Peter King's Islamic radicalization hearings against Muslims is meaningless and ineffective. He leaves out discussion of the United States long history of collaborating with Jihadis, propping up dictators and toppling democratic regimes (like in Iran in 1953). Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devils Game, discusses history of US and Middle East.
While people accuses CAIR of supporting Hamas, people forget how Israel allowed Hamas to flourish as a rival to the secular Palestinian Nationalist movement. See "How Israel and the United States Helped to Bolster Hamas" from the Democracy Now program for more about this issue.
So basically, while the United States preaches human rights and democracy, it supports kings, dictators and extremists who do its bidding. And just so that we can live comfortably, Muslims are supposed to accept and be happy about being oppressed and killed by their leaders (that we armed and supported).
I'd like to see people put their money where their mouth is and demand USA stop accepting billions of dollars in investment money from the Saudis.
There are 9/11 victims families that are demanding a reopening of the 9/11 investigation. But Peter King is ignoring them http://rememberbuilding7.org/ King chooses to place all the blame on voiceless and powerless Muslims because it is the easy and cowardly thing to do.
Peter King thinks that it was OK to support Irish terrorists because the terrorist acts did not occur in the United States. How does that look to the world that our elected politicians have double standards. What does Britain, an ally on the war on terror, think of our government supporting people who commit terrorists in their country. Peter King should be made to step down as head of House Homeland Security Committee.
Film discusses how United States government has betrayed our soldiers through the use of chemical weapons, but did not educate or provide protection to solders. In addition, millions of innocent Iraqis have suffered disease, deformities and death from the USA's use of chemical weapons. Film discusses how USA sold to Iraq many of the weapons, which the USA later used as an reason for invading Iraq. I doubt our "brave" Peter King, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, will be investigating this.
Gold9472 posted this video on youtube. He writes:
This is a very brief clip from a question and answer session Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton gave at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on 9/11/2006. As representatives of the family members, and family members themselves called for a new investigation right across the hall.
On the video, Kean says
Lee and I write in our book [Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission] that we think Commission was set up to fail because we had not enough money, we didn’t have enough time, we had been appointed by the most partisan people in Washington: The leaders of the House and Senate
Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region,Darfur.
Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.
More interestingly, the author maintains that much of what we see today as a racial divide in Sudan has its roots in colonial history, when Britain “broke up native society into different ethnicities, and ‘tribalized’ each ethnicity by bringing it under the absolute authority of one or more British-sanctioned ‘native authorities,’ ” balancing “the whole by playing one off against the others.”
Mr. Mamdani calls this British tactic of administratively reinforcing distinctions among colonial subjects “re-identify and rule” and says that it was copied by European powers across the continent, with deadly consequences — as in Rwanda, where Belgium’s intervention hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi.
In Sudan the result was to create a durable sense of land rights rooted in tribal identity that favored the sedentary at the expense of the nomad, or, in the crude shorthand of today, African and Arab.
Other roots of the Darfur crisis lie in catastrophic desertification in the Sahel region, where the cold war left the area awash in cheap weapons at the very moment that pastoralists could no longer survive in their traditional homelands, obliging many to push southward into areas controlled by sedentary farmers.
He also blames regional strife, the violent legacy of proxy warfare by France, Libya and the United States and, most recently, the global extension of the war on terror.
This important book reveals much on all of these themes, yet still may be judged by some as not saying enough about recent violence in Darfur.
Mr. Mamdani’s constant refrain is that the virtuous indignation he thinks he detects in those who shout loudest about Darfur is no substitute for greater understanding, without which outsiders have little hope of achieving real good in Africa’s shattered lands.
“With the United States so totally consumed by the Iraq conflict, it has no time, energy or political capital to crack down on challenges south of the Rio Grande. Sensing their historic chance, many Latin nations have embarked on experiments that the US would in past eras have instantly stepped in to crush.
The independence that many Latin American countries have shown in the last five years borders on outright defiance of US power. Yet to a degree unprecedented in modern history, Washington is allowing them to do as they please.”
While US involvement in Iraq appears in the mainstream media everyday, US involvement in Africa does not.
Here are articles about African countries that the United States is politically/militarily involved with. Using Kinzer’s way of thinking, these are gifts to Latin America
This cartoon is by Ward Sutton that appears in the May 12, 2008 issue of THE NATION
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/sutton In the first panel, that "average Joe's" viewpoint is held by many highly educated people. There are Senators and Congresspersons (Republicans and Democrats) who have the same point of view.
Here is information about what the US is doing in Iraq that you won;t find in the mainstream media
Every once in a while a headline shows up where the U.S. President is asking the Saudis to increase oil production. See this article If the Saudis king says no, the press acts as if though the Arabs are controlling the United States. The United States imports just as much from Canada and Mexico (See See U.S. Energy Information Administration website, yet why doesn't the President ask these countries to increase oil production? If he does, how come the mainstream media doesn't report on it.
The Saudis invest trillions of dollars in the United States, but Canada and Mexico do not. Saudi Arabia buys billions of dollars worth of weapons from the United States, even though they do not have the qualified personnel to operate the weaponry. Saudi Arabia is just a storage place for weapons the United States uses in its military interventions in the Middle East and surrounding regions.
... in September 2002, the United States launched what would become an aggressive effort to build or refurbish as many as 1,000 schools and clinics by the end of 2004. However, Congressional figures showed that they managed to finish and hand back to the Afghan government only 40 schools by late 2005.
As Ben Jackson wrote in his book Poverty and the Planet published in 1990, “Aid is commonly thought of as handing over money to Third World governments for development. In fact, aid largely consists of funding from Western governments for services, machines, technical experts and consultants to be supplied by companies in rich countries, frequently their own.” The bottom line was that “most aid money is actually spent in the rich world.” Of the $20 billion the World Bank handed out in 1988, $15 billion went to its own contractors or consultants.
... there is a huge disparity between what America spends on war and what the international community spends on aid. The US military currently spends nearly $36 billion a year in the country, some $100 million a day; yet the average volume of aid spending by all donors since 2001 is just $7 million per day. Whilst the military budget is vast, 2.5 million Afghans face severe food insecurity, and one in five children still dies before five. Life expectancy is woefully low at 45 years. Thirdly, over half of all aid to Afghanistan is tied, by which donors often require procurement of services or resources from their own countries. Rather than go to help Afghanistan, the money just lines the pockets of Western contractors and companies. So of the aid actually spent, a staggering 40% has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries.
The report notes: “Vast sums of aid are lost in corporate profits of contractors and sub-contractors, which can be as high as 50% on a single contract … A vast amount of aid is absorbed by high salaries, with generous allowances, and other costs of expatriates working for consulting firms and contractors — each of whom costs $250,000-$500,000 a year.” In contrast, an Afghan civil servant is paid less than $1000 per year.
This video shows how Halliburton overcharges for everything, but the soldiers are living under poor conditions. If this is how they are treating Americans, image how they are treating the Iraqis. Is there any wonder why there are Iraqis still fighting the Americans?
In Part 1, I had pinged back to a post on mideastyouth.com about how "We are now blocked in Yemen." The ping appeared in the post and then it was removed. I didn’t get a chance to get an image of this, but when I went to technorati it appeared there, so I captured an image of the screen. Click the image below to see it larger and clearer.
How ironic that one of the administrators of the mideatyouth.com website makes a post about how "We are now blocked in Yemen" yet certain people are blocking information from appearing on that website, and I don just mean Ray Hanania.
You notice Ray Hanania was free to respond on the blog (see comment #s 3, 4, and 7)
On the website mideastyouth.com Ray responded to Sousam Hammad’s review and he chose to insert me into it, not making any good points, but just getting back at me. http://www.mideastyouth.com/2008/04/05/criticism-and-then-there-is-criticism/ He writes “By the way, Randal Jones reared his ugly head on another board claiming that I ‘only’ criticize Muslims in my comedy, but off course, never once watched any of my online comedy performances.” He puts a link to video of one of his comedy performances, which only confirms what I have said.
Hanania had written “I am an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation AND I am an outspoken critic of Hamas terrorism and a foe of suicide bombings.”
I put a comment, that was published, that the Israeli government had allowed Hamas to flourish as arrival to the secular Yasser Arafat.
Ray Hanania responded with this comment:
Hey Randall … I wrote the first analysis of how Israel’s LIKUD/HERUT party helped midwife the birth of Hamas … they didn’t found it, as Arabs argue falsely. But they did give Sheikh Yassin the support to raise money and set up a network called the Islamic Association in the 1970s in the Gaza Strip … that he later used during the outbreak of th efirst Intifada to launch Hamas … Sharon and Shamir did not expect that, but they did hope Yassin would become an Arafat rival. Go to CounterPunch and look it up yourself … it’s there in detail … And Tim, the Electronic Intifada argues there should only be one state, a secular state where Jews, Christians and Muslims can live in peace. They haven’t lived in peace in Palestine since before 1897 … the idea of one state is a great dream, but an unrealistic goal that only results in two things: continued conflict; the perpetuation of the Palestinian refugees living in refugee camps. The ONLY solution is Two States … and by the way, the founder of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimeh, spent his life opposing and criticizing and assaulting the Oslo Accords and the Two State plan, and now that it is dying, he dances on it by saying, “See, I told you it wouldn’t work. Now let’s live together as equals.” I’d rather live under Israeli occupation than under Hamas and Palestinian fanatic occupation because as far as I am concerned, they are both bad but at least under the Israelis are under international scrutiny … the Islamicists and extremist secular nuts would be far worse and would quickly turn the “One State” into an Islamic State. That’s their goal. Not a Secular Islamic STate, but a fanatic religious state that bastardizes Islam and distoerts its meaning to give them the kind of power they enjoy in such sterling democracies as Yemen and in Al-Qaedi-stan.
I attempted to put this response several times, but it was not published on the website:
Who are the Arabs you are talking about where you write “…they[Israel] didn’t found it [Hamas], as Arabs argue falsely.” What’s the point of making this claim? This doesn’t mitigate the role of Israel in fueling the violence in Palestine, between Israelis and Palestinians, and also amongst the Palestinians.
Ray,you wrote “I’d rather live under Israeli occupation than under Hamas and Palestinian fanatic occupation because as far as I am concerned, they are both bad but at least under the Israelis are under international scrutiny … the Islamicists and extremist secular nuts would be far worse and would quickly turn the “One State” into an Islamic State.”
You just proved Sousan Hammad's and other critics' point; you want Palestinians to be occupied (but of course your not living under the occupation) because you believe Palestinians are incapable of developing a government. If a foreign power did to Israel what Israel is doing to Palestinians, I don't think you would want to be living under this situation. You are not living in occupied Palestine, so it is not for you to decide the type of government the Palestinians should have. The international scrutiny means nothing because Israel controls how the news comes out of that region. Israel has no interest in settling this conflict; its main concern is to perpetuate the violence to justify its occupation, while taking more of the Palestinians’ lands. Israel fuels the violence in Palestine by arming militants to oppose whoever gains popularity amongst the people.
You really got a lot of nerve to talk about “Al-Qaedi-stan,” the matter of fact is that the United States had recruited and trained Muslim extremists to destabilize the Afghan government, just so that the United States could give the Soviet Union its “Vietnam.” Millions of Afghans had been killed; the country's infrastructure had been destroyed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. became the number one super power in the world, but did nothing to help reconstruct Afghanistan.
As for Yemen, there are Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular countries in the Third World that have similar kinds of problems,
At the beginning of the United States’ history there was persecution of religious and racial minorities, women were treated as property, and there was slavery. It eventually changed on its own, not by having some foreign power occupying it
My comment, that you only make Muslim jokes, is based on your radio interviews, which are a reflection of your shows. Anyway, I recently saw your performance on Google video at a dinner banquet honoring Osama Siblani and the Arab American News newspaper in Dearborn Michigan, November 2004. This also confirms what I said.
I suggested to Hanania some Christian related topics he could make jokes about:
Do you know Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of assassinating Rober F. Kennedy was a Palestinian Christian? Some people believe he did not act alone; if that’s true then Sirhan is the first Arab patsy in America’s war on terror.
How about the Pope expressing concern about violence by Muslims? Are you aware that the region with the most number of killings and rapes is in the Congo, more than 4 million dead, its Christians killing Christians, Christians raping Christians.
Did you know a Muslim, Wajeeh Nuseibeh, holds the key to Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, this is to keep the different sects of Christianity from fighting each other. There are Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopians and Copts. Its a good thing Wajeeh Nuseibeh doesn’t think like the U.S. governmnet, otherwise you would have a civil war that would make Iraq look like a picnic.
You’ve brought up being a Vietnam veteran. Are you proud of the 3 to 5 million Buddhists killed when the United States bombed Vietnam and Cambodia?
*** Update: I've added three youtube videos to this post *** 4/8/2008
Some blogs and forums have made a comparison between how the media reports on the violence of the peoples in Tibet and Palestine. There is not only a difference in the media coverage of the violence, but also on the reporting of negative aspects of each society. Zionists will often report on the most negative historical and "cultural" aspects of Palestinian society, as if though this justifies the oppression and violence that Israel inflicts upon them. There is hardly, if any reporting about the negative historical and cultural aspects of Tibetan society. Here is an article by Michael Parenti that discusses Tibet before China. http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html Here is an excerpt from the article:
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. 14 The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. 15 The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land--or the monastery’s land--without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand.16 Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. 17
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.”18 Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.19
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.20
The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation--including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation--were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”21 Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. 22
In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.
Here is a video by Chris Nebe about the history of Buddhism in Tibet.
Here is a viewpoint about the Tibet riots that says both Western and Chinese media is not telling the complete truth. You be the Judge!
Here is the same guy giving an "Unbiased history of Tibet."
DAVE SKRETTA | February 12, 2008 08:23 PM EST Film director Steven Spielberg and actress Mia Farrow joined activists worldwide Tuesday in using the Olympics as a backdrop to address human rights concerns, urging Beijing to exert political leverage on Sudan's government to help end the crisis in Darfur article continued at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/12/spielberg-drops-out-as-be_n_86338.html
. The delusional righteousness of Steven Spielberg, Mia Farrow and all those other phony “Save Darfur” activists
It really is incredible the gall and extreme hypocrisy of people who cry crocodile tears for Darfur. If they are really concerned about stopping the violence in Darfur they would discuss all the factors contributing to it. As Americans, Steven Spielberg and Mia Farrow should be discussing the role of the Untied States in fueling the violence in Darfur. Learn more about it from these two articles. One is written by Keith Harmon Snow
Maurice Templesman is one of big funders of Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, always working the CIA and Mobutu to instill terror and steal minerals, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all are hidden by Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.But while Africans are victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible? For Israeli-American Dan Gertler, business in blood drenched Congo is not merely business, it is a quest for the Holy Grail. Young Dan Gertler goes nowhere——does nothing——without the spiritual guidance of Brooklyn-born Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch, a personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.
Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour by Tom Engelhardt
A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.") Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:
"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches. "In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."
And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:
"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."
Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq." Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.
Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration's invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite, a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either. Continued at http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m40642&hd=&size=1&l=e Note: the article mentions what happened in 1937 Guernica; here is an article that points out that Western countries were already bombing Arab and Muslim countries before 1937. See http://www.brushtail.com.au/july_04_on/bombing_arabs_history.html
If I asked you which station devoted more attention to Osama bin Laden's latest videotape, your answer would most likely be Al Jazeera. Well, I have news for you. It was FOX News.
FOX dedicated one hour and seven minutes to continuous coverage of Bin Laden's video, only interrupted by commercials. News anchor Shepard Smith read a script of Bin Laden's speech and then interviewed analysts on air for 30 minutes. This was followed by the business news show Your World with host Neil Cavuto, who discussed the effects of Bin Laden's speech on the stock market. Cavuto interviewed analysts for another 30 minutes. Talk show host John Gibson extended the coverage of the Bin Laden story for an additional seven minutes before moving onto other news. Brigitte Gabriel, author of "Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America" and one of the guests interviewed by Neil Cavuto, told FOX, "He (Bin Laden) knows that it is going to get great publicity right now in the Arabic world. As I'm speaking to you, Arabic television -- Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese -- are playing this live."
As I was listening to her, I glanced at the more than two dozen Arab television sets playing in my office. These included four Lebanese television stations (New TV, LBC, NBN and Future), one Egyptian (Al Masriya), the Syrian Arab Republic Television, as well as other Arab satellite channels from Jordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates. I was only able to find one 10-minute news segment about Bin Laden on Al Jazeera and another one, less than two minutes long, on Sudan Television.
The mainstream media claims Iran is fueling the violence in Iraq. On this politically left website (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112207C.shtml) there is an op-ed peice from The New York Times about Saudi and Libyan fighters in Iraq. How come there isn't as much discussion of Israel's role in fueling the violence in Iraq?
Israel in Iraq: Evidence Mounts by Jon Elmer The NewStandard
Further evidence of the presence of Israeli operatives in Iraq arose this weekend when the general formerly in charge of the U.S.-run Iraqi prison system, herself considered partly responsible for torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons under her command, told the BBC that she met an Israeli interrogator working in a U.S.-run "intelligence center" in Baghdad. Brigadier General Janet Karpinski told BBC Radio in an interview on Saturday that she met with a man who claimed to be Israeli and that he "did some of the interrogation" at the facility. . . . A top US military official quoted in the Washington Post on Sunday denied claims of Israeli presence in Iraq, calling the story an "urban legend."
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom similarly dismissed Gen. Karpinski's claims as "completely baseless," telling Israel's Army Radio: "We are not involved in any way in Iraq. We are not involved in training or in interrogations, or in anything else. The whole claim is preposterous."
The Foreign Minister's assertion is contradicted by significant documentation of Israeli-American "strategic cooperation" with regard to intelligence sharing and training in Iraq.
A December article in the Guardian described how Israeli advisers are involved in training U.S. special operations troops in counter-insurgency tactics to be used in Iraq. The operations being trained are said to include the use of assassination against resistance leaders. Quoting US intelligence and military sources, Guardian writer Julian Borger reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sent urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of U.S. Army Special Forces.
On that same day, the Associated Press ran a story under the headline "U.S. employs Israeli tactics in Iraq," in which American and Israeli officials publicly noted "high-level meetings" and "strategic cooperation" between the two countries on the subject of operations in Iraq. from http://www.antiwar.com/orig/elmer.php?articleid=2959
The fact of the matter is that every single administration, since Jimmy Carter have supported and financed the "Islamic terror" network, created during the Carter administration at the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden, 12 September 2001). al Qaeda is a instrument of US intelligence: a US sponsored intelligence asset. Where was Osama on Septembers 11?
There is evidence that the whereabouts of Osama are known to the Bush Administration.
On September 10. 2001, "Enemy Number One" was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi, courtesy of America's indefectible ally Pakistan, as confirmed by a report of Dan Rather, CBS News. (See our October 2003 article on this issue)
He could have been arrested at short notice which would have "saved us a lot of trouble", but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as George W's speeches in the course of the last five years.
According to Dan Rather, CBS, Bin Laden was hospitalized in Rawalpindi. one day before the 9/11 attacks, on September 10, 2001.
"Pakistan. Pakistan's Military Intelligence (ISI) told CBS that bin Laden had received dialysis treatment in Rawalpindi, at Pak Army's headquarters.
DAN RATHER, CBS ANCHOR: As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. On that night, says this medical worker who wanted her identity protected, they moved out all the regular staff in the urology department and sent in a secret team to replace them. She says it was treatment for a very special person. The special team was obviously up to no good.
"The military had him surrounded," says this hospital employee who also wanted his identity masked, "and I saw the mysterious patient helped out of a car. Since that time," he says, "I have seen many pictures of the man. He is the man we know as Osama bin Laden. I also heard two army officers talking to each other. They were saying that Osama bin Laden had to be watched carefully and looked after." Those who know bin Laden say he suffers from numerous ailments, back and stomach problems. Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on the Taliban, says the military was often there to help before 9/11.
It should be noted, that the hospital is directly under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. U.S. military advisers based in Rawalpindi. work closely with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America's best known fugitive, but then maybe bin Laden was serving another "better purpose". Rumsfeld claimed at the time that he had no knowledge regarding Osama's health. (CBS News, 28 January 2002)...
The CBS report is a crucial piece of information in our understanding of 9/11.
It refutes the administration's claim that the whereabouts of bin Laden are unknown. It points to a Pakistan connection, it suggests a cover-up at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Dan Rather and Barry Petersen fail to draw the implications of their January 2002 report. They suggest that the US had been deliberately misled by Pakistani intelligence officials. They fail to ask the question:
Why does the US administration state that they cannot find Osama?
Just one note: Remember in September 2004 when Dan Rather was made to leave CBS news after reporting on President G.W. Bush’s military record? He was accused of using forged documents. No one has said anything was forged or false in Rather's Spetemebr 2001 reporting on Osama Ben Laden.
Why wouldn’t an attack which killed 3,000 people be specifically mentioned? Journalist Ed Haas’ investigates this,
On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden’s Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden’s Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”
Organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Save Darfur Coalition are silent on the role of the United States and other democracies in fueling the violence in Sudan.
For some strange reason these activists are not too concerned about the Congo were a larger number of killings and rapes have occurred. Can it be because the United States, Israel and Europe benefit from the diamonds, other natural resources, and sale of weapons, that the death of millions of black Africans in the Congo is not so tragic? See http://worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/congo.htm
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