupation of the Palestinian territories and of the Golan Heights; and wars such as that against Lebanon in 2006, supposedly a response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that resulted in 1,200 Lebanese deaths, almost all of them civilians.

One example provides strong evidence that Arabs have not inherited the Nazis’ exterminatory will. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, re-endorsed unanimously by the Arab League in 2007,²⁵ calls upon Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied since 1967, and for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab countries would then commit to establishing normal relations with Israel and provide security for all the states of the region. Israel is entreated to accept the initiative to “[enable] the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.” The initiative calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem,” but expresses support for any negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.

It is difficult to find exterminatory anti-Semitism in all this. Unsurprisingly, Israeli politicians have ignored the initiative.

All signs point to the fact that Israel has never wanted an equitable peace settlement. Israeli governments since Israel’s beginnings, including Labor governments, have all acted to further the goal of a Greater Israel empty of Palestinians.

The how and why of pro-Israel watchdogs on campuses

Pro-Israel propaganda outlets like Frontpage Magazine carry little weight with scholars of the Middle East, but they are significant actors in sustaining the upside-down view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America. They use intimidation to inhibit free speech on campuses, and poison the well of public discourse.

They advise students to take notes and report on professors, which especially intimidates junior, untenured faculty. They post on their websites telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of departments and faculties which get harassed by angry phone calls and swamped by hate mail.

Pipes and Horowitz encourage confrontation and creating disturbances, followed by complaints that their freedom of speech was curtailed. So here is Gail Rubin’s account of the Q&A part of Achcar’s talk at UC, Davis:

… challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A. I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room.

In fact, according to Jewish Studies Director, Professor Diane Wolf, Rubin was called on to ask her question, read a prepared script with no relation to Achcar’s talk, and then asked him whether he wasn’t blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. As he started to express that he was shocked and offended, she tried to re-read her statement. At this point, Professor David Biale and others told her to be quiet and Professor Susan Miller explained that in an academic environment, we wait for the speaker’s response to a question. She should leave if she could not abide by those rules. So the questioner was stopped only when she interrupted Achcar to repeat her statement.

In an interview after Achcar’s program, Professor Emily Gottreich, Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, commented that if these campus pro-Israel activists were truly interested in engaging in academic dialogue, they would express their disagreements directly to the scholar in a public forum or to departmental chairs or program directors; instead, they appeal directly to donors, who tend to be neither Middle East experts nor particularly well-versed in the rules of academic discourse, to withdraw funding; or they approach university presidents or chancellors with accusations of anti-Semitism and “biased” scholarship.

Campus Watch and Horowitz’ Freedom Center are only two pieces in a large network of pro-Israel pressure groups operating on campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition includes no less than 33 independent organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Anti-Defamation League (but not Horowitz’ or Pipes’ organizations, whose work may not quite fit the coalition’s image). The coalition works “to engage leaders at colleges and universities around issues affecting Israel, and to create positive campus change for Israel.”

Why this vast deployment of resources on campuses? The answer is straightforward. A recent document by the David Project, dedicated to ensuring that “effective support for Israel thrives on campuses and in our communities,” states: “AIPAC has had a successful track record in building campus ties to future members of Congress and campus leaders.”²⁶ To-morrow’s leaders are on campuses today, so the thinking goes, and they must be reached by Israeli propaganda as early as possible.

Changing Americans’ view of who Palestinians are

Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net, a website of news about Israel/Palestine, recounts a Skype-mediated “meeting” with youth in Gaza: “Most of the questions were from young men. They were smart but slightly abstract questions … Then Rawan Yaghi sat at the microphone and asked, What can be done to change Americans’ view of who Palestinians are?”

Weiss writes of being overcome with emotion by this “poised young woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses, 18 years old … There was such delicacy to her manner and her question … I struggled against upwelling emotions to answer her question. ‘`This is the biggest question of all, and I don’t know the answer.’”

For all of us living outside the prison of Gaza, this young woman’s question should come as a call to remember the immense harm created by prejudice, ignorance, and demonization. Voices like Gilbert Achcar’s must be heard on campuses and in larger public arenas.

1. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center for American Progress, August 2011.
2. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 33.
3. Israel Gershoni, “Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s” (EUI Working Paper no. RSC 20001/32, San Domenico, 2001, p.6.
4. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 years of history and culture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
5. Benjamin Stora, L’armée d’Afrique: Les oubliés de la Libération, ‪Volume 692 of Textes et documents pour la classe TDC. ‪C.N.D.P., 1995.
6. Nissim Rejwan, Arabs aims and Israeli attitudes. The Leonard Davis Institute, Davis Occasional Papers, No 77, 2000.
7. “Israel Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2005.
8. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 274.
9. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. Reissued with new afterword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. p. 259.
10. Achcar, p. 275.
11. Achcar, p. 273.
12. Achcar, p. 291.
13. Achcar, p. 130.
14. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 26.
15. “Israeli intolerance shows up on Internet, in Knesset, on the street,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2011.
16. Tomer Velmer, “Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs,” YNet Magazine, January 19, 2011.
17. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Library of Modern Middle East Studies, 2012.
18. “The Inequality Report,” Adalah, March 2011. See also “New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel,” June 2011. Both can be downloaded from Adalah.
19. “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” with 
Ari Shavit, Logos 3.1, Winter 2004.
20. Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 5.
21. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad Press, 1973.
22. “In the Straightjacket of Anti-Zionism,” on the website of Engage, “a resource that aims to help people counter the boycott Israel campaign.” Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-hatred, translated by Colin Mead, was published by Telos Press Publishing (2008).
23. Achcar, p. 169-170.
24. From a talk given at Yale University, “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.”
25. Arab Peace Initiative.
26. “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012.

Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now
Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now”

— Mary Gauthier, “Mercy Now” ¹

We have heard much about Japan’s Fukushima Unit 4 nuclear spent fuel pool and the huge amount of radioactivity that could be released if that pool were to go dry, crack, fall apart or collapse.² As former Japanese diplomat to the United Nations, Akio Matsumura, recently warned the world:

The highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima-Daiichi power plants present a clear threat to the people of Japan and the world. Reactor 4 and the nearby common spent fuel pool contain over 11,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies, many of which are exposed to the open air. The cesium-137, the radioactive component contained in these assemblies, present at the site is 85 times larger than the amount released during the Chernobyl accident. Another magnitude 7.0 earthquake would jar them from their pool or stop the cooling water, which would lead to a nuclear fire and meltdown. The nuclear disaster that would result is beyond anything science has ever seen.  Calling it a global catastrophe is no exaggeration. If political leaders understand the situation and the potential catastrophe, I find it difficult to understand why they remain silent. The following leaves little to question:

1. Many scientists believe that it will be impossible to remove the 1,535 fuel assemblies in the pool of Reactor 4 within two or three years.

2. Japanese scientists give a greater than 90 percent  probability that an earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude will occur in the next three years in the close vicinity of Fukushia-Daiichi.

3. The crippled building of Reactor 4 will not stand through another strong earthquake.

4. Japan and the TEPCO do not have adequate nuclear technology and experience to handle a disaster of such proportions alone.³

It really does make one wonder how all of the world’s aging reactors will be dealt with if there is a global economic collapse. What we are witnessing as events race forward appears to be the convergence of socio-economic collapse — the 500 year old banking system based on fraudulent accounting tricks — together with the crumbling and cracking of the faulty technostructure put in place in the last century. Roads and bridges fall into disrepair and cities like Detroit will simply revert to green farmland, a natural process of the cycling of ecosystems where humans play their role and then bow out once they have exhausted their industrious energies. In the case of nuclear power plants, the waste remains radioactive for a good 10,000 years and the process for safely storing it has not yet been invented.⁴

Let’s go back in time to relive the astounding events of 3/11 in order to put this situation in context. On the 11th of March, 2011 at 14:46 JST, a Magnitude 9.0, “the largest earthquake recorded in Japan,” occurred with the epicenter  approximately 70 kilometers east of the Oshika peninsula in Tohoku, at an ocean depth of 32 kilometers. The Japan Meteorological Agency Seismic Intensity – JMA SI measured at 7 in Kurihara City of Miyagi Prefecture and 6+ in 28 cities and towns including in Fukushima Prefecture.⁵ The trembler lasted six minutes.⁶ Typically, the Japanese measurement of intensity is about half to a quarter as large a number as magnitude⁷. The JMA SI is derived from the Mercalli intensity scale which is:

a seismic scale used for measuring the intensity of an earthquake. It measures the effects of an earthquake, and is distinct from the moment magnitude  usually reported for an earthquake (sometimes described as the obsolete Richter magnitude), which is a measure of the energy released. The intensity of an earthquake is not totally determined by its magnitude.⁸

According to the Wall Street Journal which reported the research of Tohoku University geologists, the following points are worth noting:

*  [S]eismic risk at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has increased because the magnitude 9 earthquake jolted the plates underneath the area into a more precarious position.

*  [O]ver 24,000 tremors around Iwaki, in the seven and a half months following March 11. That number is far higher than the 1,300 quakes detected in the same area in the nine years before then.

*  Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to happen in Fukushima.

The only ray of hope I could glean from this scenario is that “seismicity near the FNPP plant is relatively low compared to that near Iwaki,” but Iwaki is only a few miles to the south of the FNPP. “A fault line that runs close to the plant could be weakened by” shifting seismic fluids.⁹

The Tohoku University geologists make clear the daily quakes Japan experiences are not anomalous but according to a well studied and documented pattern:

The Iwaki earthquake (M 7.0) occurred in a previous seismicity gap on 11 April 2011 and it was one of the major aftershocks following the Tohoku-oki mainshock and the strongest one hit the Japan land area….The compressional stress regime is therefore expected to continue to build up in the overriding plate in NE Japan, which has potential to cause reactivation of the reverse faults and therein generate large crustal earthquakes, such as the 2008 Iwate-Miyagi earthquake that occurred about 200 km north of FNPP and the 2007 Niigata earthquake (M 6.8) in the back-arc area of NE Japan. Therefore, much attention should be paid to the FNPP seismic safety in the near future.¹⁰

Their report is supported by other research that claims “[a]ftershocks along Fukushima, Ibaraki borders may take over 100 years to subside [and this region is] relatively close to the damaged Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant”.¹¹

As Kobe University seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi noted to a government panel in 2005, “[a]n earthquake and its seismic thrust can hit multiple parts” of a nuclear plant and result in a “severe accident”.¹² No one listened to Professor Ishibashi then (ironically his name is translated as “stone bridge”) but they sure the heck should have!

In addition, Tokyo University geologists have now warned that chances of “a new big earthquake” in Japan are 75 percent in the next four years, and that Japan has drastically underestimated the power of earthquakes in their building standards. Nuclear plants are vastly under-prepared for the magnitude of large quakes, having been based on projections that are now outdated and debunked. In essence, it is impossible to build nuclear power plants to withstand major earthquakes.¹³)

From the official Japanese sources themselves we can see that the 3/11 earthquake intensity was 6+ and that it was indeed strong enough to destroy at least Unit 1 at the FNPP. According to at least two reputable sources Unit 1 was destroyed primarily due to seismic activity and not the tsunami or failed back up generators (although those events contributed).¹⁴

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the Japanese Government — the Keystone Cops teamed up with the Larry Curly and Moe outfit — is still telling us that we should not worry. Tepco recently complained to critics that:

The No. 4 reactor building is not tilted and it, including the storage pool, will not be destroyed by a quake…TEPCO officials also explained that the steel support at the base of the pool and concrete wall had been reinforced by last July, which has increased by 20 percent the leeway against a possible quake. In addition, the utility conducted a simulation exercise using analytical models that showed that even if a lower -6 intensity quake were to strike the plant again, it would not collapse.¹⁵

It sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to me — “20 percent” improvements do not inspire confidence in a region ridden with constant seismic activity. Such statements are absurdly overconfident on the face. The FNPP complex looks like a war zone which is at any rate not as fit as it originally was, and even if in pristine condition may not handle a major earthquake. Nevertheless, let’s hope the fools are right this time because we could all use a little Mercy Now. Short of the Hand of Grace intervening, people of good conscience had better act quickly to solve this problem.

1. Mary Gauthier, “Mercy Now”
2. Japan’s Near Miss With Massive Nuclear Catastrophe: The Crisis Continues
3. Fukushima Daiichi: It May Be too Late Unless the Military Steps in
4. The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel
5. The 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake -Portal-
6. 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
7. Earthquake Information
8. Mercalli intensity scale
9. Could Fukushima Daiichi Be Ground Zero for the Next Big One?
10. Tomography of the 2011 Iwaki earthquake (M 7.0) and Fukushima nuclear power plant area
11. Aftershocks along Fukushima, Ibaraki borders may take over 100 years to subside
12. Earthquake and Nuke Fatigue
13. The Fukushima Lie (Die Fukushima-Lüge – English Subtitles
14. Tepco’s Cheapskate Tactics Put World at Risk
15. Doomsday scenarios spread about No. 4 reactor at Fukushima plant

Just as the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain is vowing, publicly, to keep arresting, tear-gassing, raiding their homes, confiscating their jobs and forcing pro-democracy protesters to live in non-stop fear, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is being hosted in Washington by the Barack Obama administration.

Prince Salman – who Bahraini propaganda sells as a “moderate” – showed up at the US State Department side-by-side with Secretary of State Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton. Those who “die” are evil dictators of the Muammar Gaddafi variety; “our” bastards get to party in DC after being extended a red carpet welcome.

Is there any Arab Spring-related repression and killing going in Bahrain? According to Clinton, of course not; these are only “internal issues” – in her own words.

What this means in practice is that Clinton subscribes to the official narrative that the sectarianization of everything happening in Bahrain is to be blamed on the protesters – and not the al-Khalifas, who for a year now have been destroying Shi’ite mosques and investing on all-out demonization of all things Shi’ite (blame it on “evil” Iran).

The al-Khalifas have been way wilier than President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; they have killed only an acceptable number of people. But why is Bahrain substantially “different” from Syria? Because “it hosts the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, helping the US military project its might in the Gulf and contain Iran”; and that’s not a neo-conservative talking, but Washington director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski.

A Bunch of Cowards

Here is Libya conqueror Clinton:

Bahrain is a valued ally of the United States. We partner on many important issues of mutual concern to each of our nations and to the regional and global concerns as well. I’m looking forward to a chance to talk over with His Royal Highness a number of the issues both internally and externally that Bahrain is dealing with and have some better understanding of the ongoing efforts that the government of Bahrain is undertaking. So again, His Royal Highness, welcome to the United States.

Here’s a Bahraini government spokesman telling it like it is to Reuters only one day before the Clinton-Crown Prince schmooze:

We are looking into the perpetrators and people who use print, broadcast and social media to encourage illegal protest and violence around the country. If applying the law means tougher action, then so be it.

Translation: we will keep going on a rampage because the masters in Washington have our backs covered.

Not a word from the Obama administration on the arrest of top Bahraini human-rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who Amnesty International declared a “prisoner of conscience”, as well as calling for his immediate release. Activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, for his part, has been on a hunger strike for three months, protesting his life imprisonment by the al-Khalifa regime.

R2P, “responsibility to protect”, that oh so lovely doctrine espoused by the Three Graces – Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Special Assistant to Obama Samantha Power – does not apply to civilian protesters, the majority of them Shi’ites, in Bahrain. They have been yelling for their basic human rights – of which they don’t have much – to be protected for over a year now.

Bahrain’s Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa – whose Medieval methods would lead Egyptian Omar “Sheikh al-Torture” Suleiman to blush with envy, not to mention Prince Nayef from the House of Saud – has been in power for 40 years.

And Bahrain’s King Hamad has been oh so generous; after all he commissioned a report on the repression. Needless to say, the report, even highly sanitized, hasn’t been implemented.

What makes it even more tragic is that these people are cowards. It would take just a single word from Clinton or Obama for the al-Khalifas to immediately stop their concerted repression, using their hardcore Sunni police force recruited from Pakistan, Syria and Yemen; release the thousands of prisoners; and rehire the thousands of workers who were laid off because they are “subversive”. Here’s why.

There has been a rumor in Britain that Nasser Bin Hamad, the son of Bahrain’s King, might be banned from attending the London Summer Olympic Games this summer. There are graphic reasons for it; he personally threatened many athletes, on top of being accused of torture. So what did he do? In haste, he deleted all his threatening tweets. Expect Nasser to be partying in Mayfair in July.

•  This article first appeared in Asia Times.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the July 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005″.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote:

We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions July 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story February 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying — of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.

— Colin Powell

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you?  I mean, to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall! What an insult to the entire world that would be!

Colin Powell doesn’t have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It’s on videotape.

I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which, of course, they did not, in any instance, do.

Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won’t happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.

But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. He had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing.

I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they’ve been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?

Well, it’s a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. “Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind.”

But how would he explain this:

During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:

They’re inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.

Yes.

For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?

Yes.

And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.

The incriminating phrases “clean all of the areas” and “Make sure there is nothing there” do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:

Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.

Colonel: Yes.

Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

Colonel: Yes?

Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.

Colonel: Yes.

Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.

Colonel: Yes.

Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here’s what Bob Woodward said about this in his book Plan of Attack.

[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of ‘forbidden ammo,’ Powell took the interpretation further: ‘Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.’ None of this was in the intercept.

For most of his presentation, Powell wasn’t inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.

Powell told the UN and the world:

We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam’s numerous palace complexes.

The January 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell’s draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (“INR”) flagged this claim as “WEAK”.

Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said:

Key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection.

The January 31, 2003 INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added “Plausibility open to question.”

A February 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s remarks noted:

Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well.

That didn’t stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, US media outlets wouldn’t tell anyone.

On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said:

We know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK”:

WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads.

This claim was again flagged in the February 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s presentation:

Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials.

That didn’t stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying

Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:

The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you [...] see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added:

We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses… Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event.

Powell’s own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the U.N. it was “a signature item…a decontamination vehicle.” The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.

He just kept piling it on: “UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons,” he said.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as “WEAK” and added: “the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK.”

In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.

Powell kept going, announcing:

In mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “not credible” and “open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates.”

His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.

To Powell that was no matter.

Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN:

On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and called it “Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)”

And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was “not implausible.” That was the best they could come up with. In other words: “They might buy this one, Sir, but don’t count on it.”

Powell, however, wasn’t satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations:

A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein’s guest houses.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “Highly questionable.” This one didn’t even merit a “Not implausible.”

Powell also said:

In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home.

Powell’s staff called this “WEAK,” with “Plausibility open to question.”

All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the U.N. inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.

We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.

Yet, repeatedly, Powell’s staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.

The examples of Powell’s lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War.”

A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

— President Ronald Reagan, 1987¹

On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.

Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?

Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?

Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?

The president then continued in the same fashion by saying: “We possess many tools … and using these tools over the past three years, I believe — I know — that we have saved countless lives.” Obama pointed out that this includes Libya, where the United States, in conjunction with NATO, took part in seven months of almost daily bombing missions. We may never learn from the new pro-NATO Libyan government how many the bombs killed, or the extent of the damage to homes and infrastructure. But the President of the United States assured his Holocaust Museum audience that “today, the Libyan people are forging their own future, and the world can take pride in the innocent lives that we saved.” (As I described in last month’s report, Libya could now qualify as a failed state.)

Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it.

Mr. Obama closed with these stirring words; “It can be tempting to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to man’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that there is nothing we can do.” But Barack Obama is not one of those doubters. He knows there is something he can do about man’s endless capacity for cruelty. He can add to it. Greatly. And yet, I am certain that, with exceedingly few exceptions, those in his Holocaust audience left with no doubt that this was a man wholly deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize.

And future American history books may well certify the president’s words as factual, his motivation sincere, for his talk indeed possessed the quality needed for schoolbooks.

The Israeli-American-Iranian-Holocaust-NobelPeacePrize Circus

It’s a textbook case of how the American media is at its worst when it comes to US foreign policy and particularly when an Officially Designated Enemy (ODE) is involved. I’ve discussed this case several times in this report in recent years. The ODE is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The accusation has been that he had threatened violence against Israel, based on his 2005 remark calling for “wiping Israel off the map”. Who can count the number of times this has been repeated in every kind of media, in every country of the world, without questioning the accuracy of what was reported? A Lexis-Nexis search of “All News (English)” for for the past seven years produced the message: “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results.”

As I’ve pointed out, Ahmadinejad’s “threat of violence” was a serious misinterpretation, one piece of evidence being that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”² Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place remarkably peacefully. But the myth of course continued.

Now, finally, we have the following exchange from the radio-TV simulcast, Democracy Now!, of April 19:

A top Israeli official has acknowledged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Iran seeks to “wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The falsely translated statement has been widely attributed to Ahmadinejad and used repeatedly by U.S. and Israeli government officials to back military action and sanctions against Iran. But speaking to Teymoor Nabili of the network Al Jazeera, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted Ahmadinejad had been misquoted.

Teymoor Nabili: “As we know, Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran policy is to exterminate Israel. Ahmadinejad’s position and Iran’s position always has been, and they’ve made this — they’ve said this as many times as Ahmadinejad has criticized Israel, he has said as many times that he has no plans to attack Israel. …”

Dan Meridor: “Well, I have to disagree, with all due respect. You speak of Ahmadinejad. I speak of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, Shamkhani. I give the names of all these people. They all come, basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right. But ‘It will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor that should be removed,’ was said just two weeks ago again.”

Teymoor Nabili: “Well, I’m glad you’ve acknowledged that they didn’t say they will wipe it out.”

So that’s that. Right? Of course not. Fox News, NPR, CNN, NBC, et al. will likely continue to claim that Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, threatened to “wipe it off the map”.

And that’s only Ahmadinejad the Israeli Killer. There’s still Ahmadinejad the Holocaust Denier. So until a high Israeli official finally admits that that too is a lie, keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has never said simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we historically know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of various political stripes. In a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”³

Let us now listen to Elie Wiesel, the simplistic, reactionary man who’s built a career around being a Holocaust survivor, introducing President Obama at the Holocaust Museum for the talk referred to above, some five days after the statement made by the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister:

How is it that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons — to use nuclear weapons — to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.

“Nuclear weapons” is of course adding a new myth on the back of the old myth.

Wiesel, like Obama, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. As is Henry Kissinger and Menachim Begin. And several other such war-loving beauties. When will that monumental farce of a prize be put to sleep?

For the record, let it be noted that on March 4, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama said: “Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”⁴

Postscript: Each time I strongly criticize Barack Obama a few of my readers ask to unsubscribe. I’m really sorry to lose them but it’s important that those on the left rid themselves of their attachment to the Democratic Party. I’m not certain how best to institute revolutionary change in the United States, but I do know that it will not happen through the Democratic Party, and the sooner those on the left cut their umbilical cord to the Democrats, the sooner we can start to get more serious about this thing called revolution.

Written on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, 2012

Two simple suggestions as part of a plan to save the planet.

1. Population control: limit families to two children

All else being equal, a markedly reduced population count would have a markedly beneficial effect upon global warming, air pollution, and food and water availability; as well as finding a parking spot, getting a seat on the subway, getting on the flight you prefer, and much, much more. Some favor limiting families to one child. Still others, who spend a major part of each day digesting the awful news of the world, are calling for a limit of zero. (The Chinese government announced in 2008 that the country would have about 400 million more people if it wasn’t for its limit of one or two children per couple.⁵

But, within the environmental movement, there is still significant opposition to this. Part of the reason is fear of ethnic criticism inasmuch as population programs have traditionally been aimed at — or seen to be aimed at — primarily the poor, the weak, and various “outsiders”. There is also the fear of the religious right and its medieval views on birth control.

2. Eliminate the greatest consumer of energy in the world: The United States military.

Here’s Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Mass. in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million — and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.⁶

The United States military, for decades, with its legion of bases and its numerous wars has also produced and left behind a deadly toxic legacy. From the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in the 1960s to the open-air burn pits on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, countless local people have been sickened and killed; and in between those two periods we could read things such as this from a lengthy article on the subject in the Los Angeles Times in 1990:

U.S. military installations have polluted the drinking water of the Pacific island of Guam, poured tons of toxic chemicals into Subic Bay in the Philippines, leaked carcinogens into the water source of a German spa, spewed tons of sulfurous coal smoke into the skies of Central Europe and pumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the oceans.⁷

The military has caused similar harm to the environment in the United States at a number of its installations. (Do a Google search for <"U.S. military bases" toxic>)

When I suggest eliminating the military I am usually rebuked for leaving “a defenseless America open to foreign military invasion”. And I usually reply:

“Tell me who would invade us? Which country?”

“What do you mean which country? It could be any country.”

“So then it should be easy to name one.”

“Okay, any of the 200 members of the United Nations!”

“No, I’d like you to name a specific country that you think would invade the United States. Name just one.”

“Okay, Paraguay. You happy now?”

“No, you have to tell me why Paraguay would invade the United States.”

“How would I know?”

Etc., etc., and if this charming dialogue continues, I ask the person to tell me how many troops the invading country would have to have to occupy a country of more than 300 million people.

Yankee karma

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Every once in a while someone opposed to immigration will make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to the last is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions and policy. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador, the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras. And in Mexico, although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land.

The end result of all these policies has been an army of migrants heading north in search of a better life. It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and right-wingers.

1. Washington Post, March 5, 1987.
2. Associated Press, December 12, 2006.
3. President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University, Transcript, Washington Post, September 24, 2007.
4. Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference, White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 4, 2012.
5. Washington Post, March 3, 2008.
6. The Pentagon v. Peak Oil, TomDispatch.com, June 14, 2007.
7. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1990.

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.

Obama’s decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a “Bilateral Security Agreement” still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement “with the goal of concluding within one year”.

That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement will supersede the 2003 “Status of Forces” agreement with Afghanistan, according to the text. That agreement gives U.S. troops in Afghanistan immunity from prosecution and imposes no limitations on U.S. forces in regard to military bases or operations.

Last month’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids was forced on the United States by Karzai’s repeated threat to refuse to sign a partnership agreement unless the United States gave his government control over any raids on people’s homes. Karzai’s insistence on ending U.S. unilateral night raids and detention of Afghans had held up the agreement on Strategic Partnership for months.

But Karzai’s demand put him in direct conflict with the interests of one of the most influential elements of the U.S. military: the SOF. Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on the purported effectiveness of night raids carried out by SOF units in weakening the Taliban insurgency.

CENTCOM officials refused to go along with ending the night raids or giving the Afghan government control over them, as IPS reported last February.

The two sides tried for weeks to craft an agreement that Karzai could cite as meeting his demand but that would actually change very little.

In the end, however, it was Karzai who had to give in. What was done to disguise that fact represents a new level of ingenuity in misrepresenting the actual significance of an international agreement involving U.S. military operations.

The MOU was covered by cable news as a sea change in the conduct of military operations. CNN, for example, called it a “landmark deal” that “affords Afghan authorities an effective veto over controversial special operations raids.”

But a closer reading of the text of the MOU as well as comments on it by U.S. military officials indicate that it represents little, if any, substantive change from the status quo.

The agreement was negotiated between the U.S. military command in Kabul and Afghan Ministry of Defence, and lawyers for the U.S. military introduced a key provision that fundamentally changed the significance of the rest of the text.

In the first paragraph under the definition of terms, the MOU says:

For the purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), special operations are operations approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.

That carefully crafted sentence means that the only night raids covered by the MOU are those that the SOF commander responsible for U.S. night raids decides to bring to the Afghan government. Those raids carried out by U.S. units without consultation with the Afghan government fall outside the MOU.

Coverage of the MOU by major news media suggesting that the participation of U.S. SOF units would depend on the Afghan government simply ignored that provision in the text.

But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters flatly on April 9 that Karzai would not have a veto over night raids. “It’s not about the U.S. ceding responsibility to the Afghans,” he said.

Kirby would not comment on whether those SOF units which operated independently of Afghan units would be affected by the MOU, thus confirming by implication that they would not.

Kirby explained that the agreement had merely “codified” what had already been done since December 2011, which was that Afghan Special Forces were in the lead on most night raids. That meant that they would undertake searches within the compound.

The U.S. forces have continued, however, to capture or kill Afghans in those raids.

The disparity between the reality of the agreement and the optics created by administration press briefings recalls Obama’s declarations in 2009 and 2010 on the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and an end to the U.S. war there, and the reality that combat units remained in Iraq and continued to fight long after the September 1, 2010 deadline Obama he had set for withdrawal had passed.

Fifty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq after that deadline in 2010 and 2011.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two exercises in shaping media coverage and public perceptions: the Iraq withdrawal agreement of 2008 made it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Iraqi government to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the agreements just signed impose no such constraints on the U.S. military. And although Obama is touting a policy of ending U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Pentagon have publicly said they expect to maintain thousands of SOF troops in Afghanistan for many years after 2014.

Obama had hoped to lure the Taliban leadership into peace talks that would make it easier to sell the idea that he is getting out of Afghanistan while continuing the war. But the Taliban didn’t cooperate.

Obama’s Kabul speech could not threaten that U.S. SOF units will continue to hunt them down in their homes until they agree to make peace with Karzai. That would have given away the secret still hidden in the U.S.-Afghan “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement.

But Obama must assume that the Taliban understand what the U.S. public does not: U.S. night raids will continue well beyond 2014, despite the fact that they ensure enduring hatred of U.S. and NATO troops.

Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone …

— Maya Angelou, 1928 – Present

If destabilization, duplicity, insurgency and mass murder could surprise yet again, with the blame of the victim adding to the “shock and awe”, after Libya, Syria would certainly be a case in point.

America’s decades long plan  for another puppet government and quasi client state status for the country is well underway. Any observer of the shenanigans within the US Embassy in Damascus would be forgiven for mistaking it for a covert operations centre rather that a seat of diplomacy.

Michel Chossudovsky gives graphic life to Ambassador Ford’s – surely coincidentally – eminently pertinent and relevant qualifications.

Of course, no plan for a country’s ruination is complete without the help of the UN. Think Libya and Resolution 1973, the green light for a “humanitarian” blizkrieg, regime change, razed towns, murder from air and ground on an industrial scale, including most of the country’s leading family, its small grandchildren, and the butchering of Colonel Gaddafi, the country’s sovereign leader, whose body is still unaccounted for.

Lynch-law ruled under UN mandate.

Who then, better to be appointed “Peace Envoy” to Syria than Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General (1997-2006) who silently acquiesced to the deaths on average of 6,000 children a month in Iraq from “embargo-related causes”, throughout the 119 months of his tenure, bowing to the US-UK driven UN embargo?

Inevitably, for his silence, the man who one diplomat described as “like Pontius Pilate, he washes his hands”, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, jointly with the UN for, amongst other delusional rubbish, his “emphasizing its obligations as with regard to human rights.”

Presumably this “emphasis” also applied to his deafening muteness as America and Britain illegally bombed Iraq for his entire tenure, often daily, routinely re-destroying vital infrastructure and erasing lives in uncounted numbers.

The UN’s Baghdad cabal, with its fine restaurant and barbecue parties, ensconced at the Canal Hotel at Iraq’s expense were in a perfect position to visit these sites, record and account. They never bothered.

That was yesterday. Apart from Annan, the UN has another weapon for Syria — UN diplomats’ wives.

The wives of the German and British Ambassadors to the UN, Frau Huberta Voss-Wittig and Lady Sheila Lyall Grant, have released a video appeal and an online petition to President Assad’s wife, Syria’s First Lady, Asma al Assad. A performance of skin crawling, patronizing, head patting, treacled trash, which reflects nothing but the UN’s duplicity and its representatives privileged, reality- removed lives in its ivory tower.

The “initiative”, the pampered pair stress, is entirely independent, theirs alone, and nothing to do with their husbands.

Of course, ladies.

Frau Voss-Wittig’s involvement, it might be surmised, lies in “The German ‘no’ to the US about Iraq”, in 2002.  “Historically this was the deepest ever division between the White House and any post-cold-war German Chancellor.”

Additionally, in August 2002, Germany and France agreed on the “Declaration of Schwerin”, named for the German town where their representatives had a working dinner, resolving that they “had to oppose the war … and that they had to do it in public and as forcefully as possible.” An overt collision course with the US and UK.

Only when Angela Merkel took office were links tentatively repaired formally, but “shock-waves” remained. Two wives have clearly taken delivery of bricks and tools and set about erecting bridges, never mind demolishing those of others.

Sheila Lyall Grant is the wife of Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former political Director General of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a post with wide responsibilities including for Iraq, 2007-2009, and also line manager of post-invasion UK Ambassadors to Iraq.

He was senior policy adviser to the Foreign Secretary on various strategic Foreign Office priorities regarding Iraq, in which capacity he attended major European, G8, UN, OSCE and NATO meetings.

Sir Mark clearly went through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s rigorous and scrupulous selection process as to suitability for key posts:  “I was not an Arabist. I haven’t been posted in the Middle East”, he told the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq on January 20, 2010.

However, he added,  “It naturally fell to the Foreign Office to look at where Britain’s long-term strategic interests were in Iraq and in the wider region …”

The Iraq priority for Sir Mark had been “a strong economy”.

Whilst an  “abidance of human rights and better social conditions, better social delivery to the people (were) highly desirable, I don’t say it is absolutely essential in the near future”, he told the Inquiry. (Emphasis mine.) “Let them rot” comes to mind.

Given that Nuri al Maliki’s Iraq is now firmly allied with Iran, and a disaster on every level, with economy, health, malnutrition and social conditions worse than the embargo years, it might be thought that the Foreign Office and Sir Mark would think twice before stepping aside, as his “independent” wife became another regional unguided missile.

The wives petition, which is pretty much the same as their toe-curling video reads, in part:

Dear Asma,

Some women care for style and some women care for their people. Some women struggle for their image and some women struggle for their survival. Some women have forgotten what they preached about peace and some women can only pray for their dead.

Hundreds of Syrian children have already been killed or injured. One day, our children will ask us what we have done to stop this bloodshed. What will your answer be, Asma? That you, Asma had no choice?

Every single child had a name and a family. Their lives will never be the same again. Asma, when you kiss your own children goodnight, another mother will find the place next to her empty.

These children could all be your children. They are your children. Stand up for peace, Asma. Speak out now. Stop being a bystander. No one cares about your image. We care about your action. Right now.

Lady Lyall Grant, has been a diplomat since 1980. Her most recent post was Head of VIP Visits at the Protocol Directorate in the heart of government, Whitehall.

Clearly her induction course in protocol did not include instructions on how to address the wife of a Head of  State.

Incidentally, Sir Mark apparently cares as little about the UN as he did Iraq. Asked at the Inquiry about the current role of UN in Iraq, he replied that they were no longer there after the bombing of their building in, he hesitated, then said,“2005, was it?”

The bombing of the Canal Hotel, which killed seventeen, including the Head of Mission, Sergio de Mello, and injured scores, was on August 19, 2003.

Corrected by the Chairman, Sir Mark responded,  “2003, was it? I apologise”, apparently as sanguine about his colleagues being blown to bits as in assessing that basic provisions to sustain Iraqi lives were not “absolutely essential.”

Now, for Syria, in a  crisis so clearly manipulated from without, as Kofi Annan ratchets up the number of “UN Observers” from ten to three hundred – surely as with Iraq, many will be meddlers, spies and worse — Sheila Lyall Grant writes,  “One day, our children will ask us what we have done to stop this bloodshed.”  Every child “had a family and a name.”

The child victims of Afghanistan, decimated by the invasion, also had names – but the Taliban was blamed. As did their small counterparts in Iraq since that illegal takeover, the 4.5 million orphans, 600.000 of whom live on the streets, are still somehow the fault of Saddam Hussein, and their traumatized little global siblings in Libya are still somehow the fault of Colonel Gaddafi, who brought the country the best welfare and highest living standard in Africa.

Perhaps the diplomatic duo have not noticed that Syria, generous host country to two million Iraqis fleeing their “liberation” now have their own nationals fleeing in fear over the border to Jordan; Syrians now joining the near similar number of Iraqis there, refugees themselves. Iraqis in Syria have nowhere to run.

The ladies have seemingly also missed the media coverage of senior, experienced Al Jazeera journalists, who have walked away from their livelihood in protest and disgust at the media distortion and manipulation of Syria’s plight, the portrayal, of course, that all blame lies with President al Assad.

Further, “Peace Envoy” Kofi Annan has already let slip that both he and the “truce monitors should help pave the way for much needed political process”.  Presumably he means with those insurgents with foreign passports. Read “regime change”.

And no planned destruction, overthrow, and general catastrophe would be complete without hidden weaponry and hardware with which the leader “oppresses his own people.” Syria, say – as ever – unnamed “activists” is hiding tanks and weapons in government compounds.

The media faithfully repeats the mantra. None seem to have mentioned that one of the “Peace Envoy’s” stipulations, to which Bashar al Assad agreed, was to take tanks and weapons off the streets. Where rebel violence is such that government troops are not forced to respond, they have been withdrawn — back to government compounds. Mr. Annan seemingly has not thought to point this out.

China’s Ambassador, Li Baodong, appears to be watching more closely than most. He expressed the hope that “the Supervision Mission will fully respect Syria’s sovereignty and dignity, act in strict accordance with the authorization of the Security Council, adhere to the principles of neutrality and impartiality …”   Quite!

If Lady Lyall Grant cares about children, which could equally be “her” children, she should ponder on, and tell her humanity-deficient husband of just one, which represents the trauma of every child, in every street, in every country targeted by an unholy Western alliance – and the UN.

It is an Iraqi boy of about five in an orphanage asleep. He has drawn a huge picture, depicting his mother on the floor, her arms outstretched. He is curled up on it. Every night he goes to sleep the same way — on the floor between her arms.

Well past time for the powerful to grow the hell up. Those children could be your children.

Born in Mexico, Hernández Rojas arrived in the United States at the age of 16. For more than 27 years, he lived and labored here, where he married and had five children. In May 2010, after losing his construction job, he was arrested for shoplifting. When a background check showed that he was in the country without official sanction, the police turned him over to federal authorities, who deported him to Mexico. Not willing to accept exile from his wife and children, Hernández Rojas quickly crossed back into the United States, but Border Patrol agents intercepted him in a remote area as he tried to head home.

At the detention facility, an agent allegedly assaulted and injured Hernández Rojas, which led him to express a desire to file a complaint. That same agent reportedly was one of two who drove him back—alone—to the port of entry in San Ysidro (the southernmost portion of San Diego) to deport him again. It was there, just a few feet from the actual boundary with Mexico, where the night-time, deadly assault took place, one involving over a dozen agents.

A San Diego County Medical Examiner’s report concluded that Hernández Rojas’s death was a case of homicide. It was due to a heart attack—one induced by the shocks from the taser. (According to an Amnesty International report, 334 people died in the United States after being shocked with a taser, a supposedly non-lethal device, or a similar conducted-energy weapons between June 2001 and August 2008.) The 42-year-old father also sustained broken ribs; several loosened teeth; bruises all over his body and head, and injury to his spine.

What allowed the beating and electrocution to go legally unchallenged was the uncritical acceptance of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) account of events by authorities at various levels. According to the agency’s official story, agents did what they did because an un-handcuffed Hernández Rojas “became combative,” and the use of batons and the taser was necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety.”

The blatant nature of the brutality, the cover-up of what transpired, and what appear to be clear violations of the law have helped to provoke widespread outcry. From press conferences, to an online petition and myriad news reports, pressure is mounting on federal authorities to conduct a far-reaching investigation of Hernández Rojas’s death.

More broadly, advocates—such as John Carlos Frey, a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter involved with the making of Crossing the Line at the Border—point to an institutional culture of impunity that allows killings by Border Patrol agents to go virtually unexamined outside the agency. Frey also highlights the rush to recruit ever-more agents in the aftermath of 9-11, and lowered standards of recruitment and training, in trying to explain “at least eight documented cases of extreme use of force against unarmed and non-combative migrants resulting in death” at the hands of the Border Patrol since May 2010.

Whether or not relatively new agents recruited and trained under less rigorous criteria are responsible for the deaths is not known as the CBP hasn’t even released the names of the agents involved. But, perhaps more importantly, the effect of such a line of argument is to suggest that better qualified agents are the answer to the problem.

No doubt, rigorous screening of applicants and good training, and some sort of public oversight mechanism, are very preferable to the lack thereof. But in privileging such factors, what gets obscured is the every day violence—and death and suffering—that federal boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus brings about through its normal practices.

Over the last couple of decades, many thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to traverse the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and enter the United States—in order to find work, or rejoin loved ones. U.S. authorities have also sent millions into exile abroad, many of them long-standing U.S. residents with almost non-existent ties to their countries of birth. In the process they have separated hundreds of thousands of children from parents. They have also reduced the life spans of many deportees: in a particularly egregious case, one of the first individuals “removed” to Haiti after the Obama administration resumed deportations to the earthquake-ravaged country in 2011 lost his life to cholera soon after his arrival.

The law and the institutionalized nature of the practices that produce these outcomes help to obscure the violence they embody—and the related death and suffering. But just because many do not see the violence for what it is—as death-producing—does not mean it is anything less.

From the very establishment of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, killing people and denying life has been central to what the international divide is all about. After all, its foundation necessitated a war of conquest and the dispossession of the Native and Mexicano populations in the borderlands. And, in the face of so many who refuse to accept the original injustice, its maintenance has required various forms of violence on a regular basis ever since. More broadly, in a world of profound inequality, one predicated on the production of differences such as those based on race, class, and nation, the boundary reflects and helps reproduce who gets what in terms of rights and resources, and the very nature of life and death—and the various states in between.

Anastasio Hernández Rojas was born on the wrong side of the boundary dividing people and places of privilege from those of disadvantage. Like countless others in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class, he thus became disposable. When U.S. authorities deported Hernández Rojas to Mexico and deprived him of his right to be with his family, they effectively denied his right to live. And when they beat and tased him to death, they did so as well.

Realizing justice—achieving true accountability—for Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s murder requires that we go far beyond the parameters of his particular case. It necessitates that we contest the very socio-territorial arrangement that made him disposable in the first place. Otherwise, we will end up affirming and strengthening a boundary that grants life to some, and consigns others to death.

There’s even an upside to the parade of medical journal articles linking red meat to coronary heart disease and cancer deaths. As long as people are taking about beef’s ick factor and link to progressive diseases, they’re not talking about the “third rail” of meat safety – mad cow disease.

It’s has been almost ten years since the U.S.’s first mad cow was discovered. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. beef exports evaporated within 24 hours when Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and 90 other countries banned US beef. The only reason the European Union didn’t ban U.S. beef was because it had already banned it for excessive use of growth hormones!

Now the U.S. is trying to win back Japan and China’s business, not fully restored since the first U.S. mad cow, in a trade version of the golden rule or “turnabout is fair play.” Specifically, the U.S. would agree to resume beef imports from other countries it has hitherto banned because of their mad cow risk (like Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands) in the hopes that the U.S.’s holdout trading partners will do the same, under the proposed rule.

“Quite simply, this proposed rule will show the United States is willing to talk the talk and walk the walk with regard to following international standards developed by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE),” says National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Director of Legislative Affairs Kent Bacus. “It’s difficult for us to continue to demand that our trading partners comply with OIE standards when we don’t,” agrees Josh Winegarner, government relations director for the Texas Cattle Feeders Association.

But R-CALF USA, a national cattle group often at odds with the government, is unhappy with the impending we’ll-eat-it-if-you-do quid pro quo. “Exposing U.S. consumers and U.S. livestock to a heightened risk of BSE [mad cow] introduction is irresponsible and contrary to pledges made by the Obama Administration during his campaign,” says the group.

Under OIE criteria, countries can have “negligible”, “controlled”, or “undetermined” mad cow risks based on the strength of their feed bans (feeding ruminants-to-ruminants like cows to cows), control of animal imports from risky countries and disease surveillance. OIE gave the U.S. a surprising “controlled risk” status despite three identified mad cows but the classification failed to pry open closed export markets as hoped. In fact, trade officials now say the U.S.’s controlled risk status costs it $3 billion a year in foreign sales and are seeking “negligible risk” status.

Negligible risk status under OIE guidelines requires “there has been no case of BSE or, if there has been a case, every case of BSE has been demonstrated to have been imported and has been completely destroyed” and that safety measure have been observed for at least seven years. If a mad cow case or cases were home grown, a country can still seek negligible risk status, according to OIE criteria, if it can demonstrate that all cattle “reared with the BSE cases” and consuming the same potentially contaminated feed or all cattle born from the same herd are “permanently identified, and their movements controlled, and, when slaughtered or at death, are completely destroyed.”

But even under those circumstances, the U.S. doesn’t make the cut because herd mates and feed mates of the first U.S. mad cow were not “identified”, “destroyed” or had their “movements controlled” as required. Eleven out of 25 head of cattle which authorities considered “likely to have eaten the same potentially infectious feed” as the Washington state cow were never found says the Associated Press. The fail rate was considerably higher with subsequent U.S. mad cows.

Mad cow disease belongs to a family of fatal brain diseases or “transmissible encephalopathies” and is known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, scrapie in sheep and goats and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk. The diseases are thought to be transmitted by prions, invisible infectious particles that are not viruses or bacteria, but proteins.

Though prions are not technically “alive” because they lack a nucleus, they manage to reproduce. And though not technically “alive,” prions are almost impossible to “kill” or destroy because they are not inactivated by cooking, heat, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, benzene, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde or radiation. In fact, alcohol makes prions more transmissible because it binds them to metal like surgical instruments. Nor is it safe to just dump prion material in landfills because prions endure in soil for years and contaminate it.

Many have heard mad cow scare stories like: people with Alzheimer’s disease really have variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human version of mad cow disease; dogs, cats, pigs and fish are at risk; mad cow is spread by flies and mosquitoes; and mad cow is in milk or cosmetics. But prions are scary enough without urban legends to embellish them.

In humans, mad cow prions can cause a fatal neurological disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). But the government is quick to point out that humans get other forms of CJD that are not variant, including classic or sporadic – which occur spontaneously – and hereditary CJD – which is genetic. The government also says there are clinical and symptom differences between the two and that classic or sporadic CJD tends to strike the old (at an average age of 68) while vCJD tends to strike the young (the average age in Britain was 28). The problem is doctors don’t know which type of CJD a patient has without a brain biopsy, usually after death – just as veterinarians don’t know which cows have mad cow until after death.

On December 23, 2003, as the nation headed into Christmas, the USDA announced that a Holstein cow, imported from Canada and slaughtered in Moses Lake, Washington, on December 9 for human food, tested positive for mad cow disease. Ann Veneman, agriculture secretary and other USDA officials said the cow was discovered because she was a “downer” (unable to walk), indicating that the mad cow testing program worked since it screened downers as the main source of mad cow risk. But three workers who saw the animal said it walked just fine.

What followed, believe it or not, were congressional hearings, a federal criminal investigation, and a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation largely over whether or not the animal walked to slaughter. Because if the animal looked fine and walked under its own steam to slaughter, the entire federal mad cow testing program was misconceived and was letting millions of similar animals into the food supply. But if the slaughterhouse workers were lying, as the government hoped, and the animal was prodded or fork-lifted to slaughter, we might have a farming system that values money over living things and chews them up and spits them out, but at least the mad cow alert system works.

In testimony before Congress, USDA inspector general Phyllis K. Fong blamed “procedural errors” for the conflicting data about whether or not the animal walked, and said an employee “who alleged that the BSE-positive cow was ambulatory and healthy when it arrived at the facility described a different animal from the one that arrived in the same trailer and later tested BSE-positive.”

Unfortunately, that was not the only government discrepancy. There were also two very different versions of what happened to the meat from the Washington state cow. The government said in its final report that, “By December 27, 2003, FDA had located all potentially-infectious product rendered from the BSE-positive cow in Washington State. This product was disposed of in a landfill in accordance with Federal, State and local regulations.”  But the Los Angeles Times reported that despite “a voluntary recall aimed at recovering all 10,000 pounds of beef slaughtered at the plant the day the Washington state cow was killed, some meat, which could have contained the Washington cow, was sold to restaurants in several Northern California counties.” And eaten, it turns out.

“In an interview, Alameda County health officer Dr. Anthony Iton recalled that in early January 2004, almost a month after the initial discovery, state health officials informed him that five restaurants in the Oakland area had received soup bones from the lot of tainted beef,” says the Times. “It immediately dispatched inspectors to the restaurants. But it was too late; soup made from the bones had been eaten. He was particularly disturbed to learn that none of the restaurant owners had received written notice of the recall and that federal inspectors did not visit them until 10 days after the recall.”

There was a second affront to food consumers besides letting the mad cow into the food supply and lying about it: bound by a USDA rule, the California Department of Health Services did not release the identities of stores or restaurants that purchased the meat, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Alameda and Santa Clara counties have been informed by the state that 11 local restaurants and a market purchased soup bones from the suspect lot, but they have also declined to identify which establishments purchased them,” said the Chronicle. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture insists the recall is precautionary and the meat poses no health risk.”

USDA spokesman Matthew Baun actually said it was the public’s responsibility to find out if any food they ate was at risk because the recall information was a trade secret! It is “up to consumers to check with their grocers, butchers or restaurants to find out if any of the recalled meat may have landed on their tables,” said Baun. “We are prohibited from releasing information that companies would consider proprietary. If you are concerned whether you may have purchased the product, you can call your retail store. They would know. . . . The only way to know for sure is to contact stores.”

Being “concerned” whether you “purchased” a product that could cause certain death struck the public as a glib understatement and four years later similar outrage over  government shielding of outlets selling meat from sick and abused cattle killed for the National School Lunch Program at Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California prompted the USDA to reverse its policy protecting sellers, if not growers, of dangersous meat.

More Mad Cows and More Damage Control

Because of suspicions that feeding ruminants-to-ruminants and making cows cannibals could cause or spread mad cow disease, the U.S. had already banned the “protein recyling” practice in 1997. But one week after the Washington state mad cow surfaced, the USDA strengthened controls against mad cow disease by banning downer cattle in the food supply. It also banned “specified risk material“(SRM) from cows in the human food supply which included brains, skulls, eyes, spinal cords, tonsils, spleens, lymph tissues, and most of the vertebral column and small intestine, said to be at highest risk.

While scientific literature suggests that all cattle tissue, not just SRM, can harbor BSE infectivity, the government submits that “the presence of PrP [BSE] does not necessarily indicate the presence of BSE infectivity,”–meaning it may be in the meat but you may not catch it. Not too reassuring.

Japan and South Korea, two of the U.S.’s top-three beef importing nations were also not reassured by the new safety controls and withheld their business. And even as Mike Johanns, who succeeded Ann Veneman as agriculture secretary, tried to woo back Japan’s $1.5 billion a year business and South Korea’s $800 million,¹ the unthinkable happened. A second mad cow was found in the U.S. and unlike the first cow, which had been born in Canada, the second cow had never left its Texas ranch.²

Worse, the 12-year-old “cream-colored Brahma cross” had been suspected of mad cow eleven months after the Washington cow, but the government did not tell the public until seven months later. It took the government three tests to identify the cow as positive, the last test unilaterally ordered by USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong over Johanns’ head. Asked why the United States’ best technology was missing mad cows Johanns conceded to reporters that prion distribution in a brain could make “it possible for one sample to test negative while another sample might test positive,” reported the Houston Chronicle. He also conceded that “the protocol we developed just a few years ago to conduct the tests, including the type of antibody used, might not be the best option today.”

And there were other disturbing facts. The cream-colored Brahma cross was sold at a livestock sale despite reports that she was a downer. (“The cow had always been excitable and had fallen while she was being loaded to go to the market, but that this was not unusual behavior for her,” the owner told government investigators.) The buyer sent the Brahma cross to the slaughterhouse four days later, but when the truck arrived at H&B Packing in Waco, she was dead and the truck turned around and transported her instead to Champion Pet Food, across town. And 350 of her possible herd mates and offspring were slaughtered “and possibly in the human food supply, even before the government inquiry began,” reported the Dallas Morning News. The cow’s owner was “relatively sure” he had not kept any offspring from the cow at the facility but “there were essentially no records maintained on the index farm,” reported the government.

Yet despite selling an animal that couldn’t walk for human food, maintaining no records and the business’ very murky ownership, according to the government, the identity of the ranch and its owner was protected. Even more outrageous, the ranch was cleared to resume selling meat within one month. Why should a livestock operation be penalized for producing food that could kill people?

Meanwhile, the trading relationship with Japan was roiling. One month after Japan agreed to start importing U.S. beef again in early 2005, SRM – specified risk material -was found in a U.S. beef shipment and the ban was immediately re-imposed. Oops. The USDA conducted a self-policing “export verification audit” to reassure Japan and it just made things worse. Nine slaughterhouses were found in noncompliance with SRM policies, according to the audit, and 29 downers went into a human food supply, 20 not tested for mad cow disease. The reason the cows were not tested for mad cow almost sounds like a joke. Government inspectors “did not believe that they had the authority” to go into the pens where the animals were held and get samples, reported the Houston Chronicle.

In answers to written questions from Japanese agriculture officials, Johanns said the 29 cattle were healthy until they arrived at the slaughterhouses, “where they suddenly became unable to walk because of injury or other factors,” reported Eiji Hirose of Yomiuri Shimbun/Daily Yomiuri – kind of like the Texas rancher’s “excitable” cow. Legally, downers could be slaughtered for food if they had suffered an acute injury after passing inspection. But Johanns did not give any “clear evidence for his conclusion,” wrote Hirose, and his overall comments appeared “to show the U.S. government does not take the issue seriously enough.” Japan’s agriculture minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, was similarly unappeased and told Johanns in a phone conversation, he was concerned about SRM and downer cows. Japan then sent a team of officials to inspect US slaughterhouses firsthand.

Can anyone guess what happened next? Even before Japanese inspectors arrived in the U.S., another mad cow was found. On March 13, 2006, a deep-red, crossbred beef cow from an Alabama ranch, estimated to be ten years old, became the third confirmed U.S. mad cow.

Like the Texas cow, the Alabama cow was a downer, initial tests failed to disclose her mad cow status and the identity of the Alabama ranch and its owner were protected. Also, like the Texas cow, she had recently given birth – she “had at her side a 2- to 3-week old red Charolais cross female calf” at the time of her death, said the government report – and her herd mates were not found or kept out of the food supply, though 37 farms were investigated.

The audit for Japan and mishandling of the first three mad cows are not the only red flags for U.S. beef safety. Lester Friedlander, DVM, a USDA federal meat inspector for 10 years, told United Press International in 2005 that a USDA official told him not to say anything if he ever discovered a case of mad cow disease, and that he knew of cows that had tested positive at private laboratories, but were ruled negative by the USDA.

And a 2008 Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) report to assess safe removal of specified risk material (SRM) in U.S. slaughterhouses found the same equipment was being used at one facility on animals at high risk of mad cow and other animals because, according to the supervisory public health veterinarian, “there were no ‘visible SRMs’ on the equipment,” as if prions could be seen. The government report also says FSIS Headquarters officials “believed the sanitizer spray was sufficient to address the problem,” as if prions aren’t practically indestructible. Maybe it was even alcohol.

Cluster Bombs

Even before the 2003 Washington state cow, agribusiness recognized the damage that rumors of mad cow or other lethal agents in the food supply could do and lobbied lawmakers to pass food disparagement laws in the late 1990s. Oprah Winfrey herself was tried in Amarillo in 1997 for “disparaging” beef when she remarked on her show that she would never eat a hamburger again after learning of the forced cannibalism on U.S. farms, causing cattlemen to lose $11 million when prices plummeted. She was acquitted.

Since the three U.S. mad cows, beef producers and officials are quick to reassure the public when CJD cases surface that the brain diseases are not variant CJD from eating meat. Still, the damage control is tough when cases occur in clusters since sporadic or classic CJD by definition occur randomly and not in clusters.

Soon after the Washington state cow, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigated a potential cluster of more than 13 CJD cases, thought by some to be linked to food served at the Garden State Racetrack in southern New Jersey. But the CDC issued a report that found five of the cases were sporadic CJD, not variant CJD; six were “probable” CJD but not variant; three were not CJD; and three were still under investigation. The occurrence of 14 CJD-related cases over 9.25 years “would not be unusual,” said the CDC.

Apparent clusters of nine people in Idaho in 2005³ , four in northeastern Indiana in 2007 and two in Tennessee in 2009, were similarly smoothed over. And when a CJD patient was admitted to an Amarillo, Texas hospital in 2008 causing cattle futures to tank, a beef-cattle specialist with the Amarillo office of Texas AgriLife Extension assured the public the case was sporadic not variant – before test results were even in. Two years later, there were more questions about CJD cases in Texas. A map of “CJD Cases by County 2000–2010″ on the Texas Department of State Health Services website shows two red areas that look like, well, clusters.

Nonetheless, Americans seem less rattled about beef scares than are countries they export to. As the U.S. and South Korea prepared to sign the free-trade agreement, KORUS FTA, in 2008, which included wide provisions for beef trade, actual riots over the risk of mad cow in U.S. beef broke out in South Korea. “We Don’t Like the FDA,” “Mad Cow, You Eat It!” and “Send Mad Cow to the Presidential Office!” chanted demonstrators at candlelight vigils in 22 cities, some dressed in cow costumes.

Fueling the riots were reports in local media that Koreans are genetically more vulnerable to vCJD, that mad cow prions were in cosmetics, diapers and sanitary napkins and television images of downer cows at Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California fork-lifted and “water-boarded” to slaughter for National School Lunch Program a few months earlier. And even as President George W. Bush assured South Korean president Lee Myung-bak at Camp David during the trade negotiations that U.S. beef was safe, a case of CJD appeared in a 22-year-old Virginia woman who had never left the country. It was an unusually young age for CJD if it weren’t variant.

As the U.S. now seeks “negligible risk” status for mad cow disease, there’s no reason to believe its institutionalized ineptitude, denial and misinformation about beef risks has changed and therefore that such a classification means anything. In fact, there is only one government safeguard that beef consumers can count on: if more mad cows surface, the names of the ranches that produce them will be protected.

An earlier version of this report appeared on Truth-out.org

1. Art Hovey, “Cattlemen leery of reopening border”,  Lee Newspapers, February 10, 2005
2. Betsy Blaney, “Cattle Herd Must Stay Put—Texas Ranch Where Diseased Cow Originated Is Quarantined,” Associated Press, July 1, 2005
3. Rare Disease Raises Questions—Idaho Cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Herald Journal, October 23, 2005

Seasoned U.S. analysts seem to agree with the Iranian assessment. Stephen M Walt writes in Foreign Policy, “For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the Obama administration is thinking about Iran… I’m puzzled.” Gary Sick, writing for CNN, predicts dire consequences of an attack on Iran and seems to question its wisdom. So why is Obama being so confrontational? So irrational?

The president as usual tries to position himself in the middle, chiding Republican opponents for “loose talk” about war while assuring Israeli prime minister Netanyahu that the U.S. will move in “lock step” with Israel. But what is the logic of offering Iran a “last chance” to stop doing what it is legally entitled to do? The only logic I can see here–and it is a perverse form–resides in the assumption that as the bombs start to fall Washington will be able to say, “We were patient, we went that last mile, and gave them their opportunity, but they defied the international community and so we (or Israel) had to attack.” It is 2003 all over again.

Recall that Obama was elected in large part due to his opposition to the war in Iraq. In a 2002 speech he declared that he opposed “the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” But he never really denounced the campaign of lies, or expressed moral indignation at the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, the uprooting of millions, the spread of ethnic and sectarian conflicts following the U.S. attack Rather, he saw the war as a “strategic blunder.” Still, he was widely regarded as the “anti-war” candidate.

Once elected, however, he proved to be a virtual Bush clone in foreign affairs. He chose hawkish Hilary Clinton (who had strongly supported the attack on Iraq and defended her position until late in her campaign) as Secretary of State, to the applause of the neocons who correctly anticipated that she would provide continuity with their own regime-change policies. He ordered U.S. troops out of Iraq, but he can’t take credit for the withdrawal. It occurred in accordance with the agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government worked out in 2008. (Indeed Obama attempted to renegotiate the agreement to allow for the continued presence of U.S. troops and bases but was thwarted by the Iraqis who detested the occupation. In other words: it is despite not because of Obama that the U.S. has pulled its troops out of Iraq.)

On Iran, Obama made it clear from his very first post-election press conference that he would maintain a policy of confrontation. Asked about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s message congratulating him on his election, he sidestepped the question but sternly (and obviously according to a script) declared that “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon” is “unacceptable.” And ever since his administration has promoted the assumption that Iran has a secret, active military nuclear program which must be stopped by any means necessary.

(This is the case even when, as in recent days, the White House agrees that there is no hard evidence for the existence of a nuclear weapons program! The more or less open discussion with the Israelis involves the establishment of the “red line” that would justify military action. What seems to really be “unacceptable” is the mere knowledge and ability to produce nuclear weapons. But you can’t say that too often in public. You can’t say, “We will deny Iran the right to reach the technological level that many other countries have done, legally and without our objection–because we don’t like Iran!)

Exactly like George W. Bush, Obama has repeatedly stated that he leaves “no options off the table” including military force.

How have we reached this “last chance” interval? The irrationality is in fact mind-boggling. How is it that while the entire U.S. intelligence community has on the basis of exhaustive research and analysis concluded–twice–that Iran terminated its (incipient) program of research in 2003 and does not have a nuclear weapons program; and while the Joint Chiefs of Staff is firmly opposed to an attack on Iran; and while the IAEA has repeatedly reported no evidence for diversion of enriched uranium for military purposes–Obama can still treat Iran’s civilian program as an imminent danger? And threaten war?

Since 9/11 we have seen how powerful campaigns of misinformation can shape public opinion. Hermann Goering’s observation (that if you tell people they’re under attack you can always drag the people along to support a military response) has been repeatedly confirmed. To justify the attack on Iraq, Madison Avenue techniques were used: coordinated talking-points made in televised interviews (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud over New York City); leaking of dubious “intelligence products” through cooperative journalists like Judith Miller and Jeffrey Goldberg; proliferating charges of “drones of death” carrying biological and chemical weapons, al-Qaeda training camps, meetings between al-Qaeda figures and Baathist officials including Saddam himself, mobile biological weapons factories, etc.

All lies! When no evidence of weapons of mass production or al-Qaeda ties surfaced, the administration brushed it off as the result of “faulty intelligence” and urged people to look forward, not backward.

This is what Obama said too, as he took office. He was urged by some to have the Justice Department prosecute those responsible for the criminal war based on lies. “We need to look forward, not backwards,” he replied. He then moved forward to accelerate the Afghan War, increasing U.S. troops from around 10,000 to over 90,000. He moved on to bomb Pakistan and Yemen with drones, to bomb Libya to achieve regime change, and is now threatening Syria. The current administration is as bloody as the last one.

Preparations for an attack on Iran have been made, like those for the Iraq War, through a media campaign involving terrifying phrases and accusations. “Mushroom cloud over New York” has been replaced with “existential threat,” “nuclear holocaust,” “threats to wipe Israel off the map,” “calls for the destruction of Israel.” This is fear-mongering with a twist. Few are suggesting that Iran constitutes a major threat to the U.S.; instead the focus is on the putative threat to Israel.

Many have pointed out that key architects of the Iraq War (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser) authored a report under Perle’s leadership in 1996 for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. (They did so presumably in their capacity as U.S.-Israeli dual nationals.) The paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advocated pre-emptive strikes against Iran and Syria, regime change in Iraq, and the abandonment of “land for peace” negotiations with Palestinians. In fact, the Israeli government was delighted with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, a supporter of militant Palestinian groups. But the war propagandists said little about Israel’s interests in regime change. They surely didn’t want to encourage the perception that this would be a “war for Israel.”

This time is different. Obama might tell Jeffrey Goldberg–as he did in an interview last week–that the U.S. would “still be a profound national-security interest of the United States to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon” even if “Israel weren’t in the picture.” But Israel’s plainly at the center of the political discourse on Iran in this country.

Norman Podhoretz, the “father of neoconservativism,” begged the Bush administration to bomb Iran in 2007, arguing that the world was at a crossroads such as 1938, and that appeasement was likely to produce another holocaust. We’ve been hearing this shrill rhetoric for years. It is illogical. Ahmadinejad is not a Hitler. He has limited powers under the Iranian system, and does not control foreign policy. If he was inclined to annihilate Jews, you’d think he’d begin with the 25,000 or so Jews in Iran, but he distinguishes them from Zionists and says he respects their rights.

Let’s dissect some of the sensationalistic language underlying the (joint U.S.-Israeli) drive for confrontation.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If you do a Google search, you’ll find tens of thousands of journalistic references to this concept as though it were a fact. I have not seen a poll showing how many people in this country truly assume that such a program exists, but I’d wager most do. So the Big Lie has been effective.

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• The Iranians have consistently stated that they do not have or want a nuclear weapons program. They want to enrich uranium for nuclear medicine and for electrical power. They are not necessarily doing anything other than what Brazil, Argentina, Japan and other countries have done under IAEA investigation, and as signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they are absolutely entitled to do so. (The language of the treaty is clear: signatory nations have the “inalienable right” to develop civilian Nuclear programs.)

• The chief decision-maker in Iran is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. His religious edicts (fatwa) are considered binding law by Shiite Muslims. In 2005 he issued a fatwa banning the production, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons as un-Islamic.

• The entire U.S. intelligence community (CIA, FBI, military intelligence, etc.) in two National Intelligence Estimates (in 2007 and 2010) concluded with a high degree of confidence that Iran does not have an active nuclear program.

• Israeli intelligence has concluded the same thing.

• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has never found any evidence for a nuclear weapons program. It has found some evidence for concealment of information, and complained of some lack of cooperation. But due to political manipulation, and the appointment of Yukiya Amano as director in 2009, the agency has become increasingly critical of Iran, packaging dated and dubious data to put pressure on Tehran. (A U.S. diplomatic cable leaked by the Guardian states that while campaigning for the appointment to replace the independent, respected scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei “Amano reminded [the] ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the developing countries group], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.” The 2005 IAEA resolution leading to UNSC sanctions against Iran was determined by politics, not science. 22 of 35 then-member nations of the Agency voted to declare Iran in “non-compliance” with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was basically a matter of NATO nations voting as a bloc, with Algeria, Brazil, China, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russian Federation, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Yemen opposed or abstaining.)

• The most recent IAEA report, widely reported as damning, really just repeats old charges. The principle one involves the design of a nuclear warhead found on a laptop computer allegedly stolen from a dead Iranian nuclear scientist and presented to the U.S. in 2004. It’s thought to have been provided through the Mujahaddin Khalq (MEK), a militant organization of Iranian exiles (which fought on behalf of Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War, when the U.S. was supporting Saddam’s invasion of the neighboring Country, and which happens to be listed by the State Department as a “terrorist” organization) or by Israeli intelligence. In 2005 after the U.S. shared the find with the IAEA, the New York Times quoted a “senior European diplomat” as stating, “I can fabricate that data”; the material, he said, “is open to doubt.” Iran has stated that the laptop evidence is fake. It does not seem to have caused U.S. intelligence agencies to alter their assessment that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program.

• Last month the IAEA delegation to Iran was denied admission to the Parchin military Base. The IAEA mandate does not include demanding spot checks on military bases, and the Iranians claim that the request last month was inappropriate. Amano depicted this as a matter of serious concern, stoking suspicion of nuclear activity. However Iran consented to thorough examination of base sites by the IAEA in 2004, 2005 (twice) and 2006, and the agency found nothing suspicious.

Iran has called for the destruction of Israel. How many times have we heard that? But what are the specific quotes? The Iranian leadership, along with many and varied forces in the world (including some Israeli Jewish historians), believe that the state of Israel was established through savage violence at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. They believe the refugee problem was due to Zionist terrorism–which is in fact not a terribly controversial thesis on this planet. (There seems little question that between April 9, 1948 when the terror began and May 15 when Arab armies “invaded” on Palestinians’ behalf over 300,000 had fled for their lives, while the Israeli Haganeh forces systematically wiped 170 Palestinian towns and villages off the map.) Iranians like many people around the world do not like the concept of a “Jewish state” established at others’ expense and feel a sense of solidarity with the Palestinians.

Some Iranian leaders address gatherings where the people shout, “Death to Israel!” just as they shout, “Death to America!” But how does the rhetoric translate into action?

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• In the spring of 2003, the Iranian government of President Mohamed Khatami (usually depicted as a “moderate” and advocate of “the dialogue of civilizations”) sent a letter to the U.S. State Department via the Swiss ambassador to Tehran (who handles U.S.-Iranian relations). The letter proposed normalization of U.S.-Iranian relations, and acknowledged the need to discuss Iranian support for groups the U.S. lists as “terrorist” and also its nuclear program. It indicated that Iran would support the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative endorsed by the Arab League. (This entails support for a two-state solution and recognition of Israel.) Vice President Cheney was infuriated, insisted that the administration ignore the letter, and berated the Swiss diplomat for even passing it on.

Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. You even see: “…has repeatedly” called for this. It’s not true.

(Keep in mind that the mainstream media has been inclined to circulate disinformation about him Ahmadinejad from the day he was elected in June 2005. He was falsely identified as one of the students who took U.S. embassy personnel hostage during the 1979-81 Hostage Crisis, and President Bush publicly referred to “his involvement” in it. The CIA subsequently quietly concluded that he hadn’t been involved.)

The key statement was made at a conference in Tehran October 2005. Numerous translators have questioned this rendering of his comments, some arguing that there is no such expression as “wipe off the map” in Persian (Farsi). The statement by Ahmadinejad is actually a paraphrase of a statement by the Ayatollah Khomeni (d. 1989), who declared that Israel would go the way of the Shah of Iran’s regime, and that of the Soviet Union.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor of Middle East history fluent in Farsi, smelled “the whiff of war propaganda” in the widely reproduced quotation. His own translation runs as follows: “the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shaved).”

The vigorously pro-Israel Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated the phrase as “this regime” must be “eliminated from the pages of history.” The word for “page” can also e translated as “stage.” The Khomeini statement seems a prediction, rather than a call for specific action. (And is it not entirely thinkable that demographics, settlement, and culture might produce within the next hundred years a multicultural, multi-ethnic, non-religious state in what is now Israel/Palestine? Even some prominent Israeli Jews have suggested this.)

In any case the Iranian Foreign Ministry responded to the furor with a clarification. In February 2006 the Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, answered a question at a news conference about Ahmadinejad’s statement. “How is it possible to remove a country from the map?” he asked. “[Ahmadinejad] is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime.”

Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly said that his remark was misinterpreted. In January 2006, complaining about the “hue and cry” over his statement, he said “Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.” In July 2008 he told a meeting of the D-8 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) that his country would never initiate military action but that the Israeli regime would eventually collapse on its own.

Later that year he was asked by a journalist: “If the Palestinian leaders agree to a two-state solution, could Iran live with an Israeli state?” His response: “If [the Palestinians] want to keep the Zionists, they can stay … Whatever the people decide, we will respect it. I mean, it’s very much in correspondence with our proposal to allow Palestinian people to decide through free referendums.”

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• Iranian government officials have repeatedly stated that they will defer to the Palestinians in deciding the their future, and expressed openness to the Saudi two-state solution endorsed by the Arab League.

Existential threat. Israeli politicians echoed by U.S. columnists continually refer to the Iranian nuclear program as a threat to the very existence of the state of Israel. But intelligence experts, like Ephraim Halevy, who headed Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad from 1998 to 2002, disagree. “The State of Israel cannot be destroyed,” he told journalists last November. He added: “[Iran is] far from posing an existential threat to Israel” and warned, “An attack on Iran could affect not only Israel, but the entire region for 100 years.” He even declared that Jewish extremism within Israel was a greater problem than Iran: “The growing Haredi radicalization poses a bigger risk than Ahmadinejad.”

Those raising the fear of an existential threat meet with the logical reply: “Given that Israel is armed with (undeclared) nuclear weapons, and could respond many times over to an Iranian attack, why would rational people in Iran ever bomb Israel?” The fear-mongers’ reply is simple: “We’re not dealing with rational people.”

The Iranian leaders, they argue, are Islamist fanatics, eager to court martyrdom and unconcerned about their people’s well-being. They are so driven by anti-Semitism that they would sacrifice millions of Iranians just to wipe out the Jews as Hitler failed to do. The key quote summoned in support of this argument is from former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani in 2001: “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession, the strategy of colonization would face a stalemate because the application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damage in the Muslim world.”

This statement (in a Friday sermon) noted the obvious. At present, Israel enjoys a regional nuclear monopoly (although we should note that Pakistan, a country in “the world of Islam,” already had nuclear weapons at the time Rafsanjani spoke.) If nearby Muslim countries had nuclear weapons, Israel’s freedom of action (“strategy of colonization”) would be limited. The statement, while ambiguous, does not threaten Israel but implies that given its size an relatively small population Israel would fare far worse in a nuclear exchange than a country like Iran—if Iran were to emulate Israel and acquire nukes.

I have seen this quotation reproduced with the significant section “…the strategy of colonization would face a stalemate because…” omitted, making the statement seem more ominous than it is. It has been used too often as “evidence” that the Iranian leadership positively looks forward to incurring damage to Iran so long as it can bomb Israel, leaving nothing.

This of course requires one to believe that the Iranians are not only eager to annihilate Israeli Jews but indifferent to the lives of Palestinians (about 20% of the Israeli total) and the approximately five percent of Israelis who are neither Jews nor Arabs. Rafsanjani is generally considered a “moderate” and political foe of Ahmadinejad. This interpretation of his statement is (once again) fear-mongering.

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• Iran has not attacked another country in several hundred years. It has no territorial claims on its neighbors and enjoys good relations with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iraq. It spends less than two percent of its GDP on military spending, as compared to Israel’s over six percent, and just about half as much in dollar terms as Israel. Iran spends $89 per capita per year on military spending, as opposed to $1,882 in Israel and $2,141 in the U.S. (the highest in the world).

• U.S. and Israeli military and intelligence officials agree that the Iranian leadership is rational and not reckless. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, recently told CNN that “the Iranian regime is a rational actor.” Meir Dagan, another former Mossad chief (Halevy’s successor, from 2002 to 2009), recently told CBS, “The regime in Iran is a very rational regime… No doubt that the Iranian regime is maybe not exactly rational based on what I call Western-thinking, but no doubt they are considering all the implications of their actions.” Dagan meanwhile calls an Israeli attack on Iran “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”

Finally: Nuclear holocaust. A brilliant propaganda expression, combining the terrifying imagery of the mushroom cloud with the memory of systematic round-ups and genocide.

But if the Iranian leadership seeks to imitate the Nazis and effect a “final solution” to the Jewish question, why did Ayatollah Khomeini issue a fatwa in 1979, when he returned to Iran, Requiring respect for the rights of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians? Why does Iran have a community of some 25,000 Jews (the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel)? Why does the Iranian constitution specify (Art. 64), that out of the 270 members of the legislature “the Zoroastrians and Jews will each elect one representative; Assyrian and Chaldean Christians will jointly elect one representative; and Armenian Christians in the north and those in the south of the country will each elect one representative”?

These are surely inconvenient truths to some, who want to exaggerate to oppression of Jews in Iran to support their apocalyptic Chicken Little scenarios. One finds a classic example in two pieces published in the National Post of Canada in May 2006 alleging that the Iranian parliament hadpassed laws requiring “special insignia” for Jews and other religious minorities. Written by the extreme rightwing journalist Amir Taheri, an Iranian expatriate who had firmly supported the Shah, and Chris Wattie, a Canadian journalist who’d been embedded with Canadian forces in Afghanistan and glorified their mission, it was picked up by UPI.

It was published in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Jerusalem Post. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was asked about it in a press briefing. “Despicable,” he raged, just like “Germany under Hitler.” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, readily accepted the report. “This is reminiscent of the Holocaust,” he stated. “”Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis.” But it was 100% disinformation! It was quickly refuted by (among others) by the Iranian ambassador to Canada and the indignant Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament. The paper retracted the story and apologized, but some damage had been done–as was surely the intention.

Also in 2006, Netanyahu offered this splendid historical analogy: “In 1938,” he averred, “Hitler didn’t say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren’t even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide.” Outgoing US UN Ambassador John Bolton called on the UN International Court of Criminal Justice to charge Ahmadinejad with “inciting genocide.” “It’s time to take action,” he told a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations symposium. “We’re being given early warning, unambiguously, on what his intentions are.” A mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv!

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• There are over 30 operating synagogues in Iran, kosher stores and restaurants and Hebrew schools.

• While by law there is one member of parliament elected per 150,000 people, the Jewish community of 25,000 is guaranteed one seat.

• While life is oppressive for everyone in Iran, an Islamist theocracy, Jews hold jobs in government ministries and state-owned firms. Their lot may be unhappy, like the lot of most Iranians. But it hardly resembles the lot of Jews in Hitler’s Germany.

“The stupidest idea I ever heard,” says the former Mossad chief. Still, the U.S. government headed by “hope” and “change” candidate Obama is telling Iran to submit to U.S. diktat while it has the chance, or get bombed.

It is all, as the Iranian diplomats observe, irrational.

War is Peace.  Ignorance is Strength.

— George Orwell,  1984

A self-appointed vigilante, carrying a loaded gun, decides to look for “danger” in his neighborhood.  He begins to follow a 17-year-old boy, who is carrying candy and a soft drink.  The boy asks why he is being followed; words are exchanged.  The man aims his gun at the boy, fires, and kills the boy dead.  The man claims he acted in “self-defense.”

A vigilante Super-State, armed to the teeth with thousands of WMDs, claims to perceive a threat from a small country, still battered and tattered from a war lost over a decade ago.  However, international inspectors are allowed to scour the country and find no such threat (i.e., WMDs).  Even so, to “prevent” any possibility of such a threat, the vigilante Super-State launches an all-out War on the small country—which is quickly pulverized, incinerated and murdered on a mass scale.  Shortly thereafter, it is discovered that the small country was un-armed.  “But the small country might still have made war!” the mass-murdering Super-State proclaimed.  “We reserve the right to pre-emptively attack in the name of our security and interests!”

The vigilante Super-State, revealed to have lied about the existence of any threat posed by the small country, is chastised for exercising poor judgment—and its genocidal war-making is largely excused and “dis-appeared” into the dungeon of repressed-memory.

Yet, on the margins of collective consciousness, a disquieting sense of festering injustice still persists—and presses for the liberation of exiled Truth.

Quite predictably, the U.S. propaganda machine has rushed to lay blame for the abortive ceasefire solely at the feet of the Syrian government.  As a New York Times headline averred Monday: “Cease-fire in Doubt as Syria Demands New Conditions.”  These “new” conditions, the article detailed, include “‘written guarantees’ that rebels would stop fighting before it pulled back its troops under the cease-fire plan.”

Of course, the six-point peace initiative proposed by joint United Nations and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, which has already been agreed upon by the Syrian government, explicitly calls for the “cessation of violence in all its forms by all parties to protect civilians and stabilize the country.”

In service to propaganda, however, the U.S. media has largely sidestepped such matters in propagating a narrative of one-sided Syrian governmental intransigence.  Thus, the maneuvering over the weekend by the armed Syrian opposition to undermine the Tuesday ceasefire was largely ignored.  Yet as Reuters reported Saturday, “Rebel Free Syrian Army commander Colonel Riad al-Asaad said his men would cease fire, provided ‘the regime … withdraws from the cities and returns to its original barracks.’”  Reuters went on to admit, “Annan’s plan does not stipulate a complete army withdrawal to barracks or mention police.”

Still, the concerted move to undo the Annan peace initiative did not begin this past weekend.  Rather, it began a full week prior.

Imperial “Friends”

In their April 1 meeting in Turkey, the so-called “Friends of Syria” proudly announced their plans to increase foreign aid to the armed Syrian opposition.  At the summit of some 70 nations, Arab states Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (all such bastions of democracy) pledged a total of $100 million to pay the individual salaries of those in the rebel “Free Syrian Army.” As Al Jazeera reported, “One delegate described the fund as a ‘pot of gold’ to undermine Assad’s army.”

Lest one forgets, the armed Syrian opposition, which the self-proclaimed “friends” of the Syrian people so readily laud and seek to now shower with cash, was publicly chided a mere two weeks ago by Human Rights Watch for committing myriad human-rights abuses against the Syrian people.  According to Human Rights Watch, armed opposition groups have been implicated in the “kidnapping, detention, and torture of security force members, government supporters, and people identified as members of pro-government militias, called shabeeha.”

Unmoved by such reports, Washington, too, decided at the April Fools “Friends” summit to offer up its own gold.  In total, the U.S. pledged $12 million for “non-lethal” and “humanitarian” aid to the Syrian rebels.  For good measure, London pitched in an additional $800,000 in “practical non-lethal support.”  But as the New York Times reported, this “non-lethal” support will not only include satellite communications equipment, but night-vision goggles as well.

It ought to be quite clear, then, that despite the official claims to the contrary, such “non-lethal” aid will ultimately be put to lethal use.  Moreover, such equipment will undoubtedly help enhance the coordination between the Syrian rebels and their NATO military advisers, the latter whom are already on the ground inside Syria, according to multiple reports.

Such a torpedoing of the Annan proposed ceasefire and peace plan, though, is the direct aim of the imperial minded “Friends of Syria.”

Orchestrating Continued Violence

By sustaining the rebel fighters, the international imperial alliance forged between NATO and its Arab client states seeks the perpetuation of violence within Syria.  For by maintaining the violence, the calls for the forcible removal of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad will predictably come to reverberate ever-louder throughout the Western press.  The purpose here, we shall see, being to build the necessary momentum for a new U.N. Security Council resolution approving a NATO intervention akin to that which ousted Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

Indeed, for as British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the BBC:

We’re working on coordinating our sanctions together and sending a clear message that there isn’t an unlimited period of time for this, for the Kofi Annan process to work before many of the nations here want us to go back to the U.N. Security Council,

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has added much the same.  As the Washington Post reported:

Once Annan determines that “we’re not getting any results…we would go back to the Security Council,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday in an interview with CBS News. “Now, what would Russia and China say?

Annan, Clinton said, “has gone to Moscow, he’s gone to Beijing, he’s met with them. They support his plan. They have urged publicly that Assad follow the plan.

So, if we have to go back to the Security Council to get authority” for more assistance to the Syrian opposition, she said, “I think we’ll be in a stronger position than we would if [Annan] hadn’t had a chance to go and try to negotiate.

Setting the Table for a Protracted Proxy War

Whether Russia and China shall feel pressured to capitulate to a NATO sponsored “regime change” resolution in the Security Council analogous to the one they vetoed back in February remains doubtful.  For even as some Western news outlets, like the Associated Press, eagerly report that Russia has begun to soften its alliance with Damascus, Moscow is unlikely to abandon its lone Arab ally.

In fact, as Reuters reported, on April 4, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly warned:

It is clear as day that even if the opposition is armed to the teeth, it will not defeat the Syrian army, and there will simply be slaughter and mutual destruction for long, long years,

Instead then, the maneuvering of the international “Friends of Syria” shall likely bring the specter of a protracted proxy war nearer.  As the New York Times cautions:

The offer to provide salaries and communications equipment to rebel fighters known as the Free Syrian Army — with the hopes that the money might encourage government soldiers to defect, officials said — is bringing the loose Friends of Syria coalition to the edge of a proxy war against Mr. Assad’s government and its international supporters, principally Iran and Russia.

And it is Iran, of course, that colors the NATO and Arab League interest in Syria.  For ousting Assad will no doubt deliver a strategic blow to Tehran: the long favored nemesis of NATO and its Arab clients.  And with a weakened and further isolated Iran, the opportunity will develop for the furtherance of NATO aggression in the Middle East under the auspices of combating the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program.

For the imperialist self-proclaimed “Friends of Syria,” we see ordinary Syrians are merely pawns to be exploited for imperial gains.

Therefore, for those truly seeking to aid the struggle of the Syrian people, work must hasten in building popular resistance to the NATO agenda.  For let there be no doubt: no revolution can proceed under an imperialist military intervention of any sort

In his opening statements in a Concord, New Hampshire (USA) courthouse on February 23, 2012, federal prosecutor John Capin launched the U.S. government’s trial against a 41 year-old Rwandan ‘genocide fugitive’ by wielding satellite photographs purportedly showing the road blocks where she “commanded extremist Hutu militia and ordered the rapes and killings of Tutsi” in Rwanda in 1994.

In a remarkable development, this is the first time in the history of the ‘Rwanda genocide’ trials or related Rwanda asylum hearings where Pentagon satellite photographs have been produced as evidence, and the first time that the existence of satellite photographs taken over Rwanda during the so-called ’100 days of genocide’ has ever been revealed.

Later in the trial the U.S. prosecutors produced a ‘Pentagon analyst’ who testified about the satellite photographs.  The name of the Pentagon analyst and the satellite photographs have not been made public. The existence of satellite reconnaissance and intelligence photographs newly implicates the U.S. government in the mass atrocities of 1994, and raises serious new questions about the coverup of the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994 and the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) commanded by now President Paul Kagame.

The sudden and unexpected revelation of the existence of satellite imagery shot over Rwanda in 1994 also further corroborates claims and evidence that U.S. and Pentagon officials had plenty of satellite evidence of the numbers and whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees massacred by the Kagame war machine in Congo’s forests.

Eighteen years after the so-called ’1994 Rwanda genocide,’ Rwanda is today everywhere peddled as an economic miracle of recovery and freedom, once again ‘the Switzerland of Africa’ and the model homeland for the Tutsi ‘Jews of Africa’ narrative.  All thanks to His Supreme Majesty President Paul Kagame, who is everywhere applauded for rescuing the Tutsis, stopping the genocide, and rebuilding Rwanda in His own image.

Meanwhile, the real situation for ordinary people in Central Africa is everywhere inhumane and unjust.  The average Ugandan citizen suffers under the brutal dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni.  The people in northern Uganda, already subject to genocide as policy under the Museveni government, now have a new threat: the hysterical KONY2012 movement.

The people of Congo continue to suffer under the terrorist government of Hyppolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila), a Tutsi and the nephew of Rwandan Tutsi general James Kabarebe.  Since January 2012 more than 100,000 Congolese have been internally displaced by violence under the occupation of the Kagame regime in the Kivu provinces.

And, as it as been since 1994, both Hutus and Tutsis suffer massive repression under the Kagame regime inside Rwanda.

Million Dollar Munyenyezi Trial

On June 24, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi (MOON’-yen-yezi) was arrested in Manchester, New Hampshire (USA) and charged, according to U.S. prosecutors, with “procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully by misrepresenting her activities during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.”

Munyenyezi is a U.S. citizen falsely accused of Rwanda genocide rape crimes in yet another case adding up to millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars being used to fund fabricated Rwanda genocide and asylum trials — and now genocide tourism expeditions in Rwanda.

The U.S. Department of Justice seeks to deport Beatrice Munyenyezi to face genocide charges in Rwanda. But Ms. Munyenyezi’s will be a milestone case: this is the first ever international legal proceeding in the United States involving a woman accused of rape as a genocide and war crime.

According to the government of Rwanda, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 41, allegedly “participated in, committed, ordered, oversaw, conspired to, aided and abetted, assisted in and directed persecution, kidnapping, rape and murder during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

The Kagame regime makes general accusations that you can arrest and charge any Hutu with. These are generic genocide charges used by the Rwandan military regime against all people of the Hutu ethnicity.

The fifteen-day trial of Beatrice Munyenyezi in February and March 2012 was concluded with four additional days of deliberations by an all-white jury. On March 15 the jury delivered a deadlocked decision and the U.S. government declared a ‘mistrial.’ The re-trial is set to begin September 10, 2012.

Mark Howard, one of Beatrice Munyenyezi’s attorneys, revealed to the press the huge sums of money spent by the U.S Judiciary to try Rwandan genocide suspects.

Howard estimated that U.S. taxpayers paid between US$ 2.5 million and $US 3 million for Munyenyezi’s recent prosecution and trial in federal court. Howard estimates that a retrial is likely to cost an additional US$1 million.

Howard’s estimated costs include attorney fees, agent salaries, the “extraordinary expense” of investigating in a foreign country, the costs of bringing some fifteen witnesses to New Hampshire, and the hiring of experts.

Several of the prosecution witnesses brought over from Rwanda in the latest charade staged by the Kagame military regime are described by the U.S. and Rwanda government as “extremist Hutu genocidaires” who were convicted of life in prison. Others are witnesses from a women’s genocide survivor organization in Butare, paid by the U.S. government to travel to New Hampshire, whose profits from the traveling and testifying can be used to support their mission in Butare. Such economic interests play a major role in the official choice and production of ‘genocide witnesses’ and ‘genocide survivors.’

Defense attorneys described the fifteen Rwandan witnesses flown over to the U.S. from Rwanda as “psychopathic killers who never mentioned Munyenyezi in nearly two decades of trials and investigations into the Rwanda genocide.”

The cost of bringing Kagame’s witnesses to the United States and putting them up — some under tight security and others at expensive hotels — for the duration of the trial represents additional massive costs to U.S. taxpayers for what amounts to fraud by the U.S. government.

The credibility of ‘witnesses’ incarcerated in Rwanda is highly suspect. First, there is the problem of coercion: many people in prison in Rwanda or accused by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) and Gacaca [people's] courts have been framed. Other ‘confessed genocidaires‘ have been tortured, and some have been coerced by the RPA threat of retaliation against their families.

Often enough, ‘witnesses to killings’ and ‘genocide survivors’ are frauds, sometimes they are people who were not even in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm. Other government plants and handlers have been coached.

In Munyenyezi’s case, the press apparently decided that the witnesses brought in to accuse Beatrice Munyenyezi were not credible.

First, the claim by the RPA that Munyenyezi commanded soldiers to rape Tutsi women in the basement of the hotel is presented as an absolute. The rape occurred ‘in the context of genocide’ and so it is believable and believed. However, no Rwandan woman in the context of Rwandan culture would ever oversee mass rape of other Rwandan women. In fact, Beatrice Munyenyezi was also pregnant at the time — making the hypothesis of rape even less plausible.

Second, we can imagine that any credible testimony on a genocide rape charge against a woman would have provoked an endless barrage of news stories titled ‘Hutu genocidaire woman ordered rape of innocent Tutsis in hotel’s basement’, stories that would have made their way right up to CNN and the New York Times. But the decision on the rape charges went unmentioned by the New Hampshire press because the credibility of dishonest government witnesses (coached to lie) was easily destroyed.

It is as implausible as the charge by Invisible Children founder Jason Russel that “Joseph Kony forced children to kill their parents and then eat them.”

Some so-called ‘genocidaires‘ may be guilty, but others are not, and the Kagame regime uses all kinds of bribery, subterfuge and threats to pull the wool over the eyes of tourists, researchers and other ‘guests.’ Many people in Rwanda are forced to spy, tattle and inform on others, or else face personal persecution or threats to their families.

Anyone who challenges the officially sanctioned narrative in Rwanda is branded, arrested, exiled, disappeared or — in the case of pesky American academics, like Dr. Christian Davenport, Dr. Alan Stam or Dr. Susan Thomson, who all asked too many questions of the ‘wrong’ kind — barred from Rwanda forever.

International Wars of Aggression

In 1981, Yoweri Museveni and his newly formed National Resistance Army (NRA) launched an invasion of the sovereign country of Uganda.  From 1980 to 1986, the NRA perpetrated massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Lowero Triangle and other areas in central and northern Uganda.  These atrocities were universally attributed — and are so attributed to this day — to the government forces, the Uganda National Liberation Army, commanded by then president Milton Obote. (See, for example,  “Notes On the Concealment of Genocide in Uganda,” A. Milton Obote, April 1990.)

The massive atrocities committed by the NRA set the stage for the rise of Joseph Kony, the Ugandan bogey man used by Museveni, Washington, London and Israel to facilitate a permanent state of insecurity in northern Uganda. Under permanent emergency, Museveni was able to justify the forcible displacement of millions of indigenous Acholi people and their internment into concentration camps. Museveni also authored a document attesting to genocidal intent against the Acholis.

One of the 27 guerrillas who took up arms alongside Yoweri Museveni in the illegal NRA invasion of Uganda was Paul Kagame, the future leader of the Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front, the Ugandan guerrilla army that illegally invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990.

Loyal to Museveni and his bloody guerrilla tactics, Kagame rose through the ranks to become Museveni’s director of military intelligence — a position for which his enemies now claim he was known as ‘the butcher.’

At the time of the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, Paul Kagame was being trained at the Pentagon’s General Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas (USA). Kagame returned and led the four year war that resulted in the deaths of perhaps several hundred thousand Hutu people between October 1990 and April 1994 alone.

A prima facie case can be made that each of the invasions of Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) constitute the supreme crime against humanity, that being the illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.

The United States, Britain and Israel were the strongest backers behind backed Museveni and Kagame in all three of these illegal wars of aggression.

Involved at the highest level in the RPA/F invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 were United States intelligence agent Roger Winter and Israeli MOSSAD agent David Kimche.  U.S. defense attaches Lt. Colonel Thomas P. Odom and Richard Skow are two more U.S. military intelligence agents who have deep inside knowledge of the Pentagon- and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-backed invasions of both Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

The U.S. House of Representative hearings by the Subcommittee on Africa of the Committee on International Relations reveal that the United States knew that the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire were being massacred, and it makes clear some of who knew what, where it was happening, and when.

The “Official” Rwanda Genocide Narrative

Just as Yoweri Museveni and his backers conferred victor status on Museveni after the NRA victory in Uganda, and then charged the NRA’s victims and the Obote government with genocide, so too did Museveni and Paul Kagame and their backers confer savior status on Paul Kagame and accuse the Hutu victims of genocide.

The coalition multi-party coalition government of Juvenal Habyarimana was falsely branded with the genocide label as early as 1993.

Contrary to the official narrative that casts Hutus as killers and Tutsis as victims, the RPA/F plan included the sacrificing of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Given opportunities to negotiate a ceasefire, and even the unconditional surrender by the national army forces — Habyarimana’s Forces Armées Rwandaises or FAR — soon after the plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, the RPA/F chose to continue the war to achieve absolute military dominance.

The RPA/F leadership was comprised of elite English-speaking Tutsis from Uganda backed by Ugandan generals James Kazini and Salim Saleh, and by Yoweri Museveni himself. The elite RPA/F Tutsis — Major General Paul Kagame, General James Kabarebe, etc. — did not trust French-speaking Tutsis who had stayed behind in Rwanda after the Tutsi guerrilla attacks against the Hutu governments of the 1960′s and early 1970′s provoked retaliatory pogroms against Tutsi.

As the RPA/F invasion continued — prior to April 6, 1994 — Tutsis were also killed, both in revenge killings and because of RPA/F attacks. Claims that the Habyarimana government persecuted Tutsis are highly contested. Evidence suggests that Kagame and Museveni needed to play the ‘homeless and persecuted Tutsi refugee’ card to justify invading Rwanda.

After April 6, 1994, the minority Twa population also suffered massive loss of life in what should also be recognized as acts of genocide, at the very least.

“The continuation of the genocide of the Tutsis was a key part of the [RPA] victory strategy,” writes former Rwandan Patriotic Front official Jean-Marie Ndagijimana, in How General Paul Kagame Sacrificed the Tutsis.  “[A] ceasefire and a halt to the genocide risked strengthening his adversaries [Forces Armées Rwandaises] by freeing them from their police duties.  Furthermore, a halt to the massacres would have taken from Kagame the sole pretext on which he based his legitimacy.  The government [FAR] army had to be made to appear like a genocidal force the defeat of which no one would regret… Why stop the massacres when they were working to legitimize Kagame and weaken his adversaries?”

Here is how the typical U.S. news agency reporting on the Munyenyezi story story describes the Rwanda genocide.  “The genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994,” reads the commentator, in an ominous tone, in a local New Hampshire TV station video clip. “It lasted 100 days.  Up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militias and as many as 10,000 people were killed each day.  The Hutu were defeated three months later.”

However, the genocide against Tutsis during those 100 days of 1994 cannot be understood out of context, and the true context is never provided by the establishment media, by the U.S. or British governments, by Israel, or by the mercenaries working to clean the blood off the Kagame regime.

Former British prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian academic Gerald Kaplan, New Yorker magazine writer Philip Gourevitch, former USAID agent Timothy Longman, Somalian mouthpiece Rakiya Omaar, and Rwandan mouthpiece Tom Ndahiro are some of the most prominent propagandists whitewashing the Kagame regime.

Timothy Longman, now director of African Studies at Boston University, is the Rwanda genocide ‘expert’ that was brought in to testify against Beatrice Munyenyezi. Longman and Alison Des Forges co-authored the Human Rights Watch (HRW) book on Rwanda Leave None to Tell the Story, and both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon; the 790 page tome did not mention a word about Beatrice Munyenyezi.

Kagame has also hired the Racepoint Group, a U.S. lobbying and public relations firm to “build a strong and sustained image campaign communicating the successes of Rwanda with key stakeholders in the political and financial elite communities” and “[o]ffset the negative and factually incorrect information of those parties with vested interests in mis-portraying Rwanda’s advancements.”

Racepoint’s campaign themes include “Rwanda’s Visionary Leader… highlighting President Kagame” and “The Rwandan Miracle: Healing of a Nation.” The company’s fees are listed as US$ 50,000 per month plus 2500 to 3500 pounds Sterling per month for “out of pocket expenses.”

The Pentagon Sacrifices Millions of Africans

The double presidential assassination of April 6, 1994 is defined as the trigger for the massive backlash of Tutsi killings by Hutu people. Since the war began in October 1990, more than 10 million people have died in Central Africa due to Pentagon backed insurgency, with the greatest numbers killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Jean-Marie Ndagijimana was the Rwandan Ambassador to Paris under the Habyarimana government from October 1990 to April 1994, before being removed from his post for speaking out against the mass killings of Tutsis and Hutus.

On 19 July 1994, Ndagajimana became Minister of Foreign Affairs in what was called the ‘Broad-Based National Unity Government’ led by Faustin Twagiramungu. In September 1994, he resigned and went into exile after the report by UNHCR investigator Robert Gersony confirmed that scores of thousands of Hutus were killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army between July and September 1994.

Robert Gersony was the UNHCR contractor whose report on RPA killings of Hutus was massively denounced at the time and later buried by the United Nations never to be seen again. Gersony went on to work for the UNHCR in northern Uganda and other places. Clearly, Gersony’s credentials stood the test, and his silence secured his future employment(s). Indeed, Robert Gersony went on to work for the USAID mission to Kampala, Uganda, where he produced a report detailing the persecution of Acholi people in Northern Uganda. (See, e.g.: The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-Based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda, Robert Gersony, USAID Mission to Kampala, 1997).

Jean-Marie Ndagajimana insists that the killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis between April 6 and July 1994 was organized, not spontaneous, but that there is no question that there was a double genocide. He claims Tutsis were systematically killed by militias in areas controlled by the interim government of Jean Kambanda, and that the RPA/F systematically killed Hutus in zones under its control.

Based on research for which they were eventually thrown out of Rwanda, U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Alan Stam insist that the numbers of Tutsis killed in Rwanda during the so-called 100 days could not have been as high as the official narrative claims, and that hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed during this period and these comprise the difference between the official count of 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis and the actual count of hundreds of thousands less Tutsis.

Defense attorneys from the ICTR are adamant that the record shows that there was no systematic planification of genocide by the government of Juvenal Habyarimana or its immediate successors, the interim coalition government of Jean Kambanda.

The official Rwanda genocide narrative is founded upon the idea that the Habyarimana government was an extremist Hutu government — which is what extremist purveyors of the official narrative like Paul Kagame and his elite Tutsi collaborators would like people to believe.  The less aggressive assertion that the Habyarimana government was an exclusively Hutu government and was exclusive to Tutsi is also false.

From April 1992 to the middle of July 1993 there was a coalition government led by Prime Minister Dr. Dismas Nsengiyaremye. The members of the coalition represented a diverse political spectrum, including opposition party members from the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), Parti Liberal (PL), Parti Social Démocrate (PSD) and Parti Démocratique Chrêtien (PDC). There were also members from Habyarimana’s ruling party Mouvement Républicain National Pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MRND). Opposition parties had ten ministers in addition to the Prime Minister and the MRND had 10 ministers in addition to President Habyarimana. The prominent Tutsi official in this government was Landoald Ndasingwa from the Liberal Party.

From the middle of July 1993 to April 6, 1994, there was a coalition government led by Prime Minister Madam Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The members of the coalition government were from the MDR, PSD, PDC and MRND parties. The MDR party split into two factions after Agathe Uwilingiyimana was appointed Prime Minister by Juvenal Habyariama. PSD, PDC, PL split up later. Some factions were pro-RPF, others were pro-MRND. The pro-MRND factions were later labeled ‘Hutu Power.’ The label came from a speech made by Froduald Karamira, vice-president of the MDR during a public meeting called to condemn the October 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye of Burundi, the first Hutu elected president of Burundi. (From Karamira’s perspective power belonged to the winners of elections.)

In other words there was no ‘Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana.’ Habyariman had been forced by the international community to accept a coalition government, and if there were any extremists in the government, these were the opposition people who believed that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was bringing equality to Rwanda and was genuinely interested in either peace and/or good faith negotiations. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The ICTR acquitted the so-called ‘genocide masterminds’ of all conspiracy to commit genocide charges, but some were found guilty of ‘acts of genocide’ and other crimes against humanity. The ICTR trials have been politically motivated, one-sided productions, and not one Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front official or soldier has even been indicted.

The ICTR conviction of Hutu president Jean Kambanda, the former interim president during the 1994 genocide, on the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide was a complete sham: even proponents of the official Rwanda genocide narrative have confirmed that Kambanda was not afforded proper legal representation or anything close to a fair trial. (See, e.g., The Sacrifice of Jean Kambanda: A Comparative Analysis of the Right to Counsel in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the United States, with emphasis on Prosecutor v. Jean Kambanda, Kelly Xi Huei Lalith Ranasing, California Western School of Law, Summer 2004.)

The ICTR trials have persecuted and further dehumanized Hutu people, and they have dismissed and ignored every chance to explore the role of Paul Kagame and the RPA/F in provoking, prolonging and supporting the Tutsi genocide during the 100 days of 1994.

Meanwhile, in 2008 the high court in Spain issued indictments and international arrest warrants against the top 40 Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire). The court included Paul Kagame in its consideration of egregious crimes, but is prevented from indicting a sitting head of state.

Business is business: directors of Royal/Dutch Shell Corporation with President Paul Kagame in Kigali. Note: The photo on the right to the right and behind shows former President Pasteur Bizimungu, first president under the RPA/F regime, July 19, 1994 to March 23, 2000.

The RPA Genocide against the Hutu People

Beatrice Munyenyezi survived the invasion of Rwanda’s Byumba prefecture by the Ugandan troops calling themselves the Rwanda Patriotic Army in 1990. Munyenyezi then survived the next four years of RPA/F persecution and genocide that saw entire Hutu villages in Byumba razed, massacres of scores of thousands of mostly (but not only) Hutu people, and the internal displacement of some two million Hutus.

Forced into a life-and-death refugee existence inside Rwanda between October 1990 and April 1994, the displaced Hutu people fought back after the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi, and other Rwandan high officials, was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.

Beatrice Munyenyezi then survived the so-called ’100 days of genocide’ in Rwanda from April 6 to July 15, 1994. She fled Rwanda with family members on July 18, 1994, part of the massive exodus of millions of Rwandans, mostly innocent Hutu women and children to eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo).

In Congo-Zaire, Munyenyezi survived the most ruthless and cold-blooded slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians by the RPA, Ugandan People’s Defense Forces and some lesser numbers of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and South African troops. The RPA-led genocide in Congo-Zaire began in August 1996 when the RPA shelled refugee camps in violation of international law.

In Goma, DRC, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as “one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen.”

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had been stockpiling World Food Program provisions — that were denied to starving Hutu refugees — and these provisions were used to feed the invading RPA troops.

After the refugee camps were attacked, Beatrice Munyenyezi fled from Congo to Kenya at the advice of her brother, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, another U.S. citizen also being hunted by the Kagame regime and its political, military and economic partners.

In Tanzania and Kenya, Beatrice Munyenyezi survived RPF agents hunting refugees and assassinating dissidents, including former RPF official Seth Sendashonga, who was minister of the interior in Rwanda from 1994 to 1998.

Jean Marie Vianney Higiro is the real target of the Kagame regime’s persecution of Beatrice Munyenyezi: the regime has held a vendetta against Higiro since his refusal to accept a post in the Kagame terrorist government in July 1994. Higiro was evacuated from Rwanda by U.S. marines around April 8, 1994.

The security apparatus of the Kagame regime has been hunting refugees in Europe and in North America since 1994, and Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated in Europe and Africa.  The hunting down of Rwandan dissidents is backed by the U.S. Government, Britain and Israel to prop up their client regime: the dictatorship of Paul Kagame.

Rwanda provides a major base for the U.S. Department of Defense military occupation of Africa and for U.S. and allied intelligence and defense operations. While allied operations involve many NATO countries, Britain and Israel are the main intelligence and defense partners for the U.S. in Central Africa; Germany and Belgium are not far behind them.

There is no freedom of speech in Rwanda today. There is no freedom of press. There is no freedom to organize. There is no freedom of assembly. The Kagame regime continues to assassinate and disappear critics, journalists, former business associates, former military and former government officials.

On March 31, 2012, Kagame’s former Chief of Staff Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi in exile, announced that Paul Kagame was the instigator of the January 2001 assassination of Congolese president Laurent Desire Kabila. Former defense minister Theogene Rudasingwa is also the former RPF Secretary General and former Ambassador to Washington.

The most recent assassinations include several Rwandan journalists killed in Uganda earlier this year. Opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire remains imprisoned and subject to a political charade trial because she returned to Rwanda from Belgium and courageously proclaimed the heretical obvious: There was a genocide against Hutus as well as Tutsis.

In July 2010, the body of the deputy leader of the Democratic Green Party was found dumped by a river near the southern town of Butare. Opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, a Tutsi politician, was decapitated for his opposition to the Kagame regime.

The RPA/F government routinely rounds up numerous supposed supporters of opposition parties, and people have routinely been disappeared merely for showing some allegiance to the opposition Green Party or the PS-Imberakuri party.

“So many Tutsis are also suffering political repression,” says ‘Ignace,’ a high level Rwandan dissident who fears retaliation from the U.S. government for speaking out. “Tutsis who live in Rwanda are silent because they fear repression. Tutsis who live abroad in exile, like Theogene Rudasingwa and Gerald Gahima and General Kayumba Nyamwasa are also living in fear of assassination.”

Hutus throughout the country are subject to slavery conditions and millions of people — Hutus, Tutsis, Twa — outside the cliques of power are suffering extreme poverty. Most egregious, the RPA/F genocide against Hutu people continues: there is at present a campaign in Rwanda to forcibly sterilize Hutu males.

“The RPF’s reconstruction and reconciliation policies do not represent a sincere attempt to unify and reconcile Rwandans,” writes Dr. Susan Thomson. “Instead, it is a mechanism of state power that presents a self-serving version of history and manipulates the language of ethnicity to justify and maintain policies of exclusion and oppression of ethnic Hutu in maintaining the appearance of peace and security… In practice, the government approaches post-genocide justice through the maximal prosecution of all Hutu.”

A U.S. academic who worked in Rwanda and experienced the indoctrination camps run by the Kagame regime, Dr. Susan Thomson is persona non grata in Rwanda today. (And so is this correspondent.)

The Rwanda Genocide Tourism Industry

After the arrest of Beatrice Munyenyezi in 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traveled to Rwanda to gather evidence to support the charges against her.

It is unknown which, if any, of the U.S. prosecutors also traveled to Rwanda, but there were two investigative missions sent there for the Munyenyezi ‘discovery’. Because Beatrice Munyenyezi was indigent, both of her defense attorneys traveled to Rwanda all expenses paid by U.S. taxpayers; it is likely that the two primary U.S. prosecutors also traveled there.

While prosecutors John Capin and Aloke Chakravarthy may or may not have traveled to Rwanda, independent investigations in Rwanda are impossible. The U.S. government does not send unbiased investigators to Rwanda: it sends agents intent on collecting the information and documentation provided by their client regime to protect their client regime.

It is especially easy to manipulate tourists or students or researchers who arrive in Rwanda for their first visit to Africa. White people are taken to the genocide memorials and the shock of these staged-managed productions — all these Hutu and Tutsi skeletons piled up and labeled ‘Tutsi victims of genocide’ — strikes deep into the psyche of the spectator. People don’t arrive with clean slates: the mass media has deeply conditioned western news and entertainment consumers to see Africa through a racist and exploitative lens.

The viewing of skeletons and skulls in Rwanda has become a lucrative spectator sport and the conditioning by the white systems of power in western countries has created naive and racially conditioned spectators who are easily fooled. Once they have seen the ‘horrors’ of the genocide memorials the average white and even non-white western spectators (e.g. African Americans) are often horrified into a subconscious shock and disbelief where reason and common sense are no longer accessible.

Foreigners take the skeletons and skulls as the unassailable truth — it does not cross their minds that there might be some other interpretation of the art project they see before them. It doesn’t occur to people that the truth has been distilled down — essentialized — into piles of skeletons, or shoes, or scattered clothing, or machetes that no longer appropriately re-present the original circumstances and context.

However, the fact is that virtually everyone in Rwanda owns a machete. Ditto in Burundi, Congo and rural Tanzania. They are as common a personal item as a wallet or purse or ball point pen is to a western consumer. The entire machete narrative — Hutus butchering Tutsis in 100 days, blah, blah, blah — is deeply problematic, since the RPA routinely killed people with machetes both to disguise (normalize) the means of death such that the perpetrators and the victims could not be distinguished and so that the RPA narrative of ‘bloodthirsty Hutus killing Tutsis with machetes’ could easily be advanced. The RPA also wanted to save on bullets.

There is a genocide economy in Rwanda that serves foreign visitors who spend millions of dollars annually to travel to Rwanda, stay in fancy hotels, eat at restaurants, visit the mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s national parks, hire cars, and drivers, and interpreters, and purchase souvenirs — or ‘free trade’ coffee produced on lands stolen from the Hutu masses. There is a whole industry that revolves around the production and maintenance of the official Rwanda genocide story about Hutus killing Tutsis in 100 days of horror.

The U.S. government pays all the travel and per diem expenses of genocide ‘investigators’, and everything is covered at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Rwandan ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’ who are brought to the United States are also fully paid.

“This is genocide tourism,” says ‘Ignace’. “They are not investigative. They stay at fancy hotels, they visit some locations, they see the skeletons and skulls at ‘genocide memorials’, they meet President Kagame, and they are assigned government handlers who make sure they get what Kagame and people in Washington want. They drink a lot of wine and swim in the swimming pools. They don’t know anything about Rwanda and everything looks very romantic. Then they come back and accuse innocent people of genocide.”

Pentagon Satellite Photos Exposed

The existence of satellite reconnaissance photographs has not been revealed even during the 18 years of very high profile genocide trials held at the ICTR.

During his entire three-plus years in Rwanda from 1990 to November 1993, former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Robert Flatten’s requests for Pentagon-DIA spy satellite photographs showing the progress of the war in the Rwandan countryside were turned down — because of “clouds over Rwanda” they told him.

The authenticity of the satellite images has not been established and there is good reason to assume that the satellite images may be completely fraudulent.

Alternately, the satellite photos may have been produced during a different time period than is claimed by the prosecutors.

There is also substantial reason to believe that the satellite photographs may be exactly what the Pentagon described them as.

If Washington had the capability to monitor events from a satellite platform they certainly were doing so. And Washington had that capacity indeed.

In 1994, the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment was flying two older versions of the LANDSAT remote sensing satellite platforms in outer orbit. LANDSAT-4 and LANDSAT-5 had both exceeded their design lifetimes but were operational and had the capability to capture accurate and detailed imagery of what was happening in Rwanda during the 100 days of genocide.

There was also the NASA Space Shuttle.

One direct witness to events in Rwanda leading up the 1994 genocide was a researcher connected to a foreign NGO who knows something about satellite images collected over Rwanda but who has never gone public. Witness GOR-2 worked closely with the Juvenal Habyarimana regime prior to April 1994 and again closely with the new Kagame government after 1994.

Witness GOR-2 had regular contact with the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, the office of President Kagame, and with former RPA Secretary General Theogene Rudasingwa. According to GOR-2, there were NASA space shuttle flights over Zaire and Rwanda in April and September of 1994, on U.S. government-sponsored research under contract NAS7-1260.

The prosecutors in the Munyenyezi case are claiming that Munyenyezi was present at a road block just outside the Hotel Ihuriro in Butare. This hotel was probably destroyed by the RPA towards the end of June. It seems that the RPF took Butare after June coming from Burundi. Hotel Ihuriro was still standing on May 25, 1994, when Munyenyezi is accused of commanding Hutu extremists to kill Hutu men and rape Hutu women.

According to sources present at the Munyenyezi trial, the satellite pictures are taken over a time period and show clear changes from day to day. For example, the photos showed people and cars moving towards Burundi. “When they zoom in on a given location you can see the buildings, you can see people. It’s not a video, it’s a snapshot.”

“They first showed the hotel, which doesn’t exist any more. They tried to show that somehow there was a road block that [Munyenyezi] was at. The pictures were also supposed to show a mass grave a few feet from the hotel and another mass grave near the Episcopal church nearby The defense attorney was able to prove that there was no road block shown in the pictures, and there were no mass graves.”

While reputed to be photo-shopped photo, Congolese experts insist that this photo is authentic: Hyppolite Kanambe alias Joseph Kabila was a military officer attached to Paul Kagame during the 1996-1997 invasion and conquest of Congo-Zaire.

The Great Lakes Genocide Cover-up

The existence of satellite images raises questions about what the Pentagon knows and what they are hiding. For example, satellite imagery would clearly show the wreckage of the presidential plane crash site, and photos would show who was in control of the crash site immediately after the April 6 assassinations, and who controlled the site over the next weeks and months.

The United States has blocked every bona fide investigation into the double presidential assassinations since 1994. The Kagame regime has produced several reports (e.g., “Mucyo Report”), but these self-interested productions are easily discredited.

Former RPA/F official Theogene Rudasingwa claims that Paul Kagame and an elite RPA hit squad are behind the shooting down of the presidential plane, and thus the RPA sparked the genocide of Tutsis, knowing Tutsis would be massacred everywhere, and these claims are backed up by other former RPA/F soldiers.

It is important to mention that the U.S. was directly involved in the April-July events,” says ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black, “first by being implicated in shooting down the plane, then the presence of Colonel Vukovic in Kigali, just days before the shoot down, and the U.S. was supplying the RPF forces with men and materiel by airdropping them using C130 Hercules after April 6th. General Ndindiliyimana testified that the U.S. Air Force was airdropping men and weapons to the RPF and he was not challenged on this testimony. Also, the UN Rwanda Emegency Office was in reality completely staffed by US army officers and acted as the operational headquarters for the RPF.”

Satellite imagery would also show the locations, strengths and activities of RPA troops, government (FAR) troops and militias. It is well known that the RPA infiltrated the Interahamwe militias, and therefore RPA are believed to have controlled some road blocks, and it is very curious that no satellite photos have previously been produced to show where road blocks and bridges were occupied, and who occupied them.

Probably this is because the RPA was in control of areas like the Kagera National Park, and RPA were dumping dead Hutus (and some French speaking Tutsis) in the Kagera River. The infamous mythology about Tutsi bodies floating down the Kagera River is completely contradicted by the declassified memo from Mark Prutsalis of the NGO Refugees International.

In a May 17, 1994 situation report (“SITREP #10: Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania”) to Refugees International headquarters in Washington D.C., Mark Prutsalis described documented RPA atrocities on the Tanzania-Rwanda border. The document details gruesome and egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and the indiscriminate killing of both Hutus and Tutsi civilians by RPA soldiers.

For example:

“The following are excerpts from a UNHCR-Ngara protection report on border crossing points from an assessment made on 14 and 15 May:”

At RUSUMO commune, sector KIGARAMA, the RPF came and called for a ‘peace meeting’.  Those, who did not participate voluntarily, were forced to the meeting.  At the school people were tied together, three by three — men/women/children – and stabbed.  The bodies were put on trucks and thrown into the Kagera River, north of Rusumo Bridge…

At RUSUMO commune, sectors NYAMUGARI, GISENYI, NYARUBUJE, the RPF comes at 05h00 waiting for villagers to open their doors.  The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks.  No one has returned.  Refugees from the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river.  It seems as if guns are used only if somebody tries to escape…

At RUSUMO commune, sector MUZAZA, village GASARABWAYI (4 kms from the river), the RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population.  On the 13.05 [May 13] 40 RPF soldiers came at 07h00.  They surrounded the village.  Villagers were gathered in houses, which were burned down.  An eyewitness saw 20 people being killed this way.  8 villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil.  Asked by UNHCR field officer refugees said that the RPF did not care whether victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers.

An IRC [International Rescue Committee] staff person wrote top their office,” the Refugees International SITREP concluded. “Things are getting very bad at the border here… Someone really needs to do something about all of the [RPA] killing and torture on the other [Rwanda] side. Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads.; the count is between 20 and 30 each 30 minutes.”

“The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes,” Mark Prutsalis wrote. “This remote inaccessible part of Tanzania cannot continue to receive thousands of refugees per day. We will soon be overwhelmed here unless someone takes action to end the bloodshed, the atrocities, the massacres in Rwanda.”

The genocide against Tutsis and Hutus continued after 1994 and there has never been a U.S. investigation into the roles of the Pentagon, CIA and DIA in the cataclysms in Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

Witness GOR-2 described how the RPA/F used the Volcanoes National Park as a military base to launch Congo-Zaire operations after 1994.

GOR-2 said that white soldiers driving tanks were seen inside the park heading to Zaire in September 1996. GOR-2 said that the United Nation’s IRIN report described this as U.S. soldiers going into Goma but that the IRIN report was quickly removed from the Internet. GOR-2 explained how the RPA?F would close the Volcanoes National Park for days at a time while involved in military operations and ‘clean-ups’: “The Rwandan Patriotic Army would just close the park for days at a time and we didn’t know what was going on in there.”

GOR-2 explained how the Volcanoes National Park was flooded with thousands of Rwandan refugees returning from Zaire after the U.S.-backed invasion by Kagame and Museveni forces in 1996, and that the park became an RPA ‘killing zone’.

“We had a massive clean-up operation to remove bodies in 1999,” GOR-2 said, “trying to get out all the dead bodies, and all the rags and pots and pans.”

GOR-2 was always in close personal contact with Major Richard Skow, the U.S. military attache’ from the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, and Robert E. Gribbon, the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda at the time.

GOR-2 described airborne remote sensing flyovers using a new state-of-the-art technology involving hyper-spectral analysis where flights were made over Rwanda and eastern Congo.

GOR-2 claims that some 22 CDs of raw data were delivered by Claire Richardson, the head of the Dian Fossey Gorrilla Fund, to Theogene Rudasingwa at the Rwandan Ministry of Defense.

GOR-2 said the flyovers were coordinated by the National Geographic Society and DFGF and were supposedly for gorilla conservation — habitat mapping — but were actually meant to locate mineral resources that the RPA could exploit.

Satellite imagery was almost certainly collected over the four years of warfare in Rwanda by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The NRO designs, builds and operates U.S. government spy satellites and coordinates the analysis of aerial surveillance and satellite imagery from several intelligence and military agencies, including the Defense Investigative Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Before April 6, 1994 the RPF occupied the large portions of the prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri: American satellite pictures may shed light on the destruction caused by the RPF offensive from 1990 to the 1993 ceasefire.

“I spent 3 months in the demilitarized zone resettling internally displaced people,” says another unnamed Rwandan genocide survivor GOR-3. “Based on what I saw, the RPF policy was to kill people, destroy buildings, destroy houses, destroy archives. Doors, iron sheets and corrugated metal covering the roofs of houses, furniture, toilets — everything had been removed and taken to Uganda to be sold. We need the pictures taken by the Pentagon to show the brutality of the RPA invasion and occupation.”

Hordes of NGO workers and humanitarian relief workers involved in millions of dollars of private profit come and go from Rwanda, always advertising their effectiveness in “peace” and “reconciliation” programs.

Tutsis and Hutus alike inside and outside Rwanda are increasingly speaking about military confrontation as more and more people become alienated and disaffected by the elite Tutsis in the Kagame regime.

Rwanda’s Ongoing Plunder of Congo

The U.S. Department of Defense also oversees and supports plunder and depopulation in the Eastern Congo, where Rwanda and Uganda maintain economic, political and military control.

Under the cover of military operations to capture and kill supposed Rwandan “genocidaires” in Congo (Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda) and supposed Ugandan terrorists (including Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army) western mining companies have been stripping and shipping Congolese minerals without oversight or regulation since the Pentagon-backed invasion of September 1996.

Canadian Banro Corporation is one of the most secretive corporations operating in Congo, and they have established and maintained their control through very tight relations with the Kagame regime. Banro has taken over thousands of hectares of South Kivu province by manipulating the local mwamis (chiefs), by bribing officials and by infiltrating officials onto power who are friendly to Banro and Kagame’s interests.

Banro describes its operations as ‘stable’ and ‘community-aligned’ but local human rights groups paint a very different picture, one of terrorism all over the region.  Banro’s security manager is from the private military company Erinys International, a British mercenary firm ‘registered’ in the British Virgin Islands.  Banro works exclusively with Erinys International, a firm that also operates in Iraq.

The areas around Banro concessions (e.g. Shabunda, Fizi, Walungu) have seen some of the worst bloodshed in all of the Congo, often perpetrated by Rwandan forces connected to Paul Kagame and then blamed on Congolese Mai Mai or the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

The Banro concessions can be seen in the map below, where total territory under Banro exploration is almost as big as the entire countries of Rwanda or Burundi.  This would not be possible without a close military and intelligence alliance between Banro and the Kagame government.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
– Henry David Thoreau

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
– E.F. Schumacher

Since March 27 the Fukushima region has experienced three medium sized earthquakes not to mention a typhoon to boot.¹ This is important because a Japanese engineer recently admitted that the situation at the Fukushima No. 1 power station is still dangerous and the unit four fuel pool is vulnerable to earthquakes.² Due to unit four’s fragile condition–the building is said to be leaning to one side–Tokyo Power Company (Tepco) is “working to fortify the crumpled outer shell of the building” in order to prevent collapse.³ After the most recent earthquake Tepco announced there was no problem, but the “Fukuichi live camera” which records activity at the site was shifted slightly to the left by the tremor.⁴

An accident to the fuel pool could set off a chain of events involving “a total of 1760 metric tons of fresh and used nuclear fuel” among the six reactors at the disaster site.⁵ According to Takao Yamada, Expert Senior Writer at the Mainichi Daily News, Tepco dismissed the idea of injecting extra concrete to reinforce the unit four building just after 3/11.

Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style. An inspection of the pool floor, however, led TEPCO to conclude that the pool was strong enough without additional concrete. The plans were scrapped, and antiseismic reinforcements were made to the reactor building instead.

‘Because sea water was being pumped into the reactor, the soundness of the structure (concrete corrosion and deterioration) was questionable. There also were doubts about the calculations made on earthquake resistance as well,’ said one government source familiar with what took place at the time. ‘It’s been suggested that the building would be reinforced, and spent fuel rods would be removed from the pool under those conditions. But fuel rod removal will take three years. Will the structure remain standing for that long? Burying the reactor in a concrete grave is like building a dam, and therefore expensive. I think that it was because TEPCO’s general shareholders’ meeting was coming up (in June 2011) that the company tried to keep expenses low.’⁶

Let’s get this straight: because of an upcoming share holders meeting Tepco could not be bothered to go the extra five yards and spend necessary money to solidify the building with a stoop from below (excluding the idea of the sarcophagus)? What kind of blunder is this (and it continues), putting the inane greed of money junkies in their boardrooms over the welfare of millions of people and the environment? Life on Earth will be permanently affected or destroyed if the Fukushima power station goes up in a radiological blaze, potentially setting fire to 1760 tons of fuel. This could result in tens of times more radiation than was released in 1986 in the Ukraine.

Thus we have Tepco, the limited liability corporation par excellence– privatize profits and externalize costs. But nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson noted that “the clean up is going to cost around a half a trillion dollars.”⁷ This will wipe out any savings that came from using nuclear energy in the first place.

This news comes on the heels of learning of revised estimates of the initial Fukushima disaster which put the amount of cesium released into the air and water as high as 90% of Chernobyl releases. This is a far cry from original assessments by the Japanese government that radiation was just 10 or 15% as much.

“Table S2. Estimated 137Cs releases and inventories…. Total air deposition 36 Far field air deposition and air transport model Stohl et al…. Total direct release to ocean 27 by July 18 (22 by April 8) Assessment of ocean 137Cs within 30 km of shore Bailly du Bois et al.”

• Highest estimates by foreign researchers: Fukushima 63 quadrillion becquerals;
• Japanese government highest estimate: 40 quadrillion bq;
• Chernobyl estimate after two decades of study: 70 quadrillion bq⁸

* (Special thanks to enenews.com for bringing technical literature on the Fukushima disaster to public attention.)

Nuclear Fission Fueled By Political Corruption and Financial Terrorism

Yamada offers this blistering critique of Japan’s profoundly dysfunctional political system:

The government continues to take regressive steps in spite of the torrent of criticism it has received and the lessons that should have been learned since the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster.
This is evidenced in the fact that starting this week, which marks the beginning of a new fiscal year, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan (NSC) have no budget. The new nuclear regulatory agency that was supposed to begin operations on April 1 in NISA’s stead is now floundering amid resistance in the Diet from opposition parties. In other words, government agencies overseeing nuclear power now have an even more diminished presence….The situation doesn’t do much for morale, however. Back-scratching relationships between government ministries, the indecision of both the ruling and opposition parties, and the unchanging fact that much of the current crisis is still left in the hands of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) remains the same.⁹

The stockholders won’t pay, they get bailed out by taxpayers. We will all pay through the sweat of our brows and loss of life and health from the radioactive fallout. The financial terrorists in London, New York, and Tel Aviv don’t care who loses as long as the Global Debt Slavery System (GDSS) keeps filling their bank accounts at the expense of humanity and the environment. As a curious aside, it is worth noting that the infamous Rothschilds dynasty is alleged to be a major player in uranium mining and the promotion of nuclear power, not to mention having their hands in much of the world’s wealth.¹⁰

Arnie Gunderson Reports

For the first time our top nuclear expert, the intrepid Arnie Gunderson, has publicly acknowledged that at least some of the destruction at Fukushima was caused by the earthquake, and not the tsunami as is so often reported by the mainstream media. This fact was first enumerated by Jake Adelstein and David McNeil in the Atlantic Wire.¹¹ Gunderson believes the core is still inside the No. 2 reactor and not causing a China Syndrome, and says it will be another five years before the Fukushima reactor cores cool down to the point where they can be dealt with.

The volume and insightfulness of his analysis is worth extensively reviewing. Despite my hearing from someone in the mainstream science community derisively refer to Arnie as an outlier, if I had the chance to buy Gunny a cup of coffee I surely would. While it would be better to have a wider array of experts who can speak in laymen’s terms in order to compare and contrast their views, most scientists are bought and paid for by their employers in the University and Military research world. I have not read of any serious refutation of Gunderson’s Fukushima analysis.

I’ve quoted and paraphrased the following points he made in two recent interviews¹²:

• “It’s pretty clear that unit one at Fukushima Daiichi was in trouble before the tsunami hit…. It was the first one to meltdown, the first one to explode, first one to run out of water. So, something happened in unit one before the tsunami hit, I don’t know what it is but obviously its seismically induced. So that throws a monkey wrench into the industry’s seismic analysis. These plants were designed to withstand the earthquake that hit that site… on land a 7.9. The plant was designed to withstand something that severe, and yet unit one failed and that should be a major concern.”
• “All of the people of the planet have a deep debt to the thousand or two thousand men who risked their lives” to tackle meltdowns at both Fukushima power stations No. 1 and No. 2. These brave men and women were exposed to high levels of radiation in order to prevent the situation from worsening, while Tepco and the government just stood by and downplayed the dangers.
• There are institutional problems in the nuclear industry to keep reactors that have safety issues running despite the dangers. “Tepco has actually created this problem by trying to minimize the problem” whereas in fact “this is a fifty year battle.” From now until 2062 it is “going to cost a lot of radiation exposure to workers” as well as a half a trillion dollars.
• The reactors will require five more years of “throwing water on them” until they physically cool down; cost to dismantle will be 15 billion dollars per reactor.
• In Unit 2 they were expecting to find water in the container at 5 meters but did not find “any water until until they got to 60 centimeters (2 feet)… in the bottom of the containment…. The core is in the bottom of the reactor and containment which definitely indicates a meltdown.” Tepco is pouring 5-10 tons of water per day into unit two but the water is disappearing out of the containment vessel and leaking into the other buildings. This is due to damage in the suppression pool from the explosion that occurred after the earthquake. Without the 5 meters of water for shielding “it will be very difficult to remove any nuclear fuel.” With such high radiation levels, over 70 sieverts per hour, electronic systems that control devices such as robots that could remove the fuel, are destroyed by the radiation.
• The unit 3 fuel pool is just as bad as unit 4 but because of radiation “no one has ever gotten near it yet…. The biggest problem that I see is the seismic risk because we’ve got fuel pools in Units 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 that are exposed to the atmosphere now and if there is a major seismic event — especially in Units 3 and 4 — if those fuel pools crack, we… risk destroying the nation of Japan.”
• Gunderson measured noble gases from Fukushima three times greater than Chernobyl; he is unsure of cesium but it is definitely higher than government estimate of 4 petabecquerals and may be up to three times higher than Chernobyl.
• 78% of the radiation from Fukushima “wound up in the Pacific Ocean” and the rest on Japan; biomagnification of seafood will lead to radioactive salmon and tuna in a few years; 2% of Fukushima radiation went to North America, namely the American and Canadian Cascade Range on the West Coast.
• 7,000 becquerals per sq kg of soil from Tokyo was measured in five samples by Gunderson. This exceeds 5,000 which is Japan’s limit for agriculture. However, “a lot of the land crops over time will gradually decrease in concentration [of radioactivity].”
• Japanese are treating radioactive waste by diluting it with clean waste, thereby sweeping the problem under the rug as if the radioactivity is not significant. What would be treated like radioactive waste in the US is being diluted and treated as normal waste in Japan, and being spread all over the country for incineration. This practice may lead to biomagnification in the food supply–wild “rabbits are already radioactive! … The Japanese ‘solution’ is to raise the radioactive standard so high that the standard is effectively meaningless.”

What Goes Around Comes Around

In Japan there is a media blackout on the topic of burning the 25 million tons of radioactive debris from the northeast tsunami zone.¹³ I’ll bet if you walked around Tokyo and asked people whether they thought the debris should be burned in public facilities, and that the government does not publish data on effluent toxicity, they would not agree to the policy. But since most people “know nothing” it is no problem. People no longer read newspapers and TV news is superficial, not to mention that most people don’t watch the news because it’s considered too “boring.”

However, Japan’s decision to ship radioactive debris around the country in order to share the burden of the disaster has met with some resistance. In Kyoto there have been vocal protests against receiving the debris. Maybe lack of data on effluent contamination explains why the government does not want to tell residents whether they will burn debris or not.¹⁴ I put the question to Iori Mochizuki of the Fukushima Diary:

Q: How can we find out about the effluent from chimneys that will occur from burning of radioactive waste?

A: “That’s now everyone’s question. MEXT says they can filter it out 100% but there is no data, even no official [data]. Only insiders of those filter makers [have leaked information that] the filters don’t work at all. Now we are all trying to find out the source.”¹⁵

In other words, although the government reassures the public that no radioactive effluents will escape incinerator chimneys, there is no data published to verify this. Rumors that the filters do not block radiation add to doubts. Even if the filters do block most of the radiation, considering the huge tonnage being burned, the amount of radiation will add up. The apparent fact that there is no published data is a logical fallacy that proves either the government is lying or that they deem the citizenry to be little more than troublesome cockroaches.

In the past Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan told me that incinerators were 90% more efficient than older models in blocking toxic effluents.¹⁶ But even this means there is a ten percent margin of error on effluents that can escape, relative to less efficient incinerators. I assume the government feels this is such a small amount that it is nothing to worry about, but given municipal incinerators were built for household waste and not radioactive debris, it is worrying.

When I called the Greenpeace Japan office they referred me to their website, but I could not find any stories on the incinerator issue. I asked the person over the phone about it, and they said that while they don’t entirely trust the government they have no plans to monitor the incinerators. I sent an email with questions on this matter but have not yet received a response.

1. Mar 2012 Iwate-ken Oki M6.4; 30 Mar 2012 Fukushima-ken Oki Magnitude 5.0 Intensity: 3; Magnitude 5.8 – EASTERN HONSHU, JAPAN 2012 April 01; Japan Meteorological Agency’s Highly Unusual Storm Warning on TV: “Don’t Go Outside.”
2. The Fukushima Lie.
3. Fukushima…radiation so high – even robots not safe and Japan Nuclear Plant May Be Worse Off Than Thought.
4. Fukushima live camera moved.
5. How Much Fuel Is at Risk at Fukushima?
6. In light of further nuclear risks, economic growth should not be priority.
7. Russia Today: Gundersen: One Year Anniversary of Fukushima Daiichi.
8. Fukushima-derived radionuclides in the ocean and biota off Japan; Scientists: Far more cesium released than previously believed; Chernobyl: Assessment of Radiological and Health Impact — 2002 Update of Chernobyl: Ten Years On.
9. Chernobyl: Assessment of Radiological and Health Impact — 2002 Update of Chernobyl: Ten Years On.
10. Reasons why the Rothschild Controlled Governments and Media Lie about the Japanese Nuke Crisis; Rothschild Bank International, Leading the Push for “New Nuclear”; Rothschild World Domination Plan Via Private Nuclear Weapons; How the Rothschild Dynasty Operates.
11. Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima?
12. Interview: Arnie Gunderson, Nuclear Engineer and Podcast with Arnie Gunderson
13. Tokyo Starts to Burn Onagawa Debris in Earnest at Incineration Plants for Regular Household Garbage in 23 Special Wards and Disaster Debris Is Radioactive, Ministry of the Environment’s Own Data Shows.
14. Intense protest against sharing radioactive debris policy in Kyoto and Governor of Kyoto on Disaster Debris: “We May Not Tell Residents.”
15. 50,000 tones of radioactive wastes are over 8000 Bq/Kg.
16. The Ecology of Hope.

The excellent News Sniffer website exposed how the Guardian hurriedly fixed political editor Patrick Wintour’s ugly analysis of Galloway’s 10,140 majority win, with a staggering swing of 36 per cent from Labour to the Respect party. Wintour’s shoddy journalism had initially focused on how the constituency’s ‘Muslim immigrant community’ had largely abandoned Labour. The offensive trope of ‘immigrant’ Muslims appeared three times in his piece. And Galloway’s popular call for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, and ‘a fightback against the job crisis’, was disparagingly cast as ‘fundamentalist’.

It was shocking to see such elitist disdain for majority British views and for ‘immigrant’ communities expressed by a senior Guardian journalist. Someone on the newspaper, perhaps spotting the danger of the nation’s flagship ‘liberal’ newspaper appearing so illiberal, acted swiftly to hide the evidence. Too late, News Sniffer was on the trail. This is what Wintour wrote:

‘It appeared that the seat’s Muslim immigrant community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway’s fundamentalist call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis.’

This was amended to:

‘It appeared that the seat’s Muslim community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway’s call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis.’

Further key changes are easily visible here.

‘The Muslim Vote’

It is customary for the media to cast an honest, uncompromising political voice as ‘controversial’ and ‘maverick’ (or worse). And journalists did not disappoint. On the News at Ten, celebrity presenter Fiona Bruce, reportedly on a BBC salary of half a million pounds per year, referred blithely to ‘controversial ex-Labour MP George Galloway’. (March 30, 2012). The British public will wait in vain for her to refer to the ‘controversial’ Prime Minister David Cameron or the ‘controversial’ President Barack Obama.

In a News at Ten ‘analysis’, the BBC’s Iain Watson reported, with the broadcaster’s version of impartiality, that Galloway had compared his victory to the Arab Spring and ‘cheekily suggested he was challenging the entire British establishment’. (March 30, 2012)

But perhaps Galloway’s suggestion was accurate, ‘cheeky’ or no. Galloway was, in fact, pretty devastating in challenging the British media establishment in interview after interview. On Channel 4 News, Midlands correspondent Darshni Soni asserted that Galloway’s ‘fiery rhetoric on Iraq and Afghanistan specifically targeted young Muslims’; as though only ‘young Muslims’ should be concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan. (‘“Young Muslims defied elders to vote for Galloway”’, C4 News, March 30, 2012)

Soni tried to trip up Galloway:

Soni: ‘But what do you say to people who say you played that race card – you specifically targeted young Muslim men?’

George Galloway: ‘Well, I think it was Labour that put up the Pakistani Muslim candidate, not us. So that’s a ludicrous charge, to be honest.’

Soni: ‘But you talked a lot about Iraq, Afghanistan.’

Galloway: ‘Well, Iraq and Afghanistan are not issues only for Muslims.’

Also on Channel 4 News, Cathy Newman sought, like so many before her, to outwit Galloway — only to come out of the encounter with egg on her face. (‘Cathy Newman interviews George Galloway’, C4 News, March 30, 2012)

Newman: ‘George Galloway, you’ve described this as the most sensational upset in history. I think you got a little carried away – there were two previous results with bigger swings. But it is pretty sensational nevertheless. What do you put it down to?’

Galloway: ‘No I don’t think I was exaggerating, if you’ll forgive me, I’m a bit of a student of these matters. No party to the left of Labour has ever taken a Labour seat in a period when Labour has been in opposition.’

Newman pressed on: ‘You’re defining your terms very clearly and quite narrowly, but within those terms a sensational victory – what do you put it down to?’

Galloway responded amicably: ‘I don’t know why you’re being so churlish about this. I know more about left-wing history than you do, I assure you. But anyway, I put it down to a tidal wave of alienation in the country, and not just in Bradford, against the Tweedledee-Tweedledum politics of the major parties.’

This is surely right. When much that matters is so clearly going wrong in this country and the world at large, no wonder the public is thoroughly sick of the fodder that is dished out as ‘responsible’ policies, debate and reporting.

Galloway continued: ‘I think we saw what I described last night as “a Bradford Spring” moment – a kind of uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising of especially young people.’

Newman responded with barely disguised disdain: ‘Isn’t it slightly presumptuous or even arrogant though to describe a … to compare a by-election victory with a revolution that has claimed tens of thousands of lives across the Arab world?’

Galloway exposed the biased stance of C4 News: ‘Well I can see you and I are not getting on very well and probably that’s a sign that I should go and do one of the many other interviews that are waiting for me. You obviously weren’t listening or you’re not hearing me …’

Newman: ‘I’m hearing you perfectly well…’

Galloway: ‘…I said a peaceful democratic uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising – that’s what I think it was. You evidently don’t. We’ll see if it comes to anything. Thanks very much – because I really do have a lot of very important interviews to do.’

As one of our regular readers later reminded us on the Media Lens message board, the encounter was reminiscent of Jeremy Paxman’s remarkable May 2005 interview with Galloway after he had won the Bethnal Green and Bow seat from the war-supporting, Blairite MP, Oona King. In a dismal lowlight of a long BBC career, Paxman repeatedly asked Galloway:

‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?’

Galloway rightly disparaged Paxman’s question as ‘preposterous’ saying that: ‘I don’t believe that people get elected because of the colour of their skin. I believe people get elected because of their record and their policies.’

There was more to come from the BBC. In an extraordinary segment on BBC Radio Five Live, reporter Anna Foster fired a series of hostile and loaded questions at Galloway. Just hours after his electoral victory, Foster kept asking why he had come to Bradford – an issue that he rightly said he had dealt with on numerous occasions before the election. Galloway took her to task for focusing on ‘the’ Muslim vote, as though Muslim voters were a homogeneous mass:

‘This is very incendiary and inflammatory language which the BBC keep using.’

After giving Foster several more minutes of his time, Galloway rightly described the interview as ‘a hatchet job’ and left the studio, leaving the BBC reporter flabbergasted.

Later that day on BBC2’s Newsnight, reporter Peter Marshall recycled the same discredited language: ‘It’s said you’ve relied very heavily on the Muslim vote. I mean, you yourself have said in the past that you used (sic)… you have the Muslim vote…’

Galloway responded: ‘I really reject this concept of “the” Muslim vote. Muslims are individuals just like everyone else. You wouldn’t say that there’s a “Christian vote” because Christians vote in all sorts of ways. And the Labour candidate, I remind you, was a Pakistani Muslim. So I really don’t think that’s a valid question. Every voter is an individual and every voter has to be appealed to.’

Marshall managed to include the standard description of Galloway as ‘a singular figure, a political maverick’ who ‘in triumph’ is ‘unrepentant’. What he was supposed to be ‘unrepentant’ about wasn’t made clear. Perhaps for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, pretending to be a cat licking milk from Rula Lenska’s cupped hands: stock footage that news broadcasters are seemingly obliged to repeat whenever Galloway is mentioned.

The Wolf Man

The Observer played its part as well, publishing not just one but two anti-Galloway comment pieces. The first, by Andrew Rawnsley, set the tone, referring acerbically to Galloway’s ‘blushing modesty which makes him such an appealing character’. This was a dig at the Respect politician supposedly acclaiming Bradford West ‘the most sensational victory in British political history’. But, shooting himself in the foot, Rawnsley had got the quote wrong. Galloway had called it ‘the most sensational result in British by-election history’, not ‘political history’ – a crucial distinction. As we have seen, Galloway had clearly explained the basis for his claim.

For Galloway to draw any kind of comparison with the Arab Spring was, said Rawnsley, ‘a very advanced form of narcissism’. The Observer columnist then added the sly comment that Galloway had ‘declined to offer his fusion of Marxism and Islamism to voters at the five previous byelections of this parliament’. Whatever counts as a ‘fusion of Marxism and Islamism’ was not spelled out. It was instead left hanging in the air as something to be regarded by right-minded people as dangerously anti-capitalist and un-Christian; perhaps even unpatriotic and anti-British. But arguably the most blatant propaganda element of the Observer piece was the accompanying sinister-looking photograph of Galloway, reminiscent of Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolf Man.

By an amazing coincidence – or not – a second Observer hit piece by Nick Cohen deployed a similarly sinister photograph of Galloway. The Observer’s picture editor had obviously been busy scouring the pictorial archives and struck gold not once, but twice. The comment piece also had a cartoon-like flavour. For example, Galloway’s ‘claim’ that his by-election victory was the ‘Bradford spring’ exhibited, Cohen said, ‘contemptible willingness to exploit the suffering of others for the purposes of self-aggrandisement’ which ‘no politician can beat’. No politician? Not even Cohen’s hero Tony Blair, who exploited the deaths of millions in the Middle East for his own self-aggrandisement as a ‘peace maker’?

Almost in a parody of himself, Cohen wrote that: ‘Galloway and others on the far left believe that Muslims can replace the white working class that let them down so badly by refusing to follow their orders to seize power.’

One had to check the date of publication. Yes, it was published on April 1. But, nonetheless, Observer readers were forced to accept that this was indeed not a spoof piece by a spoof Cohen.

The attitude was summed up by the title of a Liberal Conspiracy blog, run by Sunny Hundal: ‘When populism is dangerous for democracy.’ Hundal, the Guardian‘s ‘blogger of the year’ in 2006, was himself busy on Twitter. He referred to Galloway in responding to a questioner: ‘I don’t want any part of a left that supports dictators thanks. Maybe you do.’

We were intrigued by this and responded: ‘Yet you write that Obama’s re-election “is worth fighting for.” Does Obama not support, indeed arm, dictators?’

The following day, Hundal replied. Here are some highlights from the subsequent exchange:

Sunny Hundal (SH): ‘answer to that question is simple: as Us Prez Obama can’t easily call for dictators to go. But Galloway isn’t leader: he can.’

Media Lens (ML): ‘You can’t reject George Galloway for dictator “support” and then back Obama who arms them, actually helps them kill.’

SH: ‘can you name me one dictator that one Obama has cheerleaded for?’

Writer and activist Ian Sinclair replied:

‘Mubarak “is a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good” – Obama to BBC, 2009 http://bit.ly/H2ZeLg’

We responded to Hundal:

ML: ‘Simple questions 1) Has Obama armed dictators? 2) Is that more or less important than what he/Galloway says about dictators?’

SH: 1) ‘Has he personally sanctioned arming of dictators? No. They can buy weapons from China/Russia too, as Libya did.’

SH: ‘he [Obama] didn’t support Mubarak.’

We replied with a quote from 2011 in The Times on US aid to Egypt: ML: ‘”the Mubarak regime is still receiving $1.3 billion of military aid each year from America.” (The Times, January 31, 2011)’

SH: ‘Just for your info, since you guys set yourself up as a major source of info and critique: “military aid” is not guns/ammo.’

ML: ‘True. Do F-16 jets, M-1A1 tanks, Harpoon, TOW, Hellfire, and Stinger missiles count? http://tinyurl.com/5rwx7zf’

SH: ‘might help if you recognised that most of it referred to stuff over a decade, not during Obama. Now, answer my question?’

ML: ‘Details here: http://tinyurl.com/2ekorm9 May 2009 Apache attack helicopter sale here: http://tinyurl.com/7djfdzl‘

And indeed Hundal’s position was completely untenable. To sample at random, the Washington Post reported last December:

‘The Obama administration on Thursday announced an arms deal with Saudi Arabia valued at nearly $30 billion, an agreement that will send 84 F-15 fighter jets and assorted weaponry to the kingdom.’

And so on. Hundal wriggled and dug himself ever deeper. For us, it was another encounter with the curious capacity for ‘selective inattention’ found at the intellectual fringe otherwise known as ‘the mainstream media’. For Hundal, Galloway’s words really are far worse crimes than Obama’s active participation in the arming and diplomatic protection of murderous dictators who use his support to kill large numbers of people.

Closing Remarks

In our 2005 media alert, Ambushing Dissent, also analysing media treatment of Galloway, we noted how ‘across the spectrum, “rogue” thinkers, politicians and parties are relentlessly smeared and mocked by the elite media. The effect is as inevitable as it is intended – to persuade the public to revile and turn away from radical voices threatening established privilege and power.’

The response to Galloway’s latest electoral victory from the Guardian, the Observer, Channel 4 News and the BBC piles on the evidence. It shows – once again – that the supposedly liberal media, purveyors of ‘open journalism,’ will fight tooth and nail to neutralise anyone who challenges the establishment status quo.

And yet it could hardly be more obvious that the British political system has degenerated into a grotesque, neo-feudalist fraud representing the same elite interests under different brand names. Our politics is structurally addicted to greed-based ‘humanitarian’ militarism, to exacerbating the catastrophic threat of climate change, and to denying the public any serious choice on the major policy issues of the day. An honest media would welcome any small sign of hope that the iron grip of this corrupt and oppressive system might be subject to serious challenge.

The video demonstrates that the United States is not a democracy, it is a bribeocracy, largely controlled by Zionists.  But citizens of other nations need not be complacent, for there is much evidence to suggest that the same pressures are being brought to bear on their politicians and officials to support Israel’s excesses, and an Internet search will reveal that the first ever European Jewish Parliament held its inaugural meeting early in February, 2012; something that the mainstream media seemed reluctant to publicise.