Mossad Exposed In Phony ‘Palestinian Al Qaeda’ Caper by Michele Steinberg Tuesday February 11, 2003 at 08:45 AM

“…A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual citizen and right to drop high explosives on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony- bin made use of by some other planet.” -George Orwell

Been spending time lately at Indymedia ( www.indymedia.org ) and w. Noam Chomsky ( www.zmag.org ).

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, 3 ½ million men and women are directly engaged in the Defense Establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense Military Establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to cornprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very Structure of our society.

In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

President Dwight Eisenhower:
Farewell to the Nation, January 17, 1961

“The Saudis, Our Enemies”? Saudi Arabia on the agenda, too? Here’s what the Washington Post says, Apparently, with Iraq just falling to the perpetual war of the Anglo-American alliance, Saudi Arabia is now being called “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent”. It’s nice to have several “most dangerous opponents” around, so you can have several options about who it is most convenient to invade.

All the posturing over those nations that didn’t “support” the US/UK invasion of Iraq is a big lie. The unilateralism is intentional, and the criticism of the UN, France, et al, is propaganda. It is part of a larger campaign that also levelled Afghanistan. To quote
The Politics and Costs of Postmodern War in the Age of Bush By Douglas Kellner:

For several weeks following the September 11 terror attacks the global community appeared to be building an effective strategy to fight terrorism by arresting suspected members of the al Qaeda network, tracking and blocking their financial support, and developing internal and global mechanisms and policies to fight terrorism. Suddenly, however, the campaign against terrorism turned to war. On Sunday, October 7, just short of one month after the terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Bush administration unleashed a full-scale military assault on Afghanistan, purportedly to annihilate the bin Laden network and the Taliban that had been hosting it. The unilateralism of the U.S. response was striking. Indeed, leading American newspapers provided a rationale for U.S. rejection of a UN-led or NATO-led coalition against international terrorism:

In the leadup to a possible military strike, senior administration and allied officials said Mr. Rumsfeld’s approach this week made clear that the United States intends to make it as much as possible an all-American campaign.

One reason, they said, is that the United States is determined to avoid the limitations on its targets that were imposed by NATO allies during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the hesitance to topple a leader that members of the gulf war coalition felt in 1991.

“Coalition is a bad word, because it makes people think of alliances,” said Robert Oakley, former head of the State Department’s counter-terrorism office and former ambassador to Pakistan.

A senior administration official put it more bluntly: “The fewer people you have to rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get” (New York Times, October 7, 2001).

In a September 25 speech to Congress declaring his war on terrorism, Bush announced what his administration would describe as “the Bush doctrine.” Calling the crusade against terrorism as a war between freedom and fear, between “those governed by fear” who “want to destroy our wealth and freedoms,” and those on the side of freedom, Bush asserted that “you’re either with us, or against us.” Bush also said that his administration held accountable those nations who supported terrorism, and in his October 7 speech announcing a bombing campaign against the Taliban, he claimed that the Taliban leadership had sustained the al Qaeda network and would be subject to military retaliation. Bush warned that his administration was planning to go after other targets later, and there was talk that the war against terrorism and resultant Jihad of Islam against the West could lead to World War III.

As the U.S. continued its bombing campaign through the end of 2001, threatening to expand its military actions to states like Iraq, worries began to circulate that the U.S. military intervention might create more problems than it would solve. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared the war on terror to the Cold War, which lasted roughly forty years, the spectre of endless war was invoked. This is perhaps what the Bush administration and Pentagon had in mind when they first named their military intervention “operation infinite justice.” Jokes circulated through the Pentagon that an endless war on terrorism would drag them into “Operation Infinite War.” President Bush regularly referred to World War III in speeches and pledged that he would dedicate his administration to this cause.

“Endless war” would no doubt be a hard project to sell the public for the long-term and one wondered how long it would take for the costs to overwhelm the benefits. Although war throughout the new millennium would keep America’s troops fully employed and the Pentagon budget ever escalating, it would keep U.S. citizens in a state of fear from terrorist retaliation, for endless war would no doubt generate endless terror. Moreover, it was not clear how the U.S. could afford to finance an endless war against terrorism, nor how the global economy could function in a situation of perpetual fear and war.

The first weeks of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan unfolded high-tech warfare in a wildly uneven battle against Taliban and Islamic forces with ancient munitions, a first world military against a fourth world one that still used horse-back troops and revered swords. Old-fashioned B-52’s saturated large areas with explosive munitions while winged B-2 Bombers aloft for days flew from the U.S. to drop bombs directed by Global Positioning System Satellites often with mixed results. With its 172-foot wingspan, these giant flying birds deployed Joint Direct Attack Munitions (J-DAM) to fire a wide array of weapons. Heavy AC-130 gunships armed with howitzers, cannon, and machine guns blasted supposed Taliban and Al Qaeda camps and material, while land-based F-15Es bombed enemy positions, with giant fuel-air explosive “bunker bombs” used to blow up munitions dumps and possible mountain and tunnel hide-outs.

Military theoreticians described the conflict as “asymmetrical” since the Taliban had no sophisticated weaponry or modern military organization. While the U.S. military claimed that it was destroying Taliban “command and control” centers, there was in reality no command or control, at least in the sense normally defined by the contemporary military. Videos showed daily in U.S. military briefings depicted U.S. bombs hitting obscure buildings or vehicles, but it wasn’t clear that these were really military targets, or that the Taliban had a military force in the conventional sense.

Moreover, while during the first weeks of bombing, the U.S. bombing had destroyed many seemingly military targets on the ground in Afghanistan, it had also hit many civilian facilities, including Red Cross facilities and a UN supplies depot, generating many pictures of wounded or murdered Afghan children, and destroyed civilian houses. Such pictures circulated daily throughout the world, and were turning public opinion against the U.S. intervention, especially in the Islamic world where large anti-war demonstrations were a regular feature of everyday life and threats against the U.S. escalated. A flood of refugees was producing heart-breaking images of people fleeing war and facing disease and starvation. Aid agencies continued to plea for a bombing halt so that food could be delivered to refugees, yet the bombing continued unabated into a third and then a fourth and fifth weeks.

In late October 2001, there were reports of helicopter assaults on Taliban positions, Special Ops forces landing seeking Taliban and al Qaeda forces, and the beginning of a longer, more complex campaign. There was much speculation that this was the beginning of a ground war in which U.S. troops would rout the Taliban. U.S. ground forces never intervened, however, and although the Taliban regime collapsed, Osama Bin Laden and major Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders escaped. Consequently, as of early 2002, the results of the U.S. military intervention are mixed at best, with Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders still at large, millions of refugees and war victims facing starvation, and Afghanistan in chaos.

In retrospect, the Afghanistan intervention represented a new step toward postmodern war. New armed unmanned aircraft like the RQ-1 Predators were reportedly in the field, armed with Hellfire antitank missiles, although reports emerged that bad weather was limiting their effectiveness and many were crashing. An even larger and longer-range unmanned surveillance aircraft armed with missiles, the RQ-4A Global Hawk, that could bring weapons from the U.S. to the other side of the world, was also reported to be in action. Afghanistan thus emerged as yet another testing ground for new weapons and strategies where humans would be replaced by machine satellite-guided planes, taking “postmodern war” and the “revolution in military affairs” to a higher level.

Here is an interesting site.

Well, they’re already strutting around, as though they’d been somehow involved. The armchair warriors and doe-eyed Amerotrash are smiling and bragging about how they’ve “won”. They’ve simply no idea how ridiculous they look. Besides that, they remain cowards. Bragging about power and coming off like thugs, beating up on the smaller and weaker. Watching and listening to them, I’m reminded of men like Reinhard Heydrich. The similarities are striking.

I’ve been asked if I’ll stop wearing black now. No, I won’t. And no, this site isn’t going away, either. The rape of Iraq has only begun. The rape of Serbia and Afghanistan continues. And we’ve already speculated on who is next. And there will be a next. And a next. And a next.

With North Korea, and Syria, and Africa, we sympathize, indeed. At any time the incestuous Anglo-American conglomerate of governments and corporations, national and international, can manufacture crimes in your name, can attribute to you any guilt it wishes, and the sheep will bleat and follow.

And of course, the “heroes”, those shameful murderers of civilians, are home or one their way home to reproduce and brag of their exploits and be honored as the embodiment of their nations’ prized values. We’ll be here to remind the world of their crimes.

Now Newsmax and the Washington Times are morons, with only the barest pretentions to real journalism. In fact, they are neo-conservative sites designed to “present” and “handle” news with a particular spin, and give their proponents a place to go and pretend they are getting “the news”. What’s lovely about them is that they frequently brag about things (and consequently give away information) that others find horrifying. It’s especially nice when they confirm the details of reports from independent media sources (because they’re proud of being, essentially fascist). A nice example is this article on the CIA’s relationship with Hussein and role in attacking governments in Iraq dating back to 1959. Dont’ think the report isn’t washing out the more interesting events and facets of events, but it’s at least quite telling when one looks at the hypocrisy of the security apparatus that’s been driving US policy since the fifties.

Just a note: Two kinds of nations have become US colonies in the past 6 years:

• Those bailed out by the IMF from an economic crash (part of the agreement is that foreign corporations, notably banks, can own 50% of those countries’ formerly nationally controlled banking institutions).

• Those whose countries will be rebuilt by the IMF after the US has invaded them.

Two things make the illegal imprisonment of Mike Hawash, and the violation of his human rights, especially noteworthy.

1. It’s a signal from this government, driven by it’s security apparatus: Don’t step out of line. Rights are second to security. Remember what we can do to you and your family at any time. And see there will be no riots in the streets, no revolution, no blaring outcry from the press. And those who speak on your behalf can simply be called unpatriotic. They are the enemies of state; easily identified as those who speak and those who listen to them. The world will not charge us with crimes against human rights; it will let you rot, until it is convenient for us to let you go, or until we’re done programming you and them for your release.
2. It’s a high profile distraction from the many others who are similarly imprisoned. With Mike, there’s such a storm of protest (and there should be) – but largely because he fits a certain profile. Socially and economically, he’s ‘normal’ (one of the reasons point 1 works so well). But others less ‘defensible’ have also been placed in a legal/journalistic black-hole. Others languish there without the benefit of a web site documenting the abuse. Theoretically, when Mike’s case is redressed, all will be quiet once more. It will be, like this illegal invasion and all the others, “what we had to do then and can apologize for later”. We will be supposed to be placated when Mike’s ordeal is over and he’s back at Intel, but there will be those that this same illegal government knows we have forgotten.

As government-sponsored “public service announcements” tell us that a loving parent is one who “spies, snoops” (yes, those are the exact words) – that “questions” (without being specific) are an “anti-drug”, priming this generation of youth to expect and consider normal the routine invasion of privacy by authority figures, acclimating them to the security state, we should consider:

Mike Hawash, and the others who are worse off because we haven’t heard their names, because they may never be the ones selected to emerge from their dungeons, are us. The “war” is currently being waged on two fronts. In every nation that rejects US/UK internationalism/colonialism, and in the proverbial “Homeland”s of these beligerents, where we must now be ‘careful’, where any citizen can be a ‘traitor’, ‘disloyal’, ask ‘dangerous questions’, or commit ’sedition’.

Don’t be surprised, either, if some of these kidnapping victims who have been “disappeared” by their governments – governments that claim to be invading their economic prey to put a stop to this very same behaviour – emerge saying how it was uncomfortable but “understandable”, “necessary”, or a “misunderstanding”. How they were treated “reasonably well” (excepting of course the eradication of all their human rights and dignities).

In a place where terror is the norm, where one (as under Stalin) needn’t have done anything in particular, where it is not clear what is criminal and what is legal – for government or individual, where one never knows what behaviour might result in an arrest, validating the status quo is a means of survival.

Even the press plays along. There’s a mild (relative to the import for a constitutional republic) “page six” response to the rights we make meaningless by these acts, while our opponents’ abuses make page one. The response is just enough to maintain the suggestion of journalistic independence long since lost to repeating edited official statements and trading objectivity for ‘access’ and status. There hasn’t been a deeply investigative press exploring the truly heinous offenses against liberty in the US in a lifetime. The last of that died the last time the US/UK were called the “Allies”.

Your belief in liberty and justice, dear reader, is to be judged by your application of it to the least of your neighbors and your holding to it the greatest representatives of your power. Lose that, and you are the rabble of humanity, chanting the slogan of your petty tribe in the face of history from behind your bloody weapons and the torches with which you set fire to the world and reason. Trade the one torch for the other, and you are a savage in the suit of a man. A cannibal. An eater of the dead.

The government-funded PSA’s are such a mockery of such men. “Violence against women is a crime”, they tell us. And how many mothers and daughters are mourning or maimed while we sip our morning Latte and smugly talk of our nations’ strength?

Our strength is in our honesty. Force, and our daily violence, is the opposite of power and the obituary to that basic sense of truth prerequisite to any real strength.

Remember last year when Bush claimed the US had evidence of “ties” between Al-Quaeda and Iraq? Now he admits there’s no such connection. But of course the invasion must continue, says Blair.

Greenpeace:An extraordinary communication from the United States to UN representatives around the world has been leaked to Greenpeace. In it, the United States warns that the simple act of support for a General Assembly meeting to discuss the war will be considered “unhelpful and directed against the United States.” They further threaten that invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution will be “harmful to the UN.”

Mideast_AFP: WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US State Department has quietly withdrawn all CD-ROM copies of its annual human rights report due to a one-word error that was thought to overstate the extent of Israel’s rights abuses, officials said.

Did you read about the Washington Post correspondent “detained” for asking questions?

Remembering these our “brave troops”, our “courageous soldiers”, those who painted “Happy Easter” on bombs before dropping them on Serbia. Those who killed as though playing video games in Afghanistan. Those who now look forward to their current work in Iraq… here are some worthy quotations reminding us just how brave our soldiers are, and how nothing has changed:

“When our troops enter a bombed village the pariah dogs are already at work eating the corpses of the babies and old women who have been killed. Many suffer from ghastly wounds, especially some of the younger children who…are covered with flies and crying for water.” —Colonel Osburn of Britain, quoted in a May 1935 issue of the Manchester Guardian. Reprinted in A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist (The New Press, 2001), p 68.

“I could watch a burned infant trying to nurse from its dead mother’s breast, see young men with their faces blown away, witness a boy deliberately gutted…and never protest.” —reporter Richard Boyle in Vietnam. The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the US Army in Vietnam by Richard Boyle (San Francisco, 1972), p. 22. Reprinted in An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke (Basic Books, 1999), p 199.

“But [bombings] arouse a completely personal hate that no one can really understand who has not huddled in a cellar or burrowed his face in a field to escape dive bombers or seen a mother search for her son’s torn-off head or smelled the stench of burning schoolchildren.” —Reporter Edgar Snow in Chunking, China. Quoted in A History of Bombing, p 75.

“Those poor bastards sat in the air-raid shelters of 16,000 apartment buildings that burned down. Those who followed instructions and dutifully sat there, as I myself would have done, were all killed. They were suffocated when the shelter filled with smoke or when the firestorm had consumed all the oxygen. Only their bodies could testify as to how they had died.

The corpses often lay crowded into heaps near the barricaded exits. Other bodies were stuck in the hardened black mass of their own fat, which had melted and run out onto the floor.

The infants lay in rows like grilled chickens. Other corpses had vanished completely; nothing was left but a fine layer of ash on the tables and chairs.

Most of those who left the shelters burned to death out on the street instead. Many lay facedown, with one arm over their heads, as if to shield themselves. Many had shrunk to the size of dwarves; others had blown up like balloons. Some seemed completely unharmed but were naked—all of their clothes except their shoes had disappeared. Others lay with outstretched arms and blank faces, like mannequins. Still others were totally charred. Their skulls had burst at the temples where the brain pushed out, and their intestines bulged out under their ribs.” —Sven Lindqvist, describing the British firebombing of Hamburg, Germany in 1943. From his book A History of Bombing.

Vietnam, June 8, 1972

“By the time Calley and men sat down to lunch, they had rounded up and slaughtered around 500 unarmed civilians. Within those few hours, members of Charlie Company had ‘fooled around’ and laughed as they sodomized and raped women, ripped vaginas open with knives, bayoneted civilians, scalped corpses, and carved “C Company” or the ace of spades onto their chests, slaughtered animals, and torched hooches. Other soldiers had wept openly as they fired on crowds of unresisting old men, women, children, and babies.” —description of the My Lai massacre (16 March 1968). From An Intimate History of Killing, p 160.

“[Sergeant Bruce F. Anello] describes the grotesque pranks played upon corpses, the rapes, and the way platoons were ‘willing to kill any body’ simply in order to beat another platoon’s ‘kill record.’” —from An Intimate History of Killing, p 205.