Mossad: Masterminds of Global Terrorism?
Jun 28, 2003
Laura Knight-Jadczyk Cassiopaea!
The other day I was scanning the news reports and came across a rather mundane item that really got me to thinking. It simply read:
Cloudcroft chief stops Israelis with suspicious cargo
By Michael Shinabery Staff Writer, Alamogordo Daily News
CLOUDCROFT, NM -- That they were speeding through the school zone first got his attention.
That they had Israeli driver's licenses and expired passports made him suspicious.
Cloudcroft Police Chief Gene Green stopped the 2-ton van on Thursday, for speeding. Initially, Green thought the truck was commercial because of exterior markings. But when he found it was out of Chicago, he asked for documentation such as logs books and manifests.
"They said this is a U-Haul truck and handed me a rental agreement (for) in-town delivery only in Illinois, (which) had expired two days before," Green said. He called for backup, and Otero County Sheriff's Deputy Billy Anders, who patrols the Sacramento Mountains, arrived, along with Capt. Norbert Sanchez and Det. Eddie Medrano.
"We got them out and started digging a little deeper," Green said, "got permission to search the truck. They claimed they were hauling furniture from Austin to Chicago." When officers advised the men they were not exactly en route from one town to another, Green said the two men claimed they were Deming bound. "But they couldn't give us an address in Deming they were going to," he said. "Once we got into the truck, they had some junk furniture I wouldn't have given to Goodwill."
Also inside the vehicle were, Green said, "50 boxes" they claimed was a "private" delivery, but the men insisted they had no "idea what was in them."
At that point, the officers called for drug-sniffing and bomb-sniffing dogs. The men were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and U- Haul recovered the truck.
Contents of the boxes remain unknown, pending investigation.
Well, don't that just beat all? Another "moving company" with Israeli drivers with bad papers, and nobody even noticed...
Well, I noticed.
Not only did I notice, I remembered a strange story about a similar event:
On May 7, 2002, local police authorities pulled over a Budget rental truck in Oak Harbour, Washington near the Whitney Island Naval Air Station. The driver and his passenger were Israeli nationals, one of which had entered the country illegally. The other had an expired visa. Tests performed on the vehicle revealed that there were traces of TNT on the gearshift and RDX plastic explosives on the steering wheel. But no actual explosives were reported to have been found in the truck. [Fox News, 5/13/02]
A report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following day reported that the FBI performed follow-up tests on the truck which turned-up negative. One source speculated that perhaps the original tests had actually detected just cigarette residue, and not explosives. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5/14/02, Jerusalem Post, 5/14/02].
Critics argued that it would make no sense for U.S. authorities to use a method of testing that could be skewed by cigarette residue. The website whatreallyhappened.com remarked:
“The specific claim is made that residue from a cigarette lighter confused the tests for TNT and RDX. That doesn't explain why the trained bomb-sniffing dog, who surely knows the difference between explosives and cigarettes [else he would false-positive every smoker, ashtray, and convenience store he came across] gave the first indications of explosives in the truck that led to the tests in the first place. Likewise, were the chemical tests unable to discriminate between tobacco and TNT/RDX, which are chemically quite different from tobacco combustion products, they would give false positive results for every vehicle ever tested in which smokers had ever ridden. Given the likelihood of finding tobacco residues in any car, such tests would have to be designed to tell the difference. The same is true for other products from non- electric cigarette lighters, the vast majority of which are butane.”
The same website also provided references to three documents with detailed information on the tests used to detect TNT and RDX. None of the documents indicated that the presence of cigarette residue might induce inaccurate test results. [International Society for Optical Engineering 1984; Cold Regions and Research Engineering Laboratory 5-1996; Security Management n.d.]
I also remembered another peculiar item: the so-called Urban Moving Company that some researchers suggest was a cover for Mossad.
Many observers have suggested that Israel had foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Some have even argued that they may have been behind the attacks, and it seems that the funny stories about Israelis with trucks and bad papers just keep popping up here and there.
On September 11, five employees of Jewish owned Urban Moving Company were detained as a result of witness accounts that they were taking pictures of the flaming ruins of the World Trade Center and celebrating!
Yes indeedy! Shortly after the collapse of the towers a witness called the police and reported that the 5 individuals were, “going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins” and they were obviously and blatantly “making light of the situation.” The witness stated that these men were on the roof of the office of their employer, Urban Moving Company, and were posing, dancing, and laughing. [New York Times 10/8/01; Bergen Record 9/12/01; Ha'aretz 9/17/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01]
After their indiscreet celebration on the roof of the building, the five Israelis headed down to a nearby parking lot where they mounted the roof of their truck and resumed their photographing and celebrating. Another witness called the police and told them that the men were smiling, dancing, and giving each other high-fives while viewing the destruction of the symbol of Free Enterprise in America. [Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]
A few hours later, the five Israelis were stopped by police while driving their truck. One individual had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock, while another had two foreign passports. They were also found to be in the possession of a box- cutter, which they presumably had because of their job as professional movers. [New York Times 10/8/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]
On September 14, Dominic Suter, the owner of the moving company, left the country very abruptly after FBI agents indicated that they wanted a second interview with him. According to ABC News’ 2020 [ABC News 6/21/02], “Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse. The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.” [New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety, 12/13/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02; Forward, 3/15/02]
Shortly after the arrest of the men, FBI officials suspected that the Urban Moving company was an Israeli intelligence front. Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism, told ABC News that the FBI was concerned that the moving company had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area.” [ABC News, 6/21/02]
The five employees that were taken into custody were all former members of the Israeli Army. After being transferred to jail, the FBI’s Criminal Division sent the case to the Counterintelligence Section on account of suspicions that they were Israeli spies. They were then detained for more that two months. Some of them spent 40 days in solitary confinement. [New York Times 11/21/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]
Naturally, several individuals attempted to research this item. One high-ranking U.S. intelligence source told Forward magazine that intelligence agents’ investigation of Urban Moving Company led them to believe it was a front for the Israeli Mossad. It should be noted that, at present there is no publicly available information that conclusively confirms this allegation. However the above described incident, reported by various news sources, certainly casts a very dark shadow of suspicion on the company and its employees.
It seems that Urban Moving Company was not an isolated phenomenon.
According to a small local newspaper in Pennsylvania, The Mercury, three Israeli employees working for Moving Systems, Inc. were detained by police on October 11, 2001, after being caught illegally dumping garbage from their moving truck into the dumpster of a restaurant. The suspects had fled the seen after being confronted by the restaurant’s manager, who immediately reported the incident to the police. [The Mercury 10/17/01]
The Mercury reported: “The area was searched by township police, and the vehicle was spotted parked on the curb in front of John Kennedy Ford on Ridge Pike, just west of Industrial Way. An officer proceeded to make contact with the occupants of the truck by knocking on the cab, according to reports.
A Middle Eastern [an Israeli according to Executive Intelligence Review 3/29/02] man, later identified as Ron Katar, 23, exited the sleeper area of the cab and said that the operator - Elmakias - was across the street as he pointed toward the Don Rosen Porsche dealer, reports said.
Elmakias and a white female, Ayelet Reisler, 23, were approaching the vehicle from the dealership, but the female then began walking in a different direction, acting as if she were not with Elmakias, according to reports. . . .
Elmakias said that his destination was New York and that he was also coming from New York. He said he was in Plymouth because he was supposed to make a pickup from a male in the morning and pointed toward the Storage USA facility on Belvoir Road and West Ridge Pike, police said. Elmakias could not, however, provide a name or telephone number of the customer.” [The Mercury 10/17/01]
A search of the truck turned up detailed video footage of the Sears Towers along with several other suspicious articles. It was also discovered that the driver of the truck had falsified his driver log. As of this date, no ties to Israeli intelligence have been made. [The Mercury 10/17/01]
Then, of course, there was the "Art Scandal."
It seems that Israeli ‘art students’ - Israelis posing as ‘art students’ selling their art [actually made in China], - were suspected of spying for Israel. They were detained by the FBI and later deported to Israel on account of visa violations. The FBI first took notice of them in January of 2001.
A highly detailed DEA report that was acquired by French intelligence analysts documented 180 cases of Israeli art students infiltrating DEA facilities. It provided names, drivers' license numbers, addresses and phone numbers of the Israelis. [DEA report 6/01; Insight 3/11/02]
Despite official confirmations of the report, other U.S. officials denied its existence. In response, Intelligence Online released the document to CreativeLoafing.com who published it on the Internet for the public. [DEA report 6/01] The Associated Press also reported that it had a copy [AP 3/9/02] The report acknowledged that the art students “may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.” [DEA report 6/01; AP 3/5/02; Sun Sentinel 3/7/02]
Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, said, “After an agency reported suspicious activities by those so-called students, the FBI conducted an investigation and determined that there was no credence to the assumption that this was an Israeli spying operation. None of the Israelis were charged with espionage and they were all deported by the INS for visa violations.” [Forward 3/15/02]
Now, here is where things get VERY INTERESTING!
You see, five of the so-called Israeli Art Students that weren't really art students, had been living at 4220 Sheridan St in Hollywood, Florida.
What is so interesting about that address?
It just so happens that four of the five so-called 9/11 hijackers that were on AA Flight 11 [Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Walid and Waïl Al- Shehri] and one of the five hijackers [Marwan Al-Shehhi] from UA Flight 175 had at one time or another also resided in Hollywood, Florida.
Where in Hollywood?
Why, it just happens that Mohammed Atta, the presumed lead hijacker had lived at 3389 Sheridan St, only a few blocks away from the Fake Israeli Art Students! [Le Monde 3/5/02; Reuters 3/5/02; Jane's Intelligence Digest, 3/15/02; Salon, 5/7/02]
Well, don't that just beat all! And to think, Florida Senator Bob Graham was having breakfast with Pakistani ISI chief Mahmoud-Ahmad on the morning of September 11 - the same ISI chief who was later linked to Mohammed Atta by virtue of the fact that he transferred a LOT of money to the guy.
Hmmm... I smell a rat somewhere!
Of course, the Israelis have a good reason for this: they were "investigating terrorists!" We are assured by German news sources that: “between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of Sept. 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they identified the two former Hamburg students and later terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock.” [Der Spiegel 10/1/02]
I guess they didn't observe them "around the clock" enough to see when they were getting on those planes that were hijacked. A failure of intelligence? What's more, this truly pathetic "explanation" doesn't explain the joy of the Israelis at the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, nor why Bob Graham was having breakfast with the guy who paid off Mohammed Atta...
Well, it gets deeper: In addition to the close proximity of the Israeli ‘art students’ to the Florida-based hijackers, other ‘art students’ in Texas, California, and Arkansas were operating close to several of the other hijackers suspected of taking part in the 9-11 attacks. [DEA report 6/01]
And if that doesn't just crumble your cookies, how about the fact that six of the students had mobile phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.? [Le Monde 3/5/02]
The passports of the students revealed that they had been visitors in several different countries including, Thailand, Laos, India, Kenya, Central and South America, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada. [Insight 3/11/02]
In spite of the findings of the DEA report, the students were deported back to Israel on account of visa violations. [AP 3/5/02]
Now, let me try to understand this: at that point in time when every single American citizen was subject to being a suspected terrorist, a gang of Israelis with "SPY" practically branded on their foreheads, were simply shipped home with NO QUESTIONS ASKED?!
EXCUUUSE ME?!
We had to stand in line for four hours - with our dog and children - at the Miami Airport to have our luggage searched by hand, to be scanned, inspected, questioned, suspected, and in every way insulted by privacy violations - and these thugs just went home to do the happy dance?
Is the U.S. government complicit in Israeli spying activities? Are the Israelis spying on Americans with the permission of America's own elected officials? Ooops! sorry. Lost my head. I forgot for a moment and thought we had elected officials. Now I remember: America is the new Banana Republic with fixed elections, courtesy of the Bush gang.
Well, anyway, back to the problem at hand: It just so happens that Israeli suspects appear to know when they are being investigated.
In several investigations of Israeli suspects, the suspects quickly modified their behavior after U.S. enforcement agencies began wiretapping them. This suggests that the suspects may have known that they were being monitored. [Fox News 12/12-13/01]
In other words, either somebody very high in the U.S. government is warning them when those silly lower level bureaucrats get nosey. Either that, or there is a major mole in the U.S. intelligence services.
According to Executive Intelligence Review, “A well-placed Washington source has alerted EIR that there is growing suspicion among U.S. government law enforcement and intelligence agencies that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has dispatched special operations teams into North America. The warning came in the context of a discussion about the recent deportation of five Israelis who were detained on Sept. 11 for suspicious behavior…
"Portions of the funds garnered from the illegal operations, according to sources, are funneled to offshore bank accounts of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some of these dirty funds were reportedly diverted to Sharon's election campaigns. This Israeli mafia apparatus receives technical support via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and government law enforcement agencies” [EIR 12/13/01]
What does seem to be true is that, in spite of the U.S. federal agency claims that "there is no Israeli spy network," several of the same federal agencies have in the past year taken steps to protect themselves against espionage! It seems that things were getting mighty sticky because the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive officially warned federal employees in March 2001 about the art students and urged them to report any contact with such art students! The warning read, “These individuals have been described as aggressive. They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch.” [Insight 3/11/02; AP 3/9/02; Forward 3/15/02]
What seems to be emerging as the obvious solution to this mystery is that there is both high level U.S. government complicity AND a major mole in the U.S. intelligence services.
DEA communications employees were put on alert. According to John Sugg, “a Dec. 18 e-mail among DEA communications employees makes clear that the agency underwent self-scrutiny as the ‘result of the Fox network expose on Israeli counterintelligence activities’.” [Creative Loafing, Atlanta 3/27/02]
Pentagon and DOD ended practice of awarding foreign companies contracts involving sensitive projects. The World Tribune [World Tribune 3/12/02] reported, “Israeli nationals could be banned from participating in U.S. defense contracts under new regulations that seek to keep foreigners out of sensitive projects.” The article revealed that these restrictions were specifically targeted at “IT” and other “computer-related” contracts.
Pete Nelson, the deputy director for personnel security in the Pentagon, stated, “Some foreign nationals — those in the most sensitive positions — may not be permitted to remain in those positions. As we review our security requirements as a nation, we need to ensure all people with access to sensitive IT [information technology] systems are cleared and properly vetted for the material to which they have access.”
On December 13, 2001 the EIR's Washington Bureau Chief Bill Jones asked Colin Powell, “There were 60 Israeli citizens who have been picked up in the post- Sept. 11 sweep, many of whom, if not all of whom, are connected to Israeli intelligence. Are you concerned about such intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and have you taken up this issue with your counterpart in Israel?”
Powell responded: “I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained, and I've been in touch with the Israeli government as to the fact that they have been detained, in making sure that they have rights of access to Israeli diplomatic personnel here in the United States. With respect to why they are being detained, and the other aspects of your question, whether it's because they are in intelligence services or what things they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that; because, frankly, I deal with the consular parts of that problem, not the intelligence or law-enforcement parts of that problem.” [Fox News 12/17/01; EIR 12/28/01]
Justice Department Susan Dryden, spokesperson, referring to the numerous articles citing the leaked DEA report, claimed, “At this time, we have no information to support this.” [Le Monde 3/5/02; AP 3/9/02; Fox News Service 3/5/01] Ms. Dryden went even further to say that the story was “an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage.” [Washington Post, 3/6/02]
According to one independent journalist who was investigating the ‘art students’ a CIA officer had told him, “We’ve just closed the book on it. And I recommend that you do the same.” [Salon, 5/7/02]
Whoa! Now what's THAT supposed to mean? Is that a threat?! Again I ask why law-abiding American citizens must submit to the loss of all their constitutional freedoms while very suggestive evidence exists that Israel may be complicit in the 9-11 attacks - from which THEY AND THE BUSH GANG ALONE BENEFITTED - is "closed" to scrutiny?
One official of the present administration stated that the “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information.” [Fox News 12/12-13/01]
Which brings up the question as to why the Bush Administration is not only blocking an unbiased investigation into the events of September 11, but are also stalling on releasing the reports that HAVE been assembled? What do they REALLY have to hide?
Well, maybe the following provides a clue:
Pro-Israeli director of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes wrote an op-ed piece asserting that the whole espionage story was just a ‘myth.’ In spite of all the above evidence, he claimed the story was baseless and amounted to little more than fodder for the ‘conspiracy theorists.’ [New York Post 3/11/02]
Critical media coverage of investigations into Israelis has been virtually non-xistent. The major media, with the exception of Fox News, completely ignored the Israeli spy scandal. But Fox soon canned the story under pressure for pro-Israeli lobbies.
Well, that's not a surprise considering that Jews control the media in the U.S. As Kevin MacDonald has written:
The rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC. The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts. The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. [...]
By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media—far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish. [The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements
I guess warnings to "close the book" carry a lot of weight. Salon reported, “Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his report -- transcripts, Web links, headlines -- disappeared from the Foxnews.com archives. [Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.]
Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman Robert Zimmerman said it was ‘up there on our Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you've got x amount of bandwidth -- you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced. Normal course of business, my friend.’
When informed that Cameron's story was gone from the archives, not simply from the headline pages [when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen appeared with the message ‘This story no longer exists’], Zimmerman replied, ‘I don't know where it is.’ [Salon, 5/7/02]
Le Monde, attempted 3 times to acquire the transcripts from Fox. The requests were ignored until February 26, when Fox explained that there was some sort of ‘problem’ preventing them from sending it. The ‘problem’ was not explained. [Le Monde 3/5/02; see also Salon, 5/7/02]
Several pro-Israeli organizations put pressure on Fox to halt its probe and retract its story.
In response to the Fox News stories, the Israeli embassy stated the following, “The report on Fox News contains no quoted source, it has in no way demonstrated anything more than anonymous innuendo, and should be regarded accordingly. Israel does not spy on the United States of America.” [Jerusalem Post, 5/14/02]
In response to the DEA report that was publicized by Intelligence Online, a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington claimed, “No one in the US is taking this story seriously. I categorically deny the claims and my embassy has received no complaints from the US. . . . I am not aware of a single Israeli who has been charged with espionage.” [Independent 3/6/02]
Forward, after initially denying the allegations of an Israeli spy ring, acknowledged its existence in mid March 2002, [Forward, 12/21/01] but claimed, “far from pointing to Israeli spying against US government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.” [Forward, 3/15/02]
This, of course, begs the question as to why 9-11 occurred if the "Israeli spy-ring" was "on top of things," so to say. It also begs the question as to why individuals who are suggestively implicated in such a spy ring were doing the Happy Dance when the WTC towers fell?
August 23, 2001: According to German newspapers, the Mossad gave the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and said that it appeared that they were planning to carry out an attack in the near future. It is unknown if these are the same exact 19 names as the actual hijackers or if the number is a coincidence. However, at least four names did refer to actual 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta. [Die Zeit, 10/1/02, Der Spiegel, 10/1/02, BBC, 10/2/02, Haaretz, 10/3/02]
The Mossad appears to have learned about this through their "art student" spy ring; the same "art student spy ring" that the U.S. government warned their agencies to beware.
So what's the story? Is there an Israeli spy ring that the U.S. is trying to circumvent? Or is there an Israeli spy ring that tries to cooperate with the U.S.? If they are cooperating, that begs the question as to why the purported "warning and list" was not treated as particularly urgent by the CIA and also were not passed on to the FBI.
Would that constitute a "failure of intelligence?" Or criminal negligence? The next item, however, suggests complicity.
It is not clear if this warning influenced the adding of Alhazmi and Almihdhar's names to a terrorism watch list on this same day, and if so, why only those two. [Der Spiegel, 10/1/02]
These details create additional problems since Israel continues to deny that there were any Mossad agents in the US. [Haaretz, 10/3/02] and the US has denied knowing about Mohammed Atta before 9/11, despite other media reports to the contrary and despite the fact that Florida Senator Bob Graham was, on the morning of September 11, 2001, having breakfast with the Pakistani ISI chief who was later directly linked to Mohammed Atta.
None of this matter is cut and dried. On September 10, 2001, the Army School of Advanced Military Studies issued a report written by elite US army officers, which was made public just prior to 9/11. The report gave the following description for the Mossad: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act." [Washington Times, 9/10/01]
Hmmm... I guess that the Bush Gang didn't read that particular item of Intell. They were too busy reading the "cooked intell" that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I guess.
At this point, things take a strange turn. With all the questions about an Israeli Spy Ring being brought up again and again, a neat solution has been found: They aren't really Israelis! They are Islamic terrorists PRETENDING to be Israelis!
EIR reported that a number of the Israelis that were detained after the terrorist attacks “have been linked to suspected ‘Islamic’ terrorist cells in southern California” [EIR 1/11/02]
As it happens, we had our own experiences with a "Moving Company" with what turned out to be extremely questionable status: Globe Movers, purportedly owned by a couple named Baruch (Barry) and Megan Karpick. I will be chronicling this in an upcoming chapter of The French Connection, but let me just say that the recent months - as a consequence of this very disturbing interaction - have really made me think about the Jewish/Islamic question in a different way.
Here is another interesting item along that line from awhile back that ought to give us pause:
On January 12, 2000, 11 Islamic preachers were detained in India prior to boarding a flight headed for Dhaka, Bangladesh on suspicions of being terrorists. Although, the Indian official eventually cleared the clerics to leave, officials in Bangladesh indicated that they would not grant them visas.
The Muslims, who all had Israeli passports, were allowed to board a flight to Israel – under Israeli pressure. An Indian intelligence analyst, Ashok Debbarma, explained to The Week, “It is not unlikely for Mossad to recruit 11 Afghans in Iran and grant them Israeli citizenship to penetrate a network such as Bin Laden's. They would begin by infiltrating them into an Islamic radical group in an unlikely place like Bangladesh.” He added that Israel obvious concern for the men, and the haste with which they were flown back indicated a possible “aborted operation.” [The Week, 2/6/00]
There is another spin being put on the whole thing:
In March 2003, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet, in which it reported, “In the United States, approximately 80% of ecstasy seized in 2000 came from or through the Netherlands. Israeli trafficking syndicates are currently the primary source to distribution groups operating in the United States, smuggling through express mail services, via couriers aboard commercial airline flights, or more recently, through air freight shipments.” [U.S. Department of State, 3/20/03, also cited in the Ha’aretz, 4/6/03]
So now, they could be Islamic terrorists disguised as Jews, or they could be a maverick Jewish drug ring. But in NO CASE can they possibly be Israeli spies that are spying against the U.S.
Now, let's go back a minute to the fact that Senator Bob Graham was having breakfast with the Pakistani ISI chief on the morning of September 11, 2001. Keep in mind that this man, Mahmoud Ahmad, was later linked directly to Mohammed Atta, the purported "head terrorist" of the 9-11 attacks. With that in mind, read the following report in which Pakistan's ex spy chief "blames Mossad" for the 9-11 attacks:
Wednesday, 26 September 2001 15:05 (ET)
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States were perpetrated by renegade U.S. Air Force elements working in conjunction with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, according to the retired Pakistani general who is closest to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Gen. Hameed Gul, head of Inter Services Intelligence, the equivalent of a CIA-cum-FBI combination, during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, spent two weeks in the war-torn country immediately prior to Sept. 11. He has been acting as "strategic adviser" to Pakistan's extremist religious political parties. Four religious leaders left his house in the army's principal garrison town as this reporter arrived at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. The interview lasted 90 minutes.
Already countless millions of Muslims believe that the World Trade Center and Pentagon suicide attacks were part of a Mossad plot to force the United States into confrontation with the Muslim world.
[Notice in the next line that what Gul is saying is pronounced to be "disinformation" that those poor, misguided Muslims will actually believe!]
Now Gul has added a new disinformation wrinkle to the plot. And what Gul says or writes is taken at face value by religious leaders and is repeated in thousands of mosques at Friday prayers.
In an exclusive interview with United Press International, the fundamentalist general said it is now clear that there was also a plot by U.S. Air Force officers against the Pentagon.
[Actually, we have been saying that almost from the beginning. See our report on The Pentagon Strike.]
"The twin towers were first attacked at 8:45 a.m.," he said, "and four flights were diverted from their assigned air space, and yet Air Force jets didn't scramble until 10 a.m. That smacks of a small-scale Air Force rebellion, a coup attempt against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification -- challenge ... This was clearly an inside job. (President) Bush was afraid and rushed to the shelter of a nuclear bunker.
"(Bush) clearly feared a nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that also be hushed up in the investigation, like the Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?"
Gul said that his friend bin Laden had sworn to him on the Koran that he was not involved.
"From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant's hovel," Gul asked, how could bin Laden mount such a sophisticated operation? "Let's be serious," he said with a smile. "Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits," he added by asking, "Who benefits from the crime?"
Asked why Israel would benefit, Gul replied, "Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics (and it) has now handed the (Bush administration) the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America's imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia."
[...] Bush 43 doesn't realize he is being manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He is not leading but being led. All he can do is think in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture which is how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act."
"Bush 43" is actually Washington shorthand for distinguishing President George W. Bush from his father. President George W. Bush is the 43rd president: George Bush Sr. was the 41st.
Gul admitted that he turned against America when the United States walked away from Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
"We were all pro-American (during the war) but then America left us in the lurch and everything went to pieces, including Afghanistan."
[...]
Asked to consider the possibility that bin Laden -- or OBL as he is referred to in Pakistani conversations -- was lying to him and is indeed guilty as charged by the United States, Gul said, "If Taliban are given irrefutable evidence of his guilt, I am in favor of a fair trial. In America one is entitled to a jury of peers. But he has no American peers. The Taliban would not object, in the event of a prima face case, to an international Islamic court meeting in The Hague. They would extradite Osama to the Netherlands." [United Press International]
This abbreviated collection of data (believe me, there is a TON of material out there on this subject) does seem to support the idea that MOSSAD may, indeed, have been responsible for the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and that the Bush Reich was not only complicit in ordering the U.S. military and intelligence services to "stand down," but that they were directly involved in the plot as the evidence of the link between Bob Graham and Mahmoud Ahmad demonstrates.
And, of course, though each group is playing the other as in Spy vs. Spy, there are many things that Israel ought to consider in the volatile climate of burgeoning anti-Semitism around the world.
Never mind that Bush and Co, and American Intell organizations have been stirring the pot for years. Just as people were "angry" and wanted an "answer" to 9-11, what kind of answer will be given when the heat is turned up on the Bush Reich? Just imagine what would happen if suddenly, all the fingers pointed to Israel and MOSSAD as the masterminds of Global Terrorism?
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Mossad: Masterminds of Global Terrorism?
Jun 28, 2003
Laura Knight-Jadczyk Cassiopaea!
The other day I was scanning the news reports and came across a rather mundane item that really got me to thinking. It simply read:
Cloudcroft chief stops Israelis with suspicious cargo
By Michael Shinabery Staff Writer, Alamogordo Daily News
CLOUDCROFT, NM -- That they were speeding through the school zone first got his attention.
That they had Israeli driver's licenses and expired passports made him suspicious.
Cloudcroft Police Chief Gene Green stopped the 2-ton van on Thursday, for speeding. Initially, Green thought the truck was commercial because of exterior markings. But when he found it was out of Chicago, he asked for documentation such as logs books and manifests.
"They said this is a U-Haul truck and handed me a rental agreement (for) in-town delivery only in Illinois, (which) had expired two days before," Green said. He called for backup, and Otero County Sheriff's Deputy Billy Anders, who patrols the Sacramento Mountains, arrived, along with Capt. Norbert Sanchez and Det. Eddie Medrano.
"We got them out and started digging a little deeper," Green said, "got permission to search the truck. They claimed they were hauling furniture from Austin to Chicago." When officers advised the men they were not exactly en route from one town to another, Green said the two men claimed they were Deming bound. "But they couldn't give us an address in Deming they were going to," he said. "Once we got into the truck, they had some junk furniture I wouldn't have given to Goodwill."
Also inside the vehicle were, Green said, "50 boxes" they claimed was a "private" delivery, but the men insisted they had no "idea what was in them."
At that point, the officers called for drug-sniffing and bomb-sniffing dogs. The men were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and U- Haul recovered the truck.
Contents of the boxes remain unknown, pending investigation.
Well, don't that just beat all? Another "moving company" with Israeli drivers with bad papers, and nobody even noticed...
Well, I noticed.
Not only did I notice, I remembered a strange story about a similar event:
On May 7, 2002, local police authorities pulled over a Budget rental truck in Oak Harbour, Washington near the Whitney Island Naval Air Station. The driver and his passenger were Israeli nationals, one of which had entered the country illegally. The other had an expired visa. Tests performed on the vehicle revealed that there were traces of TNT on the gearshift and RDX plastic explosives on the steering wheel. But no actual explosives were reported to have been found in the truck. [Fox News, 5/13/02]
A report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following day reported that the FBI performed follow-up tests on the truck which turned-up negative. One source speculated that perhaps the original tests had actually detected just cigarette residue, and not explosives. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5/14/02, Jerusalem Post, 5/14/02].
Critics argued that it would make no sense for U.S. authorities to use a method of testing that could be skewed by cigarette residue. The website whatreallyhappened.com remarked:
“The specific claim is made that residue from a cigarette lighter confused the tests for TNT and RDX. That doesn't explain why the trained bomb-sniffing dog, who surely knows the difference between explosives and cigarettes [else he would false-positive every smoker, ashtray, and convenience store he came across] gave the first indications of explosives in the truck that led to the tests in the first place. Likewise, were the chemical tests unable to discriminate between tobacco and TNT/RDX, which are chemically quite different from tobacco combustion products, they would give false positive results for every vehicle ever tested in which smokers had ever ridden. Given the likelihood of finding tobacco residues in any car, such tests would have to be designed to tell the difference. The same is true for other products from non- electric cigarette lighters, the vast majority of which are butane.”
The same website also provided references to three documents with detailed information on the tests used to detect TNT and RDX. None of the documents indicated that the presence of cigarette residue might induce inaccurate test results. [International Society for Optical Engineering 1984; Cold Regions and Research Engineering Laboratory 5-1996; Security Management n.d.]
I also remembered another peculiar item: the so-called Urban Moving Company that some researchers suggest was a cover for Mossad.
Many observers have suggested that Israel had foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Some have even argued that they may have been behind the attacks, and it seems that the funny stories about Israelis with trucks and bad papers just keep popping up here and there.
On September 11, five employees of Jewish owned Urban Moving Company were detained as a result of witness accounts that they were taking pictures of the flaming ruins of the World Trade Center and celebrating!
Yes indeedy! Shortly after the collapse of the towers a witness called the police and reported that the 5 individuals were, “going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins” and they were obviously and blatantly “making light of the situation.” The witness stated that these men were on the roof of the office of their employer, Urban Moving Company, and were posing, dancing, and laughing. [New York Times 10/8/01; Bergen Record 9/12/01; Ha'aretz 9/17/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01]
After their indiscreet celebration on the roof of the building, the five Israelis headed down to a nearby parking lot where they mounted the roof of their truck and resumed their photographing and celebrating. Another witness called the police and told them that the men were smiling, dancing, and giving each other high-fives while viewing the destruction of the symbol of Free Enterprise in America. [Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]
A few hours later, the five Israelis were stopped by police while driving their truck. One individual had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock, while another had two foreign passports. They were also found to be in the possession of a box- cutter, which they presumably had because of their job as professional movers. [New York Times 10/8/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]
On September 14, Dominic Suter, the owner of the moving company, left the country very abruptly after FBI agents indicated that they wanted a second interview with him. According to ABC News’ 2020 [ABC News 6/21/02], “Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse. The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.” [New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety, 12/13/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02; Forward, 3/15/02]
Shortly after the arrest of the men, FBI officials suspected that the Urban Moving company was an Israeli intelligence front. Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism, told ABC News that the FBI was concerned that the moving company had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area.” [ABC News, 6/21/02]
The five employees that were taken into custody were all former members of the Israeli Army. After being transferred to jail, the FBI’s Criminal Division sent the case to the Counterintelligence Section on account of suspicions that they were Israeli spies. They were then detained for more that two months. Some of them spent 40 days in solitary confinement. [New York Times 11/21/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]
Naturally, several individuals attempted to research this item. One high-ranking U.S. intelligence source told Forward magazine that intelligence agents’ investigation of Urban Moving Company led them to believe it was a front for the Israeli Mossad. It should be noted that, at present there is no publicly available information that conclusively confirms this allegation. However the above described incident, reported by various news sources, certainly casts a very dark shadow of suspicion on the company and its employees.
It seems that Urban Moving Company was not an isolated phenomenon.
According to a small local newspaper in Pennsylvania, The Mercury, three Israeli employees working for Moving Systems, Inc. were detained by police on October 11, 2001, after being caught illegally dumping garbage from their moving truck into the dumpster of a restaurant. The suspects had fled the seen after being confronted by the restaurant’s manager, who immediately reported the incident to the police. [The Mercury 10/17/01]
The Mercury reported: “The area was searched by township police, and the vehicle was spotted parked on the curb in front of John Kennedy Ford on Ridge Pike, just west of Industrial Way. An officer proceeded to make contact with the occupants of the truck by knocking on the cab, according to reports.
A Middle Eastern [an Israeli according to Executive Intelligence Review 3/29/02] man, later identified as Ron Katar, 23, exited the sleeper area of the cab and said that the operator - Elmakias - was across the street as he pointed toward the Don Rosen Porsche dealer, reports said.
Elmakias and a white female, Ayelet Reisler, 23, were approaching the vehicle from the dealership, but the female then began walking in a different direction, acting as if she were not with Elmakias, according to reports. . . .
Elmakias said that his destination was New York and that he was also coming from New York. He said he was in Plymouth because he was supposed to make a pickup from a male in the morning and pointed toward the Storage USA facility on Belvoir Road and West Ridge Pike, police said. Elmakias could not, however, provide a name or telephone number of the customer.” [The Mercury 10/17/01]
A search of the truck turned up detailed video footage of the Sears Towers along with several other suspicious articles. It was also discovered that the driver of the truck had falsified his driver log. As of this date, no ties to Israeli intelligence have been made. [The Mercury 10/17/01]
Then, of course, there was the "Art Scandal."
It seems that Israeli ‘art students’ - Israelis posing as ‘art students’ selling their art [actually made in China], - were suspected of spying for Israel. They were detained by the FBI and later deported to Israel on account of visa violations. The FBI first took notice of them in January of 2001.
A highly detailed DEA report that was acquired by French intelligence analysts documented 180 cases of Israeli art students infiltrating DEA facilities. It provided names, drivers' license numbers, addresses and phone numbers of the Israelis. [DEA report 6/01; Insight 3/11/02]
Despite official confirmations of the report, other U.S. officials denied its existence. In response, Intelligence Online released the document to CreativeLoafing.com who published it on the Internet for the public. [DEA report 6/01] The Associated Press also reported that it had a copy [AP 3/9/02] The report acknowledged that the art students “may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.” [DEA report 6/01; AP 3/5/02; Sun Sentinel 3/7/02]
Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, said, “After an agency reported suspicious activities by those so-called students, the FBI conducted an investigation and determined that there was no credence to the assumption that this was an Israeli spying operation. None of the Israelis were charged with espionage and they were all deported by the INS for visa violations.” [Forward 3/15/02]
Now, here is where things get VERY INTERESTING!
You see, five of the so-called Israeli Art Students that weren't really art students, had been living at 4220 Sheridan St in Hollywood, Florida.
What is so interesting about that address?
It just so happens that four of the five so-called 9/11 hijackers that were on AA Flight 11 [Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Walid and Waïl Al- Shehri] and one of the five hijackers [Marwan Al-Shehhi] from UA Flight 175 had at one time or another also resided in Hollywood, Florida.
Where in Hollywood?
Why, it just happens that Mohammed Atta, the presumed lead hijacker had lived at 3389 Sheridan St, only a few blocks away from the Fake Israeli Art Students! [Le Monde 3/5/02; Reuters 3/5/02; Jane's Intelligence Digest, 3/15/02; Salon, 5/7/02]
Well, don't that just beat all! And to think, Florida Senator Bob Graham was having breakfast with Pakistani ISI chief Mahmoud-Ahmad on the morning of September 11 - the same ISI chief who was later linked to Mohammed Atta by virtue of the fact that he transferred a LOT of money to the guy.
Hmmm... I smell a rat somewhere!
Of course, the Israelis have a good reason for this: they were "investigating terrorists!" We are assured by German news sources that: “between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of Sept. 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they identified the two former Hamburg students and later terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock.” [Der Spiegel 10/1/02]
I guess they didn't observe them "around the clock" enough to see when they were getting on those planes that were hijacked. A failure of intelligence? What's more, this truly pathetic "explanation" doesn't explain the joy of the Israelis at the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, nor why Bob Graham was having breakfast with the guy who paid off Mohammed Atta...
Well, it gets deeper: In addition to the close proximity of the Israeli ‘art students’ to the Florida-based hijackers, other ‘art students’ in Texas, California, and Arkansas were operating close to several of the other hijackers suspected of taking part in the 9-11 attacks. [DEA report 6/01]
And if that doesn't just crumble your cookies, how about the fact that six of the students had mobile phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.? [Le Monde 3/5/02]
The passports of the students revealed that they had been visitors in several different countries including, Thailand, Laos, India, Kenya, Central and South America, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada. [Insight 3/11/02]
In spite of the findings of the DEA report, the students were deported back to Israel on account of visa violations. [AP 3/5/02]
Now, let me try to understand this: at that point in time when every single American citizen was subject to being a suspected terrorist, a gang of Israelis with "SPY" practically branded on their foreheads, were simply shipped home with NO QUESTIONS ASKED?!
EXCUUUSE ME?!
We had to stand in line for four hours - with our dog and children - at the Miami Airport to have our luggage searched by hand, to be scanned, inspected, questioned, suspected, and in every way insulted by privacy violations - and these thugs just went home to do the happy dance?
Is the U.S. government complicit in Israeli spying activities? Are the Israelis spying on Americans with the permission of America's own elected officials? Ooops! sorry. Lost my head. I forgot for a moment and thought we had elected officials. Now I remember: America is the new Banana Republic with fixed elections, courtesy of the Bush gang.
Well, anyway, back to the problem at hand: It just so happens that Israeli suspects appear to know when they are being investigated.
In several investigations of Israeli suspects, the suspects quickly modified their behavior after U.S. enforcement agencies began wiretapping them. This suggests that the suspects may have known that they were being monitored. [Fox News 12/12-13/01]
In other words, either somebody very high in the U.S. government is warning them when those silly lower level bureaucrats get nosey. Either that, or there is a major mole in the U.S. intelligence services.
According to Executive Intelligence Review, “A well-placed Washington source has alerted EIR that there is growing suspicion among U.S. government law enforcement and intelligence agencies that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has dispatched special operations teams into North America. The warning came in the context of a discussion about the recent deportation of five Israelis who were detained on Sept. 11 for suspicious behavior…
"Portions of the funds garnered from the illegal operations, according to sources, are funneled to offshore bank accounts of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some of these dirty funds were reportedly diverted to Sharon's election campaigns. This Israeli mafia apparatus receives technical support via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and government law enforcement agencies” [EIR 12/13/01]
What does seem to be true is that, in spite of the U.S. federal agency claims that "there is no Israeli spy network," several of the same federal agencies have in the past year taken steps to protect themselves against espionage! It seems that things were getting mighty sticky because the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive officially warned federal employees in March 2001 about the art students and urged them to report any contact with such art students! The warning read, “These individuals have been described as aggressive. They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch.” [Insight 3/11/02; AP 3/9/02; Forward 3/15/02]
What seems to be emerging as the obvious solution to this mystery is that there is both high level U.S. government complicity AND a major mole in the U.S. intelligence services.
DEA communications employees were put on alert. According to John Sugg, “a Dec. 18 e-mail among DEA communications employees makes clear that the agency underwent self-scrutiny as the ‘result of the Fox network expose on Israeli counterintelligence activities’.” [Creative Loafing, Atlanta 3/27/02]
Pentagon and DOD ended practice of awarding foreign companies contracts involving sensitive projects. The World Tribune [World Tribune 3/12/02] reported, “Israeli nationals could be banned from participating in U.S. defense contracts under new regulations that seek to keep foreigners out of sensitive projects.” The article revealed that these restrictions were specifically targeted at “IT” and other “computer-related” contracts.
Pete Nelson, the deputy director for personnel security in the Pentagon, stated, “Some foreign nationals — those in the most sensitive positions — may not be permitted to remain in those positions. As we review our security requirements as a nation, we need to ensure all people with access to sensitive IT [information technology] systems are cleared and properly vetted for the material to which they have access.”
On December 13, 2001 the EIR's Washington Bureau Chief Bill Jones asked Colin Powell, “There were 60 Israeli citizens who have been picked up in the post- Sept. 11 sweep, many of whom, if not all of whom, are connected to Israeli intelligence. Are you concerned about such intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and have you taken up this issue with your counterpart in Israel?”
Powell responded: “I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained, and I've been in touch with the Israeli government as to the fact that they have been detained, in making sure that they have rights of access to Israeli diplomatic personnel here in the United States. With respect to why they are being detained, and the other aspects of your question, whether it's because they are in intelligence services or what things they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that; because, frankly, I deal with the consular parts of that problem, not the intelligence or law-enforcement parts of that problem.” [Fox News 12/17/01; EIR 12/28/01]
Justice Department Susan Dryden, spokesperson, referring to the numerous articles citing the leaked DEA report, claimed, “At this time, we have no information to support this.” [Le Monde 3/5/02; AP 3/9/02; Fox News Service 3/5/01] Ms. Dryden went even further to say that the story was “an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage.” [Washington Post, 3/6/02]
According to one independent journalist who was investigating the ‘art students’ a CIA officer had told him, “We’ve just closed the book on it. And I recommend that you do the same.” [Salon, 5/7/02]
Whoa! Now what's THAT supposed to mean? Is that a threat?! Again I ask why law-abiding American citizens must submit to the loss of all their constitutional freedoms while very suggestive evidence exists that Israel may be complicit in the 9-11 attacks - from which THEY AND THE BUSH GANG ALONE BENEFITTED - is "closed" to scrutiny?
One official of the present administration stated that the “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information.” [Fox News 12/12-13/01]
Which brings up the question as to why the Bush Administration is not only blocking an unbiased investigation into the events of September 11, but are also stalling on releasing the reports that HAVE been assembled? What do they REALLY have to hide?
Well, maybe the following provides a clue:
Pro-Israeli director of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes wrote an op-ed piece asserting that the whole espionage story was just a ‘myth.’ In spite of all the above evidence, he claimed the story was baseless and amounted to little more than fodder for the ‘conspiracy theorists.’ [New York Post 3/11/02]
Critical media coverage of investigations into Israelis has been virtually non-xistent. The major media, with the exception of Fox News, completely ignored the Israeli spy scandal. But Fox soon canned the story under pressure for pro-Israeli lobbies.
Well, that's not a surprise considering that Jews control the media in the U.S. As Kevin MacDonald has written:
The rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC. The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts. The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. [...]
By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media—far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish. [The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements
I guess warnings to "close the book" carry a lot of weight. Salon reported, “Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his report -- transcripts, Web links, headlines -- disappeared from the Foxnews.com archives. [Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.]
Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman Robert Zimmerman said it was ‘up there on our Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you've got x amount of bandwidth -- you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced. Normal course of business, my friend.’
When informed that Cameron's story was gone from the archives, not simply from the headline pages [when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen appeared with the message ‘This story no longer exists’], Zimmerman replied, ‘I don't know where it is.’ [Salon, 5/7/02]
Le Monde, attempted 3 times to acquire the transcripts from Fox. The requests were ignored until February 26, when Fox explained that there was some sort of ‘problem’ preventing them from sending it. The ‘problem’ was not explained. [Le Monde 3/5/02; see also Salon, 5/7/02]
Several pro-Israeli organizations put pressure on Fox to halt its probe and retract its story.
In response to the Fox News stories, the Israeli embassy stated the following, “The report on Fox News contains no quoted source, it has in no way demonstrated anything more than anonymous innuendo, and should be regarded accordingly. Israel does not spy on the United States of America.” [Jerusalem Post, 5/14/02]
In response to the DEA report that was publicized by Intelligence Online, a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington claimed, “No one in the US is taking this story seriously. I categorically deny the claims and my embassy has received no complaints from the US. . . . I am not aware of a single Israeli who has been charged with espionage.” [Independent 3/6/02]
Forward, after initially denying the allegations of an Israeli spy ring, acknowledged its existence in mid March 2002, [Forward, 12/21/01] but claimed, “far from pointing to Israeli spying against US government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.” [Forward, 3/15/02]
This, of course, begs the question as to why 9-11 occurred if the "Israeli spy-ring" was "on top of things," so to say. It also begs the question as to why individuals who are suggestively implicated in such a spy ring were doing the Happy Dance when the WTC towers fell?
August 23, 2001: According to German newspapers, the Mossad gave the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and said that it appeared that they were planning to carry out an attack in the near future. It is unknown if these are the same exact 19 names as the actual hijackers or if the number is a coincidence. However, at least four names did refer to actual 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta. [Die Zeit, 10/1/02, Der Spiegel, 10/1/02, BBC, 10/2/02, Haaretz, 10/3/02]
The Mossad appears to have learned about this through their "art student" spy ring; the same "art student spy ring" that the U.S. government warned their agencies to beware.
So what's the story? Is there an Israeli spy ring that the U.S. is trying to circumvent? Or is there an Israeli spy ring that tries to cooperate with the U.S.? If they are cooperating, that begs the question as to why the purported "warning and list" was not treated as particularly urgent by the CIA and also were not passed on to the FBI.
Would that constitute a "failure of intelligence?" Or criminal negligence? The next item, however, suggests complicity.
It is not clear if this warning influenced the adding of Alhazmi and Almihdhar's names to a terrorism watch list on this same day, and if so, why only those two. [Der Spiegel, 10/1/02]
These details create additional problems since Israel continues to deny that there were any Mossad agents in the US. [Haaretz, 10/3/02] and the US has denied knowing about Mohammed Atta before 9/11, despite other media reports to the contrary and despite the fact that Florida Senator Bob Graham was, on the morning of September 11, 2001, having breakfast with the Pakistani ISI chief who was later directly linked to Mohammed Atta.
None of this matter is cut and dried. On September 10, 2001, the Army School of Advanced Military Studies issued a report written by elite US army officers, which was made public just prior to 9/11. The report gave the following description for the Mossad: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act." [Washington Times, 9/10/01]
Hmmm... I guess that the Bush Gang didn't read that particular item of Intell. They were too busy reading the "cooked intell" that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I guess.
At this point, things take a strange turn. With all the questions about an Israeli Spy Ring being brought up again and again, a neat solution has been found: They aren't really Israelis! They are Islamic terrorists PRETENDING to be Israelis!
EIR reported that a number of the Israelis that were detained after the terrorist attacks “have been linked to suspected ‘Islamic’ terrorist cells in southern California” [EIR 1/11/02]
As it happens, we had our own experiences with a "Moving Company" with what turned out to be extremely questionable status: Globe Movers, purportedly owned by a couple named Baruch (Barry) and Megan Karpick. I will be chronicling this in an upcoming chapter of The French Connection, but let me just say that the recent months - as a consequence of this very disturbing interaction - have really made me think about the Jewish/Islamic question in a different way.
Here is another interesting item along that line from awhile back that ought to give us pause:
On January 12, 2000, 11 Islamic preachers were detained in India prior to boarding a flight headed for Dhaka, Bangladesh on suspicions of being terrorists. Although, the Indian official eventually cleared the clerics to leave, officials in Bangladesh indicated that they would not grant them visas.
The Muslims, who all had Israeli passports, were allowed to board a flight to Israel – under Israeli pressure. An Indian intelligence analyst, Ashok Debbarma, explained to The Week, “It is not unlikely for Mossad to recruit 11 Afghans in Iran and grant them Israeli citizenship to penetrate a network such as Bin Laden's. They would begin by infiltrating them into an Islamic radical group in an unlikely place like Bangladesh.” He added that Israel obvious concern for the men, and the haste with which they were flown back indicated a possible “aborted operation.” [The Week, 2/6/00]
There is another spin being put on the whole thing:
In March 2003, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet, in which it reported, “In the United States, approximately 80% of ecstasy seized in 2000 came from or through the Netherlands. Israeli trafficking syndicates are currently the primary source to distribution groups operating in the United States, smuggling through express mail services, via couriers aboard commercial airline flights, or more recently, through air freight shipments.” [U.S. Department of State, 3/20/03, also cited in the Ha’aretz, 4/6/03]
So now, they could be Islamic terrorists disguised as Jews, or they could be a maverick Jewish drug ring. But in NO CASE can they possibly be Israeli spies that are spying against the U.S.
Now, let's go back a minute to the fact that Senator Bob Graham was having breakfast with the Pakistani ISI chief on the morning of September 11, 2001. Keep in mind that this man, Mahmoud Ahmad, was later linked directly to Mohammed Atta, the purported "head terrorist" of the 9-11 attacks. With that in mind, read the following report in which Pakistan's ex spy chief "blames Mossad" for the 9-11 attacks:
Wednesday, 26 September 2001 15:05 (ET)
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States were perpetrated by renegade U.S. Air Force elements working in conjunction with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, according to the retired Pakistani general who is closest to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Gen. Hameed Gul, head of Inter Services Intelligence, the equivalent of a CIA-cum-FBI combination, during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, spent two weeks in the war-torn country immediately prior to Sept. 11. He has been acting as "strategic adviser" to Pakistan's extremist religious political parties. Four religious leaders left his house in the army's principal garrison town as this reporter arrived at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. The interview lasted 90 minutes.
Already countless millions of Muslims believe that the World Trade Center and Pentagon suicide attacks were part of a Mossad plot to force the United States into confrontation with the Muslim world.
[Notice in the next line that what Gul is saying is pronounced to be "disinformation" that those poor, misguided Muslims will actually believe!]
Now Gul has added a new disinformation wrinkle to the plot. And what Gul says or writes is taken at face value by religious leaders and is repeated in thousands of mosques at Friday prayers.
In an exclusive interview with United Press International, the fundamentalist general said it is now clear that there was also a plot by U.S. Air Force officers against the Pentagon.
[Actually, we have been saying that almost from the beginning. See our report on The Pentagon Strike.]
"The twin towers were first attacked at 8:45 a.m.," he said, "and four flights were diverted from their assigned air space, and yet Air Force jets didn't scramble until 10 a.m. That smacks of a small-scale Air Force rebellion, a coup attempt against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification -- challenge ... This was clearly an inside job. (President) Bush was afraid and rushed to the shelter of a nuclear bunker.
"(Bush) clearly feared a nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that also be hushed up in the investigation, like the Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?"
Gul said that his friend bin Laden had sworn to him on the Koran that he was not involved.
"From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant's hovel," Gul asked, how could bin Laden mount such a sophisticated operation? "Let's be serious," he said with a smile. "Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits," he added by asking, "Who benefits from the crime?"
Asked why Israel would benefit, Gul replied, "Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics (and it) has now handed the (Bush administration) the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America's imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia."
[...] Bush 43 doesn't realize he is being manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He is not leading but being led. All he can do is think in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture which is how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act."
"Bush 43" is actually Washington shorthand for distinguishing President George W. Bush from his father. President George W. Bush is the 43rd president: George Bush Sr. was the 41st.
Gul admitted that he turned against America when the United States walked away from Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
"We were all pro-American (during the war) but then America left us in the lurch and everything went to pieces, including Afghanistan."
[...]
Asked to consider the possibility that bin Laden -- or OBL as he is referred to in Pakistani conversations -- was lying to him and is indeed guilty as charged by the United States, Gul said, "If Taliban are given irrefutable evidence of his guilt, I am in favor of a fair trial. In America one is entitled to a jury of peers. But he has no American peers. The Taliban would not object, in the event of a prima face case, to an international Islamic court meeting in The Hague. They would extradite Osama to the Netherlands." [United Press International]
This abbreviated collection of data (believe me, there is a TON of material out there on this subject) does seem to support the idea that MOSSAD may, indeed, have been responsible for the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and that the Bush Reich was not only complicit in ordering the U.S. military and intelligence services to "stand down," but that they were directly involved in the plot as the evidence of the link between Bob Graham and Mahmoud Ahmad demonstrates.
And, of course, though each group is playing the other as in Spy vs. Spy, there are many things that Israel ought to consider in the volatile climate of burgeoning anti-Semitism around the world.
Never mind that Bush and Co, and American Intell organizations have been stirring the pot for years. Just as people were "angry" and wanted an "answer" to 9-11, what kind of answer will be given when the heat is turned up on the Bush Reich? Just imagine what would happen if suddenly, all the fingers pointed to Israel and MOSSAD as the masterminds of Global Terrorism?
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Book Review by Regis T. Sabol
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books, 268 pages, 2000
As the Bush Administration amasses hundreds of thousands of American troops on Iraq’s borders, pushes the Filipino government for permission to send more than two thousand American troops to fight Islamic guerrillas on an obscure island in the Philippines, and prepares for a nuclear showdown with North Korea, reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson is both a revelatory and disturbing experience.
In simple terms, Blowback argues that what goes around comes around. And, according to Johnson, that is a frightening prospect.
Blowback is a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency ((CIA). “It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people,” says Johnson. “What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”
The primary objective of these operations, he argues, is to maintain a global American empire held together by military and financial domination of other countries and, more critically, their markets. In short, we want to own the world.
The Bush Administration, by word and deed, has made it abundantly clear that it envisions a world dominated by one power, the United States, that will enforce a “Pax Americana.” The Administration declared its intentions in the National Security Strategy released Sept. 20, 2001. The policy was actually formulated in 1992 in the last year of the Bush I administration by Donald Rumsfield, who is now Secretary of Defense; Paul Wolfowitz, who is now Assistant Secretary of Defense; and Richard Perle, a national security advisor; among others.
This strategy dismisses deterrence or containment, a policy successfully used against the former Soviet Union” as a relic of the Cold War. Instead, it favors “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.” Naturally, Washington will determine what those “sovereign responsibilities” are.
The Bush Doctrine of American Hegemony
At the core of this doctrine is the concept of the pre-emptive strike. As George Bush explained to the nation in his most recent State of the Union address, the United States has the right to attack any country it perceives as being a threat to our security or interests. These countries do not actually have to be an immediate threat; they need only be perceived as one.
“In essence,” explains Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “(the National Security Strategy) lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.”
“The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia,” the document warns, “as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.”
Wolfowitz, in the 1992 draft of Defense Planning Guidance, enunciated the number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy.
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is the dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”
Wolfowitz went onto to identify three additional aspects of American hegemony.
“First the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
Even though Johnson’s book was published before George Bush took over the White House, Blowback essentially argues that such a strategy is a formula for disaster that will blow back on America with terrible consequences. In fact, it already has. In one chilling passage, Chalmers obliquely suggests that Osama bin Laden would retaliate against the United States for our missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998; “…the spiral of blowback…is not at an end in the case of bin Laden,” he warns. The term 9/11 had not yet entered the national consciousness.
“Government spokesmen continue to justify these attacks as ‘deterring’ terrorism even if the targets proved to be irrelevant to any damage done to facilities of the United States. In this way, future blowback possibilities are seeded into the world,” explains Johnson.
The author of Blowback is no left-wing academe or wild-eyed radical. Johnson is an economist, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has written several books on Japan and Asia, including MITI and the Japanese Miracle and Japan: Who Governs?
Nor is he a point man for the Democratic Party. Johnson cites the actions of the Clinton Administration, in particular, as examples of all that is wrong with American foreign policy. While his critique is withering, Johnson points out that Clinton’s actions were in step with those of his Republican and Democratic predecessors.
Does America Need to Maintain an Empire?
Although Blowback focuses on our relations with Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and China, Johnson shows how the pattern of relations with these countries holds true in all our international dealings. For example, the book opens, not with East Asia, but in northern Italy where, in 1998, a Marine Corps jet fighter, flying well below minimum altitude, sliced through a ski-lift cable, plunging 20 people to their deaths. “A court-martial held not in Italy but in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, exonerated everyone involved, calling it a ‘training accident.’” Even though President Clinton promised compensation to the families of the victims, Congress dropped the provision because of opposition in the House of Representatives and from the Pentagon.
“This was hardly the only such incident in which American service personnel victimized foreign civilians in the post-Cold War world,” Johnson reports. “From Germany and Turkey to Okinawa and South Korea, similar incidents have been common—as has been their usual denouement.” He supports that claim by citing a shameful number of specific incidents, many of them involving rape.
Johnson goes on to ask the obvious question that none dare ask: Why does the United States maintain military bases in Italy, Germany, Indonesia, Spain, and Japan, among other countries? It is past time to discuss that question, he argues, “and what the consequences of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the world and ourselves.”
Military actions are not the only cause of blowback, according to Johnson. Economic policies can be just as devastating. He points to the economic disasters that swept across Southeast Asia in 1997 and eventually engulfed Russia and Brazil as examples. These disasters resulted from our insistence on a “one-size-fits-all” free trade policy, this economist argues. To expect governments, cultures, and societies to follow our concept of capitalism to the letter is arrogant and doomed to failure.
Yet the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration before it, insists that “globalization” is the panacea for all the world’s economic ills. Far from being a cure, globalization is a policy that ignores the needs of individual countries and the working men and women who live in them. Moreover, globalization has been a disaster for American workers who have lost their jobs to cheap foreign labor markets. Johnson cites the now non-existent American steel industry as one victim of globalization.
Johnson sees a clear parallel between the postwar policies of the Soviet Union and the United States. “The USSR in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia created their satellite systems for essentially the same reasons,” he contends. Just as the USSR intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the U.S. intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Korea and Vietnam.
East Asia: A Model for American Hegemony
Japan, according to Johnson, is the lynchpin of our East Asian Empire. It is the wellspring of our policies toward the two Koreas and China, including our fuzzy military/economic support of Taiwan. While the United States has nurtured economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and even China, we have done so only to maintain our own military and economic dominance in the region. Thus, while we are willing to trade with China, we still follow a policy of containment that attempts to stunt the growth of the largest and eventually the dominant economic power in East Asia.
This policy of containment provides insight into the crisis we now face with North Korea, even though the Bush Administration pretends the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula is not a crisis. To more clearly understand the roots of the current standoff, we need to rethink our perceptions of the Korean War.
Americans have always accepted the notion that the Korean War started when Communist North Korea, a sovereign state, invaded Democratic South Korea, another sovereign state, in 1950. Johnson doesn’t see it that way.
In the first place, the partitioning of Korea was decided by the United States and the Soviet Union; Koreans had no say in the matter. Secondly, South Korea was not a democracy but an authoritarian regime established by the United States and composed primarily of former Japanese collaborators while the dogmatic Communist regime in the North was established by the Soviet Union and composed of guerillas who had fought the Japanese occupation. In short, the Korean War was, in fact, a civil war, argues Johnson.
Because the United States had committed itself to stopping Communist aggression, President Harry S. Truman committed U.S. troops to an Asian country’s civil war. The nature of that conflict changed when China, goaded by Douglas McArthur’s foolhardy march to the Yalu River, entered the war. It then became a war between China and the United States, which was fought to a bloody stalemate before ending in a truce in 1953.
That truce was signed by the United States and China. Since then, the border between North and South Korea remains a no-man’s land with North Korean forces on one side and American and South Korean forces on the other. Since then, not only has the U.S. established diplomatic ties with China, China has established diplomatic and economic ties with South Korea. North Korea, on the other hand, remains frozen out of the picture.
What the North Koreans most fear is an attack by the United States. Recent actions by the Bush Administration have given them no reason to believe otherwise. One of Bush’s first actions when he took office was to cut off an ongoing dialogue with North Korea. Two years later, he lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran into an “Axis of Evil.” He also ordered a drastic reduction of desperately needed oil supplies to the country.
Enter blowback. Now North Korea, in an attempt to gain some leverage with Washington, has reactivated its nuclear processing plans, withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact, and kicked out U.N. inspectors. Last week, the North Koreans fired a missile into the Sea of Japan.
What the North Koreans want is direct talks with the United States leading to a non-aggression treaty that will ensure their security. While the government of Japan and the newly elected government of North Korea are pushing for negotiation and accommodation with the North, Bush has dug in his Texas boot heels.
The Bush Administration says it will talk with North Korea but it will not be “blackmailed” into negotiations. Ari Fleischer reiterated that position in a press briefing Thursday and White House sources reaffirmed it Saturday. The Administration insists it will not enter into bi-lateral talks with North Korea but will only negotiate within the context of a multilevel coalition of nations.
A legitimate question arises here: Just who is blackmailing whom? Wouldn’t we be better off to negotiate a treaty with North Korea that guarantees nonaggression by either side and establishes security on the Korean peninsula, thus eliminating a dangerous flashpoint for potential nuclear catastrophe? Unfortunately, such a solution does not fit in with the Bush Administration’s ambition to maintain a worldwide empire. Consequently, we may face blowback of catastrophic proportions.
The War against Iraq: Consequences and Dangers of Blowback
Our all-but-inevitable war with Iraq, of course, is the most glaring example of the consequences of blowback from previous policies and the dangers of blowback that will result from the war. Citing statistics from the government’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Johnson notes that, by 1995, the U.S. provided 49 percent of all global arms exports to 140 odd countries, “90 percent of which were either not democracies or were human rights abusers.” And we often arm opponents in ongoing conflicts—Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, China and Taiwan.
“Saddam Hussein of Iraq,” he points out, “the number-one ‘rogue’ leader of the 1990s (and still number one in 2003, according to Bush), was during the 1980s simply an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country’s oil reserves.” In fact, the U.S., under Ronald Reagan, provided Saddam with the much-ballyhooed Weapons of Mass Destruction that are Bush’s excuse for going to war today. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield was a key player in those deals. And, as we all know, Halliburton Corp., with Vice President Dick Cheney as CEO, did a multi-billion dollar business with Iraq after the Gulf War.
In the aftermath of that war, George I urged Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south to rebel against Saddam’s rule with sincere promises of U.S. military assistance. Alas, for the Kurds and the Shiites, Bush wasn’t true to his word and Saddam’s Republican Guard slaughtered them by the thousands. Now the Shiites have said they will fight to defend Iraqi sovereignty before they’ll trust the Americans again. That’s blowback.
In the north, Bush II has offered Turkey $26 billion to allow 60,000 U.S. troops to invade Iraq from the north. Bush has also assured the Turks they can follow American troops into Iraq and take control of valuable oil fields that the Kurds of northern Iraq also covet. In doing so, the Bush team seems to be oblivious to the deep enmity that exists between the Turks and the Kurds. As Johnson points out:
“The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish population estimated at fifty-eight million. Another five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkey’s borders in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated against the Kurds for the past seventy years and have conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand Kurdish villages and hamlets in the backward southeastern part of the country.”
It comes as no surprise then that the Kurds have announced they will not accept any Turkish presence inside the Iraqi territory they now control. Thus the stage is set for a war between Turkey and the de facto nation of Kurdistan, both armed to the teeth with arms supplied by the United States. No wonder, then, that the Turkish Parliament thought twice about allowing 62,000 American troops use Turkey as a springboard into Iraq. Blowback again.
Iran: A Tangled Web of Blowback
Meanwhile, in Iran, the third member of Bush’s Axis of Evil, U.N. inspectors have discovered a network of sophisticated machinery for processing enriched uranium, a crucial step toward developing nuclear weapons. And where did the Iranians acquire the technology to develop this machinery? From our new friend and ally, Pakistan. Pakistan became our friend and ally because it helped us attack Afghanistan and defeat the hated Taliban. Before then, Pakistan was also a “rogue” state while the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and other Afghani tribal warlords were our allies in their guerilla war against the Soviet Union. Now, with thousands of American troops still in Afghanistan, at least one Afghani warlord has called for a “jihad” against the American occupiers. Yet another example of blowback.
For those with a short memory, the Iranians hate us because the CIA deposed a democratically elected government in 1954 and installed and propped up with money and arms the Shah, whom they deposed in 1979 in favor of the fanatical fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. Again, we have blowback.
Thus, while the United States stands on the precipice of war with Iraq to keep that nation from developing nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them and Iran is close to possessing them. How then to stop this nuclear madness?
The Obvious Solution: America Must Lead by Example
For Johnson, the answer is obvious. The United States must lead by example. “There can be little question that a serious policy of nuclear disarmament led by the United States would have been far more effective in halting or even reversing the nuclearization of the world than the continuing policy of forward deployment of nuclear-armed troops combined with further research on ever more advanced nuclear weaponry at America’s weapon’s laboratories,” he declares.
Lest we forget, a key element of the Bush Doctrine is that we reserve the right to first strike use of nuclear weapons. This represents a radical departure from the established doctrine of nuclear deterrence.
Finally, there’s the matter of those two thousand American troops who might soon be slogging through the jungles of the Philippines in a search and destroy mission against a small band of Muslim extremists said to have ties to Al Qaeda. Once again, the Bush Administration has displayed a deplorable ignorance of history or, at the very least, a short memory.
After United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ignored previous promises of independence for the island chain and created an American colony there. During the guerilla war Filipinos fought against American forces to gain their independence, American Gen. John (Black Jack) Pershing led American troops onto the island of Jolo, where 65 percent of the population followed Islam. Pershing’s troops killed thousands of islanders, including women and children. It’s not likely that the island descendents of those people want to see American troops set foot on their island again.
More recently, the Philippine government banished the U.S. military from the Subic Bay Naval Base. As far as most Filipinos are concerned, we’re not welcome there.
Johnson makes a number of concrete recommendations to avoid what he calls “an impending crisis of empire.” The Bush Administration has already done the opposite of all of them. “More generally,” Johnson says, “the United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than through military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary.”
For the Bush Administration marching under the banners of globalization, unilateralism, and American hegemony, that agenda is not only unrealistic; it’s unthinkable.
Regis T. Sabol is a senior editor of Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New Deal: an online magazine of political, social, and cultural thought.
Book Review by Regis T. Sabol
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books, 268 pages, 2000
As the Bush Administration amasses hundreds of thousands of American troops on Iraq’s borders, pushes the Filipino government for permission to send more than two thousand American troops to fight Islamic guerrillas on an obscure island in the Philippines, and prepares for a nuclear showdown with North Korea, reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson is both a revelatory and disturbing experience.
In simple terms, Blowback argues that what goes around comes around. And, according to Johnson, that is a frightening prospect.
Blowback is a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency ((CIA). “It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people,” says Johnson. “What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”
The primary objective of these operations, he argues, is to maintain a global American empire held together by military and financial domination of other countries and, more critically, their markets. In short, we want to own the world.
The Bush Administration, by word and deed, has made it abundantly clear that it envisions a world dominated by one power, the United States, that will enforce a “Pax Americana.” The Administration declared its intentions in the National Security Strategy released Sept. 20, 2001. The policy was actually formulated in 1992 in the last year of the Bush I administration by Donald Rumsfield, who is now Secretary of Defense; Paul Wolfowitz, who is now Assistant Secretary of Defense; and Richard Perle, a national security advisor; among others.
This strategy dismisses deterrence or containment, a policy successfully used against the former Soviet Union” as a relic of the Cold War. Instead, it favors “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.” Naturally, Washington will determine what those “sovereign responsibilities” are.
The Bush Doctrine of American Hegemony
At the core of this doctrine is the concept of the pre-emptive strike. As George Bush explained to the nation in his most recent State of the Union address, the United States has the right to attack any country it perceives as being a threat to our security or interests. These countries do not actually have to be an immediate threat; they need only be perceived as one.
“In essence,” explains Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “(the National Security Strategy) lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.”
“The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia,” the document warns, “as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.”
Wolfowitz, in the 1992 draft of Defense Planning Guidance, enunciated the number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy.
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is the dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”
Wolfowitz went onto to identify three additional aspects of American hegemony.
“First the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
Even though Johnson’s book was published before George Bush took over the White House, Blowback essentially argues that such a strategy is a formula for disaster that will blow back on America with terrible consequences. In fact, it already has. In one chilling passage, Chalmers obliquely suggests that Osama bin Laden would retaliate against the United States for our missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998; “…the spiral of blowback…is not at an end in the case of bin Laden,” he warns. The term 9/11 had not yet entered the national consciousness.
“Government spokesmen continue to justify these attacks as ‘deterring’ terrorism even if the targets proved to be irrelevant to any damage done to facilities of the United States. In this way, future blowback possibilities are seeded into the world,” explains Johnson.
The author of Blowback is no left-wing academe or wild-eyed radical. Johnson is an economist, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has written several books on Japan and Asia, including MITI and the Japanese Miracle and Japan: Who Governs?
Nor is he a point man for the Democratic Party. Johnson cites the actions of the Clinton Administration, in particular, as examples of all that is wrong with American foreign policy. While his critique is withering, Johnson points out that Clinton’s actions were in step with those of his Republican and Democratic predecessors.
Does America Need to Maintain an Empire?
Although Blowback focuses on our relations with Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and China, Johnson shows how the pattern of relations with these countries holds true in all our international dealings. For example, the book opens, not with East Asia, but in northern Italy where, in 1998, a Marine Corps jet fighter, flying well below minimum altitude, sliced through a ski-lift cable, plunging 20 people to their deaths. “A court-martial held not in Italy but in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, exonerated everyone involved, calling it a ‘training accident.’” Even though President Clinton promised compensation to the families of the victims, Congress dropped the provision because of opposition in the House of Representatives and from the Pentagon.
“This was hardly the only such incident in which American service personnel victimized foreign civilians in the post-Cold War world,” Johnson reports. “From Germany and Turkey to Okinawa and South Korea, similar incidents have been common—as has been their usual denouement.” He supports that claim by citing a shameful number of specific incidents, many of them involving rape.
Johnson goes on to ask the obvious question that none dare ask: Why does the United States maintain military bases in Italy, Germany, Indonesia, Spain, and Japan, among other countries? It is past time to discuss that question, he argues, “and what the consequences of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the world and ourselves.”
Military actions are not the only cause of blowback, according to Johnson. Economic policies can be just as devastating. He points to the economic disasters that swept across Southeast Asia in 1997 and eventually engulfed Russia and Brazil as examples. These disasters resulted from our insistence on a “one-size-fits-all” free trade policy, this economist argues. To expect governments, cultures, and societies to follow our concept of capitalism to the letter is arrogant and doomed to failure.
Yet the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration before it, insists that “globalization” is the panacea for all the world’s economic ills. Far from being a cure, globalization is a policy that ignores the needs of individual countries and the working men and women who live in them. Moreover, globalization has been a disaster for American workers who have lost their jobs to cheap foreign labor markets. Johnson cites the now non-existent American steel industry as one victim of globalization.
Johnson sees a clear parallel between the postwar policies of the Soviet Union and the United States. “The USSR in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia created their satellite systems for essentially the same reasons,” he contends. Just as the USSR intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the U.S. intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Korea and Vietnam.
East Asia: A Model for American Hegemony
Japan, according to Johnson, is the lynchpin of our East Asian Empire. It is the wellspring of our policies toward the two Koreas and China, including our fuzzy military/economic support of Taiwan. While the United States has nurtured economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and even China, we have done so only to maintain our own military and economic dominance in the region. Thus, while we are willing to trade with China, we still follow a policy of containment that attempts to stunt the growth of the largest and eventually the dominant economic power in East Asia.
This policy of containment provides insight into the crisis we now face with North Korea, even though the Bush Administration pretends the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula is not a crisis. To more clearly understand the roots of the current standoff, we need to rethink our perceptions of the Korean War.
Americans have always accepted the notion that the Korean War started when Communist North Korea, a sovereign state, invaded Democratic South Korea, another sovereign state, in 1950. Johnson doesn’t see it that way.
In the first place, the partitioning of Korea was decided by the United States and the Soviet Union; Koreans had no say in the matter. Secondly, South Korea was not a democracy but an authoritarian regime established by the United States and composed primarily of former Japanese collaborators while the dogmatic Communist regime in the North was established by the Soviet Union and composed of guerillas who had fought the Japanese occupation. In short, the Korean War was, in fact, a civil war, argues Johnson.
Because the United States had committed itself to stopping Communist aggression, President Harry S. Truman committed U.S. troops to an Asian country’s civil war. The nature of that conflict changed when China, goaded by Douglas McArthur’s foolhardy march to the Yalu River, entered the war. It then became a war between China and the United States, which was fought to a bloody stalemate before ending in a truce in 1953.
That truce was signed by the United States and China. Since then, the border between North and South Korea remains a no-man’s land with North Korean forces on one side and American and South Korean forces on the other. Since then, not only has the U.S. established diplomatic ties with China, China has established diplomatic and economic ties with South Korea. North Korea, on the other hand, remains frozen out of the picture.
What the North Koreans most fear is an attack by the United States. Recent actions by the Bush Administration have given them no reason to believe otherwise. One of Bush’s first actions when he took office was to cut off an ongoing dialogue with North Korea. Two years later, he lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran into an “Axis of Evil.” He also ordered a drastic reduction of desperately needed oil supplies to the country.
Enter blowback. Now North Korea, in an attempt to gain some leverage with Washington, has reactivated its nuclear processing plans, withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact, and kicked out U.N. inspectors. Last week, the North Koreans fired a missile into the Sea of Japan.
What the North Koreans want is direct talks with the United States leading to a non-aggression treaty that will ensure their security. While the government of Japan and the newly elected government of North Korea are pushing for negotiation and accommodation with the North, Bush has dug in his Texas boot heels.
The Bush Administration says it will talk with North Korea but it will not be “blackmailed” into negotiations. Ari Fleischer reiterated that position in a press briefing Thursday and White House sources reaffirmed it Saturday. The Administration insists it will not enter into bi-lateral talks with North Korea but will only negotiate within the context of a multilevel coalition of nations.
A legitimate question arises here: Just who is blackmailing whom? Wouldn’t we be better off to negotiate a treaty with North Korea that guarantees nonaggression by either side and establishes security on the Korean peninsula, thus eliminating a dangerous flashpoint for potential nuclear catastrophe? Unfortunately, such a solution does not fit in with the Bush Administration’s ambition to maintain a worldwide empire. Consequently, we may face blowback of catastrophic proportions.
The War against Iraq: Consequences and Dangers of Blowback
Our all-but-inevitable war with Iraq, of course, is the most glaring example of the consequences of blowback from previous policies and the dangers of blowback that will result from the war. Citing statistics from the government’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Johnson notes that, by 1995, the U.S. provided 49 percent of all global arms exports to 140 odd countries, “90 percent of which were either not democracies or were human rights abusers.” And we often arm opponents in ongoing conflicts—Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, China and Taiwan.
“Saddam Hussein of Iraq,” he points out, “the number-one ‘rogue’ leader of the 1990s (and still number one in 2003, according to Bush), was during the 1980s simply an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country’s oil reserves.” In fact, the U.S., under Ronald Reagan, provided Saddam with the much-ballyhooed Weapons of Mass Destruction that are Bush’s excuse for going to war today. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield was a key player in those deals. And, as we all know, Halliburton Corp., with Vice President Dick Cheney as CEO, did a multi-billion dollar business with Iraq after the Gulf War.
In the aftermath of that war, George I urged Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south to rebel against Saddam’s rule with sincere promises of U.S. military assistance. Alas, for the Kurds and the Shiites, Bush wasn’t true to his word and Saddam’s Republican Guard slaughtered them by the thousands. Now the Shiites have said they will fight to defend Iraqi sovereignty before they’ll trust the Americans again. That’s blowback.
In the north, Bush II has offered Turkey $26 billion to allow 60,000 U.S. troops to invade Iraq from the north. Bush has also assured the Turks they can follow American troops into Iraq and take control of valuable oil fields that the Kurds of northern Iraq also covet. In doing so, the Bush team seems to be oblivious to the deep enmity that exists between the Turks and the Kurds. As Johnson points out:
“The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish population estimated at fifty-eight million. Another five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkey’s borders in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated against the Kurds for the past seventy years and have conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand Kurdish villages and hamlets in the backward southeastern part of the country.”
It comes as no surprise then that the Kurds have announced they will not accept any Turkish presence inside the Iraqi territory they now control. Thus the stage is set for a war between Turkey and the de facto nation of Kurdistan, both armed to the teeth with arms supplied by the United States. No wonder, then, that the Turkish Parliament thought twice about allowing 62,000 American troops use Turkey as a springboard into Iraq. Blowback again.
Iran: A Tangled Web of Blowback
Meanwhile, in Iran, the third member of Bush’s Axis of Evil, U.N. inspectors have discovered a network of sophisticated machinery for processing enriched uranium, a crucial step toward developing nuclear weapons. And where did the Iranians acquire the technology to develop this machinery? From our new friend and ally, Pakistan. Pakistan became our friend and ally because it helped us attack Afghanistan and defeat the hated Taliban. Before then, Pakistan was also a “rogue” state while the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and other Afghani tribal warlords were our allies in their guerilla war against the Soviet Union. Now, with thousands of American troops still in Afghanistan, at least one Afghani warlord has called for a “jihad” against the American occupiers. Yet another example of blowback.
For those with a short memory, the Iranians hate us because the CIA deposed a democratically elected government in 1954 and installed and propped up with money and arms the Shah, whom they deposed in 1979 in favor of the fanatical fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. Again, we have blowback.
Thus, while the United States stands on the precipice of war with Iraq to keep that nation from developing nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them and Iran is close to possessing them. How then to stop this nuclear madness?
The Obvious Solution: America Must Lead by Example
For Johnson, the answer is obvious. The United States must lead by example. “There can be little question that a serious policy of nuclear disarmament led by the United States would have been far more effective in halting or even reversing the nuclearization of the world than the continuing policy of forward deployment of nuclear-armed troops combined with further research on ever more advanced nuclear weaponry at America’s weapon’s laboratories,” he declares.
Lest we forget, a key element of the Bush Doctrine is that we reserve the right to first strike use of nuclear weapons. This represents a radical departure from the established doctrine of nuclear deterrence.
Finally, there’s the matter of those two thousand American troops who might soon be slogging through the jungles of the Philippines in a search and destroy mission against a small band of Muslim extremists said to have ties to Al Qaeda. Once again, the Bush Administration has displayed a deplorable ignorance of history or, at the very least, a short memory.
After United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ignored previous promises of independence for the island chain and created an American colony there. During the guerilla war Filipinos fought against American forces to gain their independence, American Gen. John (Black Jack) Pershing led American troops onto the island of Jolo, where 65 percent of the population followed Islam. Pershing’s troops killed thousands of islanders, including women and children. It’s not likely that the island descendents of those people want to see American troops set foot on their island again.
More recently, the Philippine government banished the U.S. military from the Subic Bay Naval Base. As far as most Filipinos are concerned, we’re not welcome there.
Johnson makes a number of concrete recommendations to avoid what he calls “an impending crisis of empire.” The Bush Administration has already done the opposite of all of them. “More generally,” Johnson says, “the United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than through military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary.”
For the Bush Administration marching under the banners of globalization, unilateralism, and American hegemony, that agenda is not only unrealistic; it’s unthinkable.
Regis T. Sabol is a senior editor of Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New Deal: an online magazine of political, social, and cultural thought.
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Bush's Shift on Israel Was Swift
Country's Friends And Foes Credited
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2003; Page A01
The day after President Bush delivered a rare public criticism of Israel last week, he sat down to dinner at the White House with 100 Jewish leaders and did some damage control.
The dinner on June 11, officially marking a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, became an unofficial chance for Bush to reassure the attendees, many of them political donors, that he remained pro-Israel and that his complaints about an Israeli attack on a Palestinian militant were an aberration.
"He and others at the White House recognized that their reaction could be counterproductive," said Malcolm Hoenlein, one of the Jewish leaders who talked privately with Bush that night. "People were taken a little aback by the comments and, from what everyone could tell, the White House was well aware of it."
Indeed, by June 15, Bush was putting sole responsibility for Middle East violence on the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, leaving Israel blameless and asking the world to "deal harshly" with Hamas.
The shift in emphasis came about because of a variety of factors, according to diplomats, administration officials and others involved. The day after Bush's criticism of Israel, a Hamas-orchestrated bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 17 checked the president's first, visceral reaction to Israel's attack on a Hamas leader. A dossier presented by Israeli intelligence operatives to U.S. officials made a case that the target was legitimate -- while Israeli officials reached a tacit understanding with Bush aides about limiting future assassination attempts.
And, not least, Bush faced a wave of protest from Israel's defenders on Capitol Hill and K Street -- including many of those at the dinner on the 11th. According to Republican sources, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.), who declared that "America must stand by Israel as it fights its own war on terror," had a private meeting with Bush aides and threatened to promote a congressional resolution in support of Israel's actions if Bush persisted in criticizing Israel.
The brief episode illustrates the pressure Bush will be under as he seeks to implement his "road map" to Middle East peace, kicked off earlier this month with a summit meeting in Jordan between the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. The reaction to Bush's rebuke of Israel -- really just a mild expression that he was "troubled" by the attack -- brought Bush grief from his conservative supporters, and his dropping of the criticism served to confirm Arab fears that he would not pressure Israel.
"Any president that overuses our relationship with Israel to put their feet to the fire will not be able to do it when the key time comes," said Edward S. Walker, a former ambassador to Israel and now president of the Middle East Institute. "It's something that has to be preserved for the very important decisions, and last week was not one of them."
On Tuesday, June 10, Bush reacted angrily to a pair of Israeli attacks. "I am troubled by the recent Israeli helicopter gunship attacks," Bush said, echoing slightly stronger remarks by his aides. "I also don't believe the attacks help the Israeli security," he added, suggesting that Israel had not been exercising "responsible leadership."
In Jerusalem, Israeli officials felt the administration's anger in phone calls shortly after the first attack. Israeli officials started to assemble a dossier about Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi justifying the attack, but this was not made available before Bush spoke. "We could have handled it better," said one Israeli official, calling the response to U.S. inquiries "haphazard."
Eventually, Israel's Shin Bet domestic security agency turned over information to the CIA in a series of briefings. Among numerous Israeli officials who flew to Washington were Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who met with Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who is expected to make a Middle East trip later this month).
Part of Bush's pique when he criticized Israel came from his assumption that Sharon had promised Israel would limit assassinations to militants who were "ticking time bombs" -- preparing to attack Israelis. Weisglass, according to an Israeli official, delivered the message to Rice and others that the target, Rantisi, was such a threat.
After numerous discussions, U.S. and Israeli officials agreed on what would be tolerated in the future. "There's a better understanding with the Israelis of what is and is not a ticking time bomb," a senior Bush aide said.
While those secret discussions were occurring, Bush faced a barrage of dissent from Israel's defenders, Republicans and Democrats, on Capitol Hill. Jewish groups normally friendly to the White House objected.
Then, on June 11, the suicide bombing in Jerusalem pushed aside any thought within the administration of criticizing Israel. Bush spoke again in public, this time asking the world to cut off funds to "organizations such as Hamas" and to "condemn the killings."
At the White House dinner, Jewish leaders were assured in private talks with Bush that he was not going to waver in his solidarity with Israel. Bush, in his public remarks, did not speak of the incident, talking instead about the importance of battling anti-Semitism and recalling his recent visit to a Nazi concentration camp.
"Everybody came away encouraged and pleased," said Nathan Diament, who had helped to craft a statement from orthodox Jews criticizing the White House. Diament said he was convinced the administration "clearly is not going to put pressure on Israel in the face of terrorist assaults."
Bush said as much in his next public remarks on the Middle East, on June 15. "The message is clear: Prime Minister Abbas wants peace; Prime Minister Sharon wants peace; America wants peace; the European Union wants peace," he said. "But there are clearly killers who don't. . . . [B]efore that state is established, it is clear that the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers. And that's just the way it is in the Middle East."
Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the Jerusalem bombing "did change the immediate focus" of the administration's rhetoric. But Fleischer added that "the president will not be shy about reminding Israel of its responsibilities."
Still, Jewish leaders are not expecting more such reminders anytime soon. "It was a human reaction more than a change in policy," Republican Jewish Coalition Director Matthew Brooks said of the Bush criticism. "I account for it as a very, very small blip."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Bush's Shift on Israel Was Swift
Country's Friends And Foes Credited
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2003; Page A01
The day after President Bush delivered a rare public criticism of Israel last week, he sat down to dinner at the White House with 100 Jewish leaders and did some damage control.
The dinner on June 11, officially marking a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, became an unofficial chance for Bush to reassure the attendees, many of them political donors, that he remained pro-Israel and that his complaints about an Israeli attack on a Palestinian militant were an aberration.
"He and others at the White House recognized that their reaction could be counterproductive," said Malcolm Hoenlein, one of the Jewish leaders who talked privately with Bush that night. "People were taken a little aback by the comments and, from what everyone could tell, the White House was well aware of it."
Indeed, by June 15, Bush was putting sole responsibility for Middle East violence on the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, leaving Israel blameless and asking the world to "deal harshly" with Hamas.
The shift in emphasis came about because of a variety of factors, according to diplomats, administration officials and others involved. The day after Bush's criticism of Israel, a Hamas-orchestrated bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 17 checked the president's first, visceral reaction to Israel's attack on a Hamas leader. A dossier presented by Israeli intelligence operatives to U.S. officials made a case that the target was legitimate -- while Israeli officials reached a tacit understanding with Bush aides about limiting future assassination attempts.
And, not least, Bush faced a wave of protest from Israel's defenders on Capitol Hill and K Street -- including many of those at the dinner on the 11th. According to Republican sources, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.), who declared that "America must stand by Israel as it fights its own war on terror," had a private meeting with Bush aides and threatened to promote a congressional resolution in support of Israel's actions if Bush persisted in criticizing Israel.
The brief episode illustrates the pressure Bush will be under as he seeks to implement his "road map" to Middle East peace, kicked off earlier this month with a summit meeting in Jordan between the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. The reaction to Bush's rebuke of Israel -- really just a mild expression that he was "troubled" by the attack -- brought Bush grief from his conservative supporters, and his dropping of the criticism served to confirm Arab fears that he would not pressure Israel.
"Any president that overuses our relationship with Israel to put their feet to the fire will not be able to do it when the key time comes," said Edward S. Walker, a former ambassador to Israel and now president of the Middle East Institute. "It's something that has to be preserved for the very important decisions, and last week was not one of them."
On Tuesday, June 10, Bush reacted angrily to a pair of Israeli attacks. "I am troubled by the recent Israeli helicopter gunship attacks," Bush said, echoing slightly stronger remarks by his aides. "I also don't believe the attacks help the Israeli security," he added, suggesting that Israel had not been exercising "responsible leadership."
In Jerusalem, Israeli officials felt the administration's anger in phone calls shortly after the first attack. Israeli officials started to assemble a dossier about Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi justifying the attack, but this was not made available before Bush spoke. "We could have handled it better," said one Israeli official, calling the response to U.S. inquiries "haphazard."
Eventually, Israel's Shin Bet domestic security agency turned over information to the CIA in a series of briefings. Among numerous Israeli officials who flew to Washington were Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who met with Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who is expected to make a Middle East trip later this month).
Part of Bush's pique when he criticized Israel came from his assumption that Sharon had promised Israel would limit assassinations to militants who were "ticking time bombs" -- preparing to attack Israelis. Weisglass, according to an Israeli official, delivered the message to Rice and others that the target, Rantisi, was such a threat.
After numerous discussions, U.S. and Israeli officials agreed on what would be tolerated in the future. "There's a better understanding with the Israelis of what is and is not a ticking time bomb," a senior Bush aide said.
While those secret discussions were occurring, Bush faced a barrage of dissent from Israel's defenders, Republicans and Democrats, on Capitol Hill. Jewish groups normally friendly to the White House objected.
Then, on June 11, the suicide bombing in Jerusalem pushed aside any thought within the administration of criticizing Israel. Bush spoke again in public, this time asking the world to cut off funds to "organizations such as Hamas" and to "condemn the killings."
At the White House dinner, Jewish leaders were assured in private talks with Bush that he was not going to waver in his solidarity with Israel. Bush, in his public remarks, did not speak of the incident, talking instead about the importance of battling anti-Semitism and recalling his recent visit to a Nazi concentration camp.
"Everybody came away encouraged and pleased," said Nathan Diament, who had helped to craft a statement from orthodox Jews criticizing the White House. Diament said he was convinced the administration "clearly is not going to put pressure on Israel in the face of terrorist assaults."
Bush said as much in his next public remarks on the Middle East, on June 15. "The message is clear: Prime Minister Abbas wants peace; Prime Minister Sharon wants peace; America wants peace; the European Union wants peace," he said. "But there are clearly killers who don't. . . . [B]efore that state is established, it is clear that the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers. And that's just the way it is in the Middle East."
Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the Jerusalem bombing "did change the immediate focus" of the administration's rhetoric. But Fleischer added that "the president will not be shy about reminding Israel of its responsibilities."
Still, Jewish leaders are not expecting more such reminders anytime soon. "It was a human reaction more than a change in policy," Republican Jewish Coalition Director Matthew Brooks said of the Bush criticism. "I account for it as a very, very small blip."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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Q&A: Robert Fisk Reports from Occupied Territory
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
June 12, 2003
On June 11, 2003, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman interviewed Robert Fisk, reporter with the Independent newspaper of London. He recently left Iraq where he was chronicling the rising resistance to the U.S. occupation. Ten American soldiers have been killed in ambushes across Iraq in the past 15 days including one yesterday in Baghdad who was attacked with rocket propelled grenades. Fallujah has been a hotbed of Iraqi resistance since April when U.S. troops fired into large crowds of civilians twice killing at least 18 people.
This is a rush transcript.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, can you talk more about what you found there?
ROBERT FISK: I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of an army that thought it was an army of liberation and has become an army of occupation. It's important perhaps to say – I did mention it in [a recent] article that a number of those soldiers who were attached to the 3rd infantry division who were military policeman, American ordinary cops like one from Rhode Island, for example – they had a pretty shrewd idea of what was going on. You got different kinds of behavior from the Americans. You got this very nice guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive towards people, didn't worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them candies. There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and he said, 'If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck,' and there was quite a lot of language like that as well. There were good guys as well as bad guys among the Americans as there always are in armies, but the people who I talked to, the sergeants and captains and so on – most of them acknowledge that something had gone wrong, that this was not going to be good.
One guy said to me, every time we go down to the river here – he was talking about the river area in Fallujah – it's a tributary of the Tigris – it's like Somalia down there. You always get shot at and you always get stoned, I mean, have stones thrown at them. Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me – I heard twice before in Baghdad itself, once from a British Commonwealth diplomat and once from a fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the coalition, C.P.A., the Coalition – for the moment forces or whatever it's called – Authority, the authority that's hanging on there until they can create some kind of Iraqi government – they all say that Baghdad airport now comes under nightly sniper fire from the perimeter of the runways from Iraqis. Two of them told me that every time a military aircraft comes in at night, it's fired at. In fact some of the American pilots are now going back to the old Vietnamese tactic of cork screwing down tightly on to the runways from above rather than making the normal level flight approach across open countryside because they're shot at so much. It's a coalition provisional authority I'm thinking of, the C.P.A., previously an even more long fangled name. There is a very serious problem of security.
The Americans still officially call them the remnants of Saddam or terrorists.
But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organized resistance and not just people who were in Saddam's forces, who were in the Ba'ath Party or the Saddam Fedayeen.
There was also increasing anger among the Shiite community, those who were of course most opposed to Saddam, and I think what we're actually seeing, you can get clues in Iraq, is a cross fertilization. Shiites who are disillusioned, who don't believe they have been liberated, who spent so long in Iran, they don't like the Americans anyway. Sunni Muslims who feel like they're threatened by the Shiites, former Sadaam acolytes who've lost their jobs and found that their money has stopped. Kurds who are disaffected and are beginning to have contacts, and that of course is the beginning of a real resistance movement and that's the great danger for the Americans now.
GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, whoís just come out of Iraq. There's a front page piece in The New York Times today, "GI's In Iraqi City Are Stalked By Faceless Enemies At Night,' and Michael Gordon writes about how organized the resistance is, how it seems to come alive at night and that what's clear, he says , is some attacks are premeditated, involve cooperation among small groups of fighters including a system of signaling the presence of American forces: talking about the use of red, white and blue flares when forces come and then the attacks begin.
FISK: Yes, I've heard this. I also know that in Fallujah, for example, there's a system of honking the horns of cars: when the vehicles approach, the American convoy approaches, there's one honk on the horn. When the last vehicle goes by the same spot, there's two honks on the horn, and the purpose is to work out the time element between the first hooter and the second because by that, they know how big is the convoy and whether it's small enough to be attacked. That comes from a sergeant in the military police in Fallujah taking part in this actual operation which I described to you just now, which you read out from my report.
One of the problems with the Americans I think is that the top people in the Pentagon always knew that this wasn't going to be 'human rights abuses ended,' flowers and music for the soldiers, and everyone lives happily every after and loves America. You may remember when Rumsfeld first came to Baghdad, something your president didn't dare to do in the end, he wanted to fly over in an airplane.
He made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather sinister in the big hanger at Baghdad airport. He said we still have to fight the remnants of Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq, and I thought, hang on a minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to realize I think what he was doing, he was laying the future narrative of the opposition to the Americans. I.E when the Americans get attacked, it could be first of all laid down to remnants of Saddam, as in remnants of the Taliban who seem to be moving around in Afghanistan now in battalion strength, but never mind. It could be blamed on Al Qaeda, so America was back fighting its old enemies again. This was familiar territory.
If you were to suggest that it was a resistance movement, harakat muqawama, resistance party in Arabic, that would suggest the people didn't believe they had been liberated, and of course, all good-natured peace loving people have to believe they were liberated by the Americans, not occupied by them. What you're finding for example is a whole series of blunders by Paul Bremer, the American head of the so-called coalition forces, at least coalition authority in Baghdad.
First of all, he dissolved the Iraqi Army. Well, I can't imagine an Army that better deserves to be dissolved. But that means that more than quarter of a million armed men overnight are deprived of their welfare and money. Now if you have quarter of a million armed Iraqis who suddenly don't get paid any more, and they all know each other, what are they going to do? They are going to form some kind of force which is secret, which is covered; then they will be called terrorists, but I guess they know that, and then of course they will be saying to people, why don't you come and join us.
It was very interesting that in Fallujah, the young men came out to see me from a shop just after the American searches there had ended and said some people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked me to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. I met a Shiite Muslim family in Baghdad who moved into the former home of a Saddam intelligence officer. This family had been visited three nights previously by armed men who said, you better move out of this house. It doesn't belong to you unless you want to join us. The guy in Fallujah said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him to join the resistance had weapons, showed their mukhabarat intelligence identity card and said, we're still being paid and we are proud to hold our I.D. cards for the Ba'ath Party. So, now you have to realize that Fallujah and other towns like it are very unlike Tikrit, are very much pro-Saddam. Fallujah is the site of a great munitions factory, it gave people massive employment. They all loved Saddam in the way Arabs are encouraged to love dictators or go prison to otherwise. But nonetheless, there is an embryo of a serious resistance movement now.
On top of this, you can see the measure of what I think is basically desperation. I've been writing about this in The Independent this morning in London, well, last night for this morning's paper, and Paul Bremer now asked the legal side of the coalition provisional authority to set up the machinery of Iraqi press censorship. In other words, Iraqi newspapers are going to be censored. Controlled I think is the official word they use, but that means censorship.
That is the kind of language that Saddam used. Iraqis are used to a censored press; after all, they lived with it for more than 20 years under Saddam Hussein.
Now when you question the Americans about it, first of all they deny it. Then the British half accept it; then other people involved in the coalition say well it's probably true, yes, it is true.
But the problem is the wild stories appearing in the Iraqi press. Now, of course there's no tradition of western style journalism in Iraq. There are those that say it's a good idea, no tradition for example of letting the other side have a say, checking the story out, going back on the ground and asking the other side for their version of events. It doesn't exist. It's a little bit, but not much. What you get after saying that Americans are going with Iraqi prostitutes, American troops are chasing Iraqi women, that Muslim women are being invited to marry Christian foreigners, that this is worse than it was under Saddam. I'm actually quoting from one particular newspaper called The Witness, which is a Shiite Muslim paper, basically that had its first issue the other day. Other newspapers carry reports of American beatings; and the opening of mass graves. They're not totally one sided against the Americans.
But you can see how the occupation forces, let's call them by their real name, are troubled by this kind of publication because it seems to them to provoke or incite animosity towards the liberators of Iraq, which it is not meant to do. But of course the problem is that the Imams in the mosques are saying the same thing about the Americans. Now, the last quote I read from American official said that it may be necessary to control what the Imams were saying in the mosques; well, this is preposterous. I sat on Rashid Street in Baghdad a few days ago and listened to the loud speaker carrying the sermon of the imam from within the mosque.
I think he was saying the Americans must leave immediately, now. Well, under the new rule presumably he's inciting the people to violence. What are we going to do? Arrest all the Imams in the mosques, arrest all the journalists who won't obey, close down the newspapers? I mean what Iraqi journalists need are courses in journalism from reporters who work in real democracies.
You can come along and say, look, by all means criticize the Americans and put the boot in if you want to, but make sure you get it right. And if you also do that you have to look at your own society and what is wrong in it and how Saddam ever came about. He didn't just come about because America supported Saddam which my goodness they did. But Bremer is not interested in this. What Bremer wants to do is control, control the press, control the Imams, and it doesn't work. A lot of the incidents taking place now, the violent incidents are not being divulged. A colleague of mine went the other day.
GOODMAN: Robert, you were just talking about a lot of the attacks we're hearing about – what seems like a good number, a lot of the attacks – on U.S. forces are not being reported.
FISK: I have a colleague, for example, who went down to Fallujah before the incident I was describing to you earlier, after two gunmen, one American had been killed in the fire fight, he reported, I spoke to both sides. On his way back he was traveling past the town of Abu Garab a rather sinister place where the huge prison is where Saddam executed so many prisoners, including an Observer journalist back in the late 1980's.
As we were, as the colleague was passing by the town, he saw a young man come up and throw a hand grenade at American troops in the Humvee.
The grenade missed them and exploded in the canal and wounded six Iraqi children, a very clear account of what happened. I rang the coalition forces, the telephone didn't answer as it very often doesn't do. And no report ever emerged except in my paper that this incident had occurred.
Now, over and over again we keep seeing things, seeing small incidents occur, soldiers threatening people outside petrol lines because people are trying to jump the line and steal. And it just doesn't make it back into the coalition record of what's actually happening in Iraq. The danger here is not so much that we're not being told about it because we can see and find out for ourselves. The danger is that the United States leadership in Baghdad, and of course, especially back in the White House and Pentagon is also not being told about it. Or if it is, information is only going to certain people who can deal with that information.
It's very easy to say, well Iraq's been a great success we've got rid of a dictatorship, the weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist have now been destroyed or whatever interpretation you want to put on that. Human rights abuses have ended, certainly the Saddam kind. But if you try and if this information goes up the ladder every bit of it to people like Bremer, I'm not sure it all is – I think it should be – then you can see how the coalition doesn't represent the reality.
One of the big problems at the moment is the Americans and, to some extent the British, particularly the Americans in Baghdad. They're all ensconced in this chic gleaming marble palace, largest, most expensive palace. There they sit with their laptops trying to work out with Washington how they're going to bring about this new democracy in Iraq. They rely upon for the most part former Iraqi exiles who never endured Saddam Hussein, who are hovering around making sure that they get the biggest part of the pie if possible. When they leave the palace, when they go into the streets of Baghdad, the dangerous streets of Baghdad, they leave in these armored black Mercedes with gunmen in the front and back, soldiers, plain clothes guys with weapons and sunglasses.
One Iraqi said to me the other day, who did you think was the last person we saw driving through town like [this]? I said, Saddam Hussein? They all burst out laughing, of course, they said, exactly the same.
We are used to this just like they're used to press censorship. I think it's difficult – you need to be in Baghdad to understand the degree to which there's been this slippage of ambition and slippage in the ideological war. I was in small hotel called the Al Hama the other day – it has a swimming pool, 24-hour generators. Just going down to have a meal in the evening, I came across two westerners, one with a pump action shotgun, the other with a submachine gun passing me in the hallway.
I said, 'Who are you?'
He said, 'Well, who are you?'
'I'm a guest in the hotel. You have guns. Who are you?'
He said, 'We work for D.O.D'.
'Department of Defense, right?' (But he was obviously English – he had a British accent.) 'Hang on a second you're not American.'
'No, we're a British company that is hired to look after D.O.D. employees in Baghdad. That's why we're armed.'
I said, 'Who gives you permission to have weapons?'
He said, 'The coalition forces, we're here protecting them.'
Now, how often have Iraqis seen armed plain clothes men moving in and out of hotels, they have for more than 20 years, now seeing them again. Well these guys are not going to string them up by their fingernails and electrocute them in torture cells. But again, the image, the picture is the same. The armored escort, limousines in the street, soldiers kicking down the doors searching for, 'terrorists.' The press censorship plans. Plain clothes armed men going into a hotel asking who you are immediately by asking them who they are, same system as before. It has this kind of ghastly ghostly veneer of the old regime about it The Americans are not Saddam, they're not murdering people - they're not lining up people at mass graves, of course they're not. But if you see through the eyes of the Iraqis, it doesn't look quite that simple.
GOODMAN: We are talking to Robert Fisk, just came out of Iraq but you've also written about the so-called road map to peace. I just wanted to get your response to what happened yesterday in Gaza, with the Israeli helicopter gun ships attempting to assassinate the political leader for Hamas, Abdel Azziz Rantizzi. And also Bush strongly criticizing the attempted assassination on the part of the Israel.
FISK: First of all he didn't strongly criticize them, he mildly, rather pathetically and rather cowardly criticized the Israelis. This was an attack which was meant to kill the political head of Hamas. And in the ghastly role which the Palestinians and Israelis play in their bloody and useless conflict, I can understand why the attack was made in that context.
But that attack did not kill Rantizzi, it killed a little child of five and a young woman. Now your president said that that was 'troubling'. That isn't troubling that's a shameful act, that's a despicable thing to do. But there was no strong condemnation from Mr. Bush, he just said it was troubling. If a Palestinian had attacked Israeli forces or Israeli political leader involved in encouraging violence, had killed a little Israeli girl, and a young innocent Israeli woman Mr. Bush would not have called it troubling. He would have said it was a shameful, terrorist act, which it would have been How can it work when the most powerful president of the most powerful state in the world, United States of America, can be so gutless and cowardly in condemning the killing of two innocent people.
It is not troubling. It is an outrage that those two innocent people died. Just as it would be if the Palestinians had done it. Just as it is when the Palestinians do do it. [For Bush] It is not an outrage. Not a tragedy. Not shameful. It is merely troubling. Like a flood is troubling or a heavy rainfall that kills people or a storm is troubling. In that context how can this new peace possibly work.
It's called a road map, who invented the phrase road map? I suppose the poor old State Department and all the journalists dutifully used the word road map.
They can't use peace process because that's associated with Oslo and that failed. You remember the cliche for the peace process, always had to be put back on track. I suppose peace process was a railway line or a railway train so it presumably always has to be put back on the main road or back on the highway that is the cliche.
What has Sharon done? he's closed down a few empty caravans on hilltops.
At large and continuing to expand Jewish settlements, the Jews and Jews only in occupied Arab land. What have the Palestinians done? Mahmoud Abbas says I'm going to finish terrorism, there's going to be no more violence by the Palestinians and, bang, there immediately is. We have the three main violent groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa immediately carrying out the suicide bombing.
And then praised by Rantizzi, I remember thinking, he's praising them, that's against the road map so Israelis have got a green light to knock him off and they tried and failed. I remember interviewing Rantizzi along similar lines about six months ago in Gaza, as I was talking to him I saw an Israeli helicopter emerge in the window and his body guard looked around very nervously and I thought, oh, no, please go away and so I finished the interview.
But I always thought he was a target, he always had two gunmen with him all the time. That's not the point. Rantizzi is a very tough Hamas man, a very ruthless man. He was one of the Palestinians who was illegally deported from Israeli prisons into Lebanon in 1992. I actually met him there in the southern Lebanon in the hills, when he was living rough, months after months in a tent.
This is a very rough character, very tough guy – grew up the hard way in guerrilla warfare as well as politics.
But when you're going to have a situation where you have an Israeli prime minister who doesn't want to end the settlements, who is indeed the creator of the settlements, and a Palestinian prime minister who can't stop the intifada and a U.S. president who is so gutless he can only call a killing of a woman and a child troubling, what chance is there for a road map or peace process or any other kind of agreement in the Middle East?
GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, who is just come out of Iraq and who has reported extensively on the Middle East for more than 30 years.
I wanted to end, back in Iraq. CNN is reporting today that Ahmed Chalabi who has addressed the Council on Foreign Relations is saying that Saddam Hussein is moving in an arc around the Tigris River starting northeast of Baghdad. He said finding Saddam would just be a matter of knowing whom to talk to. He says based on information from credible sources, he believes the former Iraqi president wants revenge and has obtained two suicide bombing vests for attacks on U.S. forces. Chalabi says Saddam is paying bounty for every U.S. soldier killed. Your response?
FISK: I long ago gave up putting any credit in anything that Ahmed Chalabi says. The real issue is not where is Saddam Hussein, he could be sitting in Minsk or Belarus or he could be sitting in Tikrit or in the Iraqi countryside somewhere. Obviously there were plans to hide him in advance. You know this goes back to another issue of the degree of real effort to find him. Just look back, the Americans wanted to arrest Valadich and put him in the Hague. We were going to capture Osama bin laden, he's still on the loose. We were going to capture Mullah Omar, he's only got one eye, not difficult to identify. But he's still on the loose. We can't get vice president Ramadan in Iraq or Uday Hussein, the sons of Saddam. We can't get Saddam himself. Can't get Naji Sabri the foreign minister.
I was sitting in a restaurant in Baghdad a week and a half ago, at the next table next to me was Saddam's personal translator. I sort of did a double take, I said, hi, how are you? I knew the guy. I'd known him for years and years. I said, are you okay? Fine, fine no problem, he was having a beer with friends. And he walked out. This is the same restaurant that later on I saw Paul Bremer walk into with several special forces men to protect him and his guests for dinner. I have to ask myself sometimes what's going on. Ahmed Chalabi says that Saddam is moving in an arc, he maybe moving in a circle or square for all I know but it's clear he's still alive. That's the point.
GOODMAN: Well, Robert Fisk, thank you very much for being with us. Robert Fisk of the Independent of London just out of Iraq.
Democracy Now! is a national listener-sponsored radio and television program.
Q&A: Robert Fisk Reports from Occupied Territory
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
June 12, 2003
On June 11, 2003, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman interviewed Robert Fisk, reporter with the Independent newspaper of London. He recently left Iraq where he was chronicling the rising resistance to the U.S. occupation. Ten American soldiers have been killed in ambushes across Iraq in the past 15 days including one yesterday in Baghdad who was attacked with rocket propelled grenades. Fallujah has been a hotbed of Iraqi resistance since April when U.S. troops fired into large crowds of civilians twice killing at least 18 people.
This is a rush transcript.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, can you talk more about what you found there?
ROBERT FISK: I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of an army that thought it was an army of liberation and has become an army of occupation. It's important perhaps to say – I did mention it in [a recent] article that a number of those soldiers who were attached to the 3rd infantry division who were military policeman, American ordinary cops like one from Rhode Island, for example – they had a pretty shrewd idea of what was going on. You got different kinds of behavior from the Americans. You got this very nice guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive towards people, didn't worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them candies. There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and he said, 'If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck,' and there was quite a lot of language like that as well. There were good guys as well as bad guys among the Americans as there always are in armies, but the people who I talked to, the sergeants and captains and so on – most of them acknowledge that something had gone wrong, that this was not going to be good.
One guy said to me, every time we go down to the river here – he was talking about the river area in Fallujah – it's a tributary of the Tigris – it's like Somalia down there. You always get shot at and you always get stoned, I mean, have stones thrown at them. Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me – I heard twice before in Baghdad itself, once from a British Commonwealth diplomat and once from a fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the coalition, C.P.A., the Coalition – for the moment forces or whatever it's called – Authority, the authority that's hanging on there until they can create some kind of Iraqi government – they all say that Baghdad airport now comes under nightly sniper fire from the perimeter of the runways from Iraqis. Two of them told me that every time a military aircraft comes in at night, it's fired at. In fact some of the American pilots are now going back to the old Vietnamese tactic of cork screwing down tightly on to the runways from above rather than making the normal level flight approach across open countryside because they're shot at so much. It's a coalition provisional authority I'm thinking of, the C.P.A., previously an even more long fangled name. There is a very serious problem of security.
The Americans still officially call them the remnants of Saddam or terrorists.
But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organized resistance and not just people who were in Saddam's forces, who were in the Ba'ath Party or the Saddam Fedayeen.
There was also increasing anger among the Shiite community, those who were of course most opposed to Saddam, and I think what we're actually seeing, you can get clues in Iraq, is a cross fertilization. Shiites who are disillusioned, who don't believe they have been liberated, who spent so long in Iran, they don't like the Americans anyway. Sunni Muslims who feel like they're threatened by the Shiites, former Sadaam acolytes who've lost their jobs and found that their money has stopped. Kurds who are disaffected and are beginning to have contacts, and that of course is the beginning of a real resistance movement and that's the great danger for the Americans now.
GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, whoís just come out of Iraq. There's a front page piece in The New York Times today, "GI's In Iraqi City Are Stalked By Faceless Enemies At Night,' and Michael Gordon writes about how organized the resistance is, how it seems to come alive at night and that what's clear, he says , is some attacks are premeditated, involve cooperation among small groups of fighters including a system of signaling the presence of American forces: talking about the use of red, white and blue flares when forces come and then the attacks begin.
FISK: Yes, I've heard this. I also know that in Fallujah, for example, there's a system of honking the horns of cars: when the vehicles approach, the American convoy approaches, there's one honk on the horn. When the last vehicle goes by the same spot, there's two honks on the horn, and the purpose is to work out the time element between the first hooter and the second because by that, they know how big is the convoy and whether it's small enough to be attacked. That comes from a sergeant in the military police in Fallujah taking part in this actual operation which I described to you just now, which you read out from my report.
One of the problems with the Americans I think is that the top people in the Pentagon always knew that this wasn't going to be 'human rights abuses ended,' flowers and music for the soldiers, and everyone lives happily every after and loves America. You may remember when Rumsfeld first came to Baghdad, something your president didn't dare to do in the end, he wanted to fly over in an airplane.
He made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather sinister in the big hanger at Baghdad airport. He said we still have to fight the remnants of Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq, and I thought, hang on a minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to realize I think what he was doing, he was laying the future narrative of the opposition to the Americans. I.E when the Americans get attacked, it could be first of all laid down to remnants of Saddam, as in remnants of the Taliban who seem to be moving around in Afghanistan now in battalion strength, but never mind. It could be blamed on Al Qaeda, so America was back fighting its old enemies again. This was familiar territory.
If you were to suggest that it was a resistance movement, harakat muqawama, resistance party in Arabic, that would suggest the people didn't believe they had been liberated, and of course, all good-natured peace loving people have to believe they were liberated by the Americans, not occupied by them. What you're finding for example is a whole series of blunders by Paul Bremer, the American head of the so-called coalition forces, at least coalition authority in Baghdad.
First of all, he dissolved the Iraqi Army. Well, I can't imagine an Army that better deserves to be dissolved. But that means that more than quarter of a million armed men overnight are deprived of their welfare and money. Now if you have quarter of a million armed Iraqis who suddenly don't get paid any more, and they all know each other, what are they going to do? They are going to form some kind of force which is secret, which is covered; then they will be called terrorists, but I guess they know that, and then of course they will be saying to people, why don't you come and join us.
It was very interesting that in Fallujah, the young men came out to see me from a shop just after the American searches there had ended and said some people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked me to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. I met a Shiite Muslim family in Baghdad who moved into the former home of a Saddam intelligence officer. This family had been visited three nights previously by armed men who said, you better move out of this house. It doesn't belong to you unless you want to join us. The guy in Fallujah said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him to join the resistance had weapons, showed their mukhabarat intelligence identity card and said, we're still being paid and we are proud to hold our I.D. cards for the Ba'ath Party. So, now you have to realize that Fallujah and other towns like it are very unlike Tikrit, are very much pro-Saddam. Fallujah is the site of a great munitions factory, it gave people massive employment. They all loved Saddam in the way Arabs are encouraged to love dictators or go prison to otherwise. But nonetheless, there is an embryo of a serious resistance movement now.
On top of this, you can see the measure of what I think is basically desperation. I've been writing about this in The Independent this morning in London, well, last night for this morning's paper, and Paul Bremer now asked the legal side of the coalition provisional authority to set up the machinery of Iraqi press censorship. In other words, Iraqi newspapers are going to be censored. Controlled I think is the official word they use, but that means censorship.
That is the kind of language that Saddam used. Iraqis are used to a censored press; after all, they lived with it for more than 20 years under Saddam Hussein.
Now when you question the Americans about it, first of all they deny it. Then the British half accept it; then other people involved in the coalition say well it's probably true, yes, it is true.
But the problem is the wild stories appearing in the Iraqi press. Now, of course there's no tradition of western style journalism in Iraq. There are those that say it's a good idea, no tradition for example of letting the other side have a say, checking the story out, going back on the ground and asking the other side for their version of events. It doesn't exist. It's a little bit, but not much. What you get after saying that Americans are going with Iraqi prostitutes, American troops are chasing Iraqi women, that Muslim women are being invited to marry Christian foreigners, that this is worse than it was under Saddam. I'm actually quoting from one particular newspaper called The Witness, which is a Shiite Muslim paper, basically that had its first issue the other day. Other newspapers carry reports of American beatings; and the opening of mass graves. They're not totally one sided against the Americans.
But you can see how the occupation forces, let's call them by their real name, are troubled by this kind of publication because it seems to them to provoke or incite animosity towards the liberators of Iraq, which it is not meant to do. But of course the problem is that the Imams in the mosques are saying the same thing about the Americans. Now, the last quote I read from American official said that it may be necessary to control what the Imams were saying in the mosques; well, this is preposterous. I sat on Rashid Street in Baghdad a few days ago and listened to the loud speaker carrying the sermon of the imam from within the mosque.
I think he was saying the Americans must leave immediately, now. Well, under the new rule presumably he's inciting the people to violence. What are we going to do? Arrest all the Imams in the mosques, arrest all the journalists who won't obey, close down the newspapers? I mean what Iraqi journalists need are courses in journalism from reporters who work in real democracies.
You can come along and say, look, by all means criticize the Americans and put the boot in if you want to, but make sure you get it right. And if you also do that you have to look at your own society and what is wrong in it and how Saddam ever came about. He didn't just come about because America supported Saddam which my goodness they did. But Bremer is not interested in this. What Bremer wants to do is control, control the press, control the Imams, and it doesn't work. A lot of the incidents taking place now, the violent incidents are not being divulged. A colleague of mine went the other day.
GOODMAN: Robert, you were just talking about a lot of the attacks we're hearing about – what seems like a good number, a lot of the attacks – on U.S. forces are not being reported.
FISK: I have a colleague, for example, who went down to Fallujah before the incident I was describing to you earlier, after two gunmen, one American had been killed in the fire fight, he reported, I spoke to both sides. On his way back he was traveling past the town of Abu Garab a rather sinister place where the huge prison is where Saddam executed so many prisoners, including an Observer journalist back in the late 1980's.
As we were, as the colleague was passing by the town, he saw a young man come up and throw a hand grenade at American troops in the Humvee.
The grenade missed them and exploded in the canal and wounded six Iraqi children, a very clear account of what happened. I rang the coalition forces, the telephone didn't answer as it very often doesn't do. And no report ever emerged except in my paper that this incident had occurred.
Now, over and over again we keep seeing things, seeing small incidents occur, soldiers threatening people outside petrol lines because people are trying to jump the line and steal. And it just doesn't make it back into the coalition record of what's actually happening in Iraq. The danger here is not so much that we're not being told about it because we can see and find out for ourselves. The danger is that the United States leadership in Baghdad, and of course, especially back in the White House and Pentagon is also not being told about it. Or if it is, information is only going to certain people who can deal with that information.
It's very easy to say, well Iraq's been a great success we've got rid of a dictatorship, the weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist have now been destroyed or whatever interpretation you want to put on that. Human rights abuses have ended, certainly the Saddam kind. But if you try and if this information goes up the ladder every bit of it to people like Bremer, I'm not sure it all is – I think it should be – then you can see how the coalition doesn't represent the reality.
One of the big problems at the moment is the Americans and, to some extent the British, particularly the Americans in Baghdad. They're all ensconced in this chic gleaming marble palace, largest, most expensive palace. There they sit with their laptops trying to work out with Washington how they're going to bring about this new democracy in Iraq. They rely upon for the most part former Iraqi exiles who never endured Saddam Hussein, who are hovering around making sure that they get the biggest part of the pie if possible. When they leave the palace, when they go into the streets of Baghdad, the dangerous streets of Baghdad, they leave in these armored black Mercedes with gunmen in the front and back, soldiers, plain clothes guys with weapons and sunglasses.
One Iraqi said to me the other day, who did you think was the last person we saw driving through town like [this]? I said, Saddam Hussein? They all burst out laughing, of course, they said, exactly the same.
We are used to this just like they're used to press censorship. I think it's difficult – you need to be in Baghdad to understand the degree to which there's been this slippage of ambition and slippage in the ideological war. I was in small hotel called the Al Hama the other day – it has a swimming pool, 24-hour generators. Just going down to have a meal in the evening, I came across two westerners, one with a pump action shotgun, the other with a submachine gun passing me in the hallway.
I said, 'Who are you?'
He said, 'Well, who are you?'
'I'm a guest in the hotel. You have guns. Who are you?'
He said, 'We work for D.O.D'.
'Department of Defense, right?' (But he was obviously English – he had a British accent.) 'Hang on a second you're not American.'
'No, we're a British company that is hired to look after D.O.D. employees in Baghdad. That's why we're armed.'
I said, 'Who gives you permission to have weapons?'
He said, 'The coalition forces, we're here protecting them.'
Now, how often have Iraqis seen armed plain clothes men moving in and out of hotels, they have for more than 20 years, now seeing them again. Well these guys are not going to string them up by their fingernails and electrocute them in torture cells. But again, the image, the picture is the same. The armored escort, limousines in the street, soldiers kicking down the doors searching for, 'terrorists.' The press censorship plans. Plain clothes armed men going into a hotel asking who you are immediately by asking them who they are, same system as before. It has this kind of ghastly ghostly veneer of the old regime about it The Americans are not Saddam, they're not murdering people - they're not lining up people at mass graves, of course they're not. But if you see through the eyes of the Iraqis, it doesn't look quite that simple.
GOODMAN: We are talking to Robert Fisk, just came out of Iraq but you've also written about the so-called road map to peace. I just wanted to get your response to what happened yesterday in Gaza, with the Israeli helicopter gun ships attempting to assassinate the political leader for Hamas, Abdel Azziz Rantizzi. And also Bush strongly criticizing the attempted assassination on the part of the Israel.
FISK: First of all he didn't strongly criticize them, he mildly, rather pathetically and rather cowardly criticized the Israelis. This was an attack which was meant to kill the political head of Hamas. And in the ghastly role which the Palestinians and Israelis play in their bloody and useless conflict, I can understand why the attack was made in that context.
But that attack did not kill Rantizzi, it killed a little child of five and a young woman. Now your president said that that was 'troubling'. That isn't troubling that's a shameful act, that's a despicable thing to do. But there was no strong condemnation from Mr. Bush, he just said it was troubling. If a Palestinian had attacked Israeli forces or Israeli political leader involved in encouraging violence, had killed a little Israeli girl, and a young innocent Israeli woman Mr. Bush would not have called it troubling. He would have said it was a shameful, terrorist act, which it would have been How can it work when the most powerful president of the most powerful state in the world, United States of America, can be so gutless and cowardly in condemning the killing of two innocent people.
It is not troubling. It is an outrage that those two innocent people died. Just as it would be if the Palestinians had done it. Just as it is when the Palestinians do do it. [For Bush] It is not an outrage. Not a tragedy. Not shameful. It is merely troubling. Like a flood is troubling or a heavy rainfall that kills people or a storm is troubling. In that context how can this new peace possibly work.
It's called a road map, who invented the phrase road map? I suppose the poor old State Department and all the journalists dutifully used the word road map.
They can't use peace process because that's associated with Oslo and that failed. You remember the cliche for the peace process, always had to be put back on track. I suppose peace process was a railway line or a railway train so it presumably always has to be put back on the main road or back on the highway that is the cliche.
What has Sharon done? he's closed down a few empty caravans on hilltops.
At large and continuing to expand Jewish settlements, the Jews and Jews only in occupied Arab land. What have the Palestinians done? Mahmoud Abbas says I'm going to finish terrorism, there's going to be no more violence by the Palestinians and, bang, there immediately is. We have the three main violent groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa immediately carrying out the suicide bombing.
And then praised by Rantizzi, I remember thinking, he's praising them, that's against the road map so Israelis have got a green light to knock him off and they tried and failed. I remember interviewing Rantizzi along similar lines about six months ago in Gaza, as I was talking to him I saw an Israeli helicopter emerge in the window and his body guard looked around very nervously and I thought, oh, no, please go away and so I finished the interview.
But I always thought he was a target, he always had two gunmen with him all the time. That's not the point. Rantizzi is a very tough Hamas man, a very ruthless man. He was one of the Palestinians who was illegally deported from Israeli prisons into Lebanon in 1992. I actually met him there in the southern Lebanon in the hills, when he was living rough, months after months in a tent.
This is a very rough character, very tough guy – grew up the hard way in guerrilla warfare as well as politics.
But when you're going to have a situation where you have an Israeli prime minister who doesn't want to end the settlements, who is indeed the creator of the settlements, and a Palestinian prime minister who can't stop the intifada and a U.S. president who is so gutless he can only call a killing of a woman and a child troubling, what chance is there for a road map or peace process or any other kind of agreement in the Middle East?
GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, who is just come out of Iraq and who has reported extensively on the Middle East for more than 30 years.
I wanted to end, back in Iraq. CNN is reporting today that Ahmed Chalabi who has addressed the Council on Foreign Relations is saying that Saddam Hussein is moving in an arc around the Tigris River starting northeast of Baghdad. He said finding Saddam would just be a matter of knowing whom to talk to. He says based on information from credible sources, he believes the former Iraqi president wants revenge and has obtained two suicide bombing vests for attacks on U.S. forces. Chalabi says Saddam is paying bounty for every U.S. soldier killed. Your response?
FISK: I long ago gave up putting any credit in anything that Ahmed Chalabi says. The real issue is not where is Saddam Hussein, he could be sitting in Minsk or Belarus or he could be sitting in Tikrit or in the Iraqi countryside somewhere. Obviously there were plans to hide him in advance. You know this goes back to another issue of the degree of real effort to find him. Just look back, the Americans wanted to arrest Valadich and put him in the Hague. We were going to capture Osama bin laden, he's still on the loose. We were going to capture Mullah Omar, he's only got one eye, not difficult to identify. But he's still on the loose. We can't get vice president Ramadan in Iraq or Uday Hussein, the sons of Saddam. We can't get Saddam himself. Can't get Naji Sabri the foreign minister.
I was sitting in a restaurant in Baghdad a week and a half ago, at the next table next to me was Saddam's personal translator. I sort of did a double take, I said, hi, how are you? I knew the guy. I'd known him for years and years. I said, are you okay? Fine, fine no problem, he was having a beer with friends. And he walked out. This is the same restaurant that later on I saw Paul Bremer walk into with several special forces men to protect him and his guests for dinner. I have to ask myself sometimes what's going on. Ahmed Chalabi says that Saddam is moving in an arc, he maybe moving in a circle or square for all I know but it's clear he's still alive. That's the point.
GOODMAN: Well, Robert Fisk, thank you very much for being with us. Robert Fisk of the Independent of London just out of Iraq.
Democracy Now! is a national listener-sponsored radio and television program.
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