| To: LTK007 who wrote (258) | 5/20/2009 5:42:08 PM | | From: Crimson Ghost | | | | Pro-Israel Mouthpiece Says Freedom of Speech Dangerous
By: Michael Collins Piper on: 20.05.2009 [15:47 ] (71 reads)
AFP Issue # 21, May 25, 2009
‘JINSA’ article says outlets who oppose future wars should be silenced—killed if necessary—by military strike
(7072 bytes) [c]
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL voices of the pro-Israel lobby has published a shocking essay suggesting that, in the future, there should be “military attacks” on journalists and media outlets that oppose American military ventures on behalf of Israel.
In the spring 2008 issue of its Journal of International Security Affairs, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a particularly vocal force of the Jewish lobby, published a series of articles devoted to the subject: “The U.S. Military Faces the Future.”
One article, entitled “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars,” written by Ralph Peters (described as “a retired U.S. Army officer”) states flatly that “Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.”
The JINSA essay says “Freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.”
JINSA’s suggestion that the media in America opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq—a key demand by Israel and JINSA—flies in contrast to the truth. In fact, the major media banged the drum for war. AMERICAN FREE PRESS and a few independent newspapers strongly opposed this needless war.
So what JINSA is saying is that those independent media voices—such as AMERICAN FREE PRESS—that opposed the drive for war should ultimately face military violence if they oppose the Jewish lobby’s future military aims.
One analyst, University of Pennsylvania Prof. Edward Herman, has described JINSA as “organized and run by individuals closely tied to the Israeli lobby and can be regarded as a virtual agency of the Israeli government.”
JINSA was founded in the mid-1980s by Stephen Bryen. He, along with several of his close associates—including future George W. Bush administration officials Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—was investigated by the FBI on charges of spying for Israel at various times. JINSA has worked to forge alliances between the Jewish lobby and former American military officials, treating them to international junkets and a variety of business and other financial bonanzas provided by Israeli sympathizers in America and around the globe in return for support for their blatantly pro-Israel policies.
Peters—whose pro-Israel articles are published regularly in The New York Post, owned by pro-Zionist billionaire Rupert Murdoch—is just one of those whose views on the military appeared in JINSA’s journal.
A recurring theme in the essays emphasized the need for the United States to coordinate its international ventures with its “allies,” that is, Israel. The essays underscore the idea that it is vital for the United States to engage in covert action to bring down regimes that stand in the way of Israel’s agenda. Written in “code,” so to speak, the essays carry the theme that Israel’s interests are those of America and vice-versa and that those who oppose Israel are “anti-American,” and that includes American military officers.
An essay by one Patrick Poole alleges that the distinguished Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College is in the state of “strategic collapse” because it published a study saying that Hamas, the Palestinian faction, has been misunderstood due to misreporting by what the War College report says are “Israeli and Western sources that villainize the group.”
JINSA’s propagandist claims the War College “is only representative of a larger rot in the U.S. military’s halls of higher learning . . . that apparently runs through all levels of our military senior service schools. . . .”
The author of these attacks on American military leaders who refuse to pander to the Jewish lobby, Patrick Poole, is a ubiquitous Internet presence, writing pro-Israel screeds for Frontpagemag.com, the website of ex-communist-turned-neoconservative pro-Israel publicist David Horowitz.
The record shows that increasing numbers of American military figures, and a host of ex-diplomats, intelligence officers and others are publicly challenging the Jewish lobby. They include Adm. “Fox” Fallon, former ambassadors Charles Freeman and Richard Peck, ex-CIA officers Michael Scheuer and Ray McGovern as well as top academics such as Dr. John Mearsheimer and Dr. Stephen Walt. And former President Jimmy Carter as well.
It is thus no surprise that influential Jewish voices, such as Forward, published in Manhattan, complain there is opposition to Israel within higher circles, a point that surprises many Americans who believe Israel has a firm stranglehold on the American intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement apparatus.
On May 11, 2005, Forward reported that Barry Jacobs of the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee said there were high-ranking officials in the U.S. intelligence community who were hostile to Israel and unreceptive to pro-Israel lobbyists.
Citing the then-ongoing FBI investigation of espionage by officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Forward noted that this top Jewish leader believed, in Forward’s summary, that “the notion that American Jews and Pentagon neo-conservatives conspired to push the United States into war against Iraq, and possibly also against Iran, is pervasive in Washington’s intelligence community.”
Although the Justice Department recently dropped its case against the AIPAC duo, the FBI investigators remained confident that their criminal case against the intriguers would have resulted in a conviction.
It has been a long-standing concern of JINSA that many in the military are tired of fighting wars for Israel. In the fall of 2006, JINSA’s journal suggested that a full-fledged witch-hunt was in order, designed to root out critics of Israel at high levels, implying that Israel’s critics were allied to “jihadist” fundamentalist Muslims. JINSA asked:
How deeply have jihadist elements infiltrated the U.S. government and federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and various military commands, either through sympathizers or via actual operatives?
Since there are few Muslims in the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense etc, the suggestion that “jihadist” elements have “infiltrated” our government might seem silly to the average American. But JINSA—determined to enforce Israel’s demands on American foreign policy and military might—is concerned that there are growing numbers in the military, the FBI and the CIA who are opposed to wars for Israel—and this, in JINSA’s view, constitutes collaboration with the dreaded “jihadists.”
atheonews.blogspot.com |
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| To: LTK007 who wrote (261) | 5/21/2009 7:18:20 AM | | From: Crimson Ghost | | | | Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney
by Paul Craig Roberts, May 21, 2009
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America has lost her soul, and so has her president.
A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.
The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.
The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.
Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.
Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.
The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a "reform" for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture. How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a U.S. government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize U.S. citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.
Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that "sovereign immunity" protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.
Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fein puts it: "In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability."
Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime’s crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.
Obama is fighting the release of the latest batch of horrific torture photos that have come to light. Obama claims that release of the photos would anger insurgents and cause them to kill our troops. That, of course, is nonsense. Those resisting occupation of their land by U.S. troops and NATO mercenaries are already dedicated to killing our troops, and they know that Americans torture whomever they capture. Obama is fighting the release of the photos because he knows the barbaric image that the photos present of the U.S. military will undermine the public’s support for the wars that enrich the military/security complex, appease the Israel Lobby, and repay the campaign contributions that elect the U.S. government.
As for bringing the troops home from Iraq, this promise, too, has been reformed. To the consternation of his supporters, Obama is leaving 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The others are being sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan, where on Obama’s watch war has broken out big time with already one million refugees from the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military/security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.
Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language. He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric. The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words that now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony. |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (262) | 5/21/2009 12:23:24 PM | | From: Broken_Clock | | | | Obama OKs nuclear deal with United Arab Emirates
May. 21, 2009
Associated Press , THE JERUSALEM POST
President Barack Obama agreed Wednesday to share US nuclear power technology with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, giving his consent to a deal signed in the final days of George W. Bush's administration.
The pact now goes to Congress, which will have 90 days to amend or reject it.
The agreement creates a legal framework for the US to transfer sensitive nuclear items to the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven Middle Eastern states that wants nuclear power to satisfy growing demand for electricity.
Although flush with oil, the emirates imports 60 percent of the natural gas they use to generate electricity. The United Arab Emerates wants to break its dependence on outside sources for its energy needs and settled on nuclear power as the best option |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (262) | 5/21/2009 1:34:42 PM | | From: LTK007 | | | | i will be putting be this quote at the TOP of My Thread Header, and will write, the Verdict is In, Obama guilty as charged.
"Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney
America has lost her soul, and so has her president." Paul Craig Roberts, May 21, 2009 |
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| From: Crimson Ghost | 5/23/2009 5:29:13 PM | | | | | | Another Bogus 'Terror' Plot
posted by ROBERT DREYFUSS on 05/22/2009 @ 07:56am
By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.
I've seen this movie before.
In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself. Noted the Los Angeles Times:
Prosecutors called it the latest in a string of homegrown terrorism plots hatched after Sept. 11.
"It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," Assistant U.S. Atty. Eric Snyder said in court Thursday. He described all four suspects as "eager to bring death to Jews."
Actually, it's hard to imagine a stupider, less competent, and less important plot. The four losers were ensnared by a creepy FBI agent who hung around the mosque in upstate New York until he found what he was looking for. Here's the New York Times account:
Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, the imam at the mosque where the authorities say the confidential informant first encountered the men, said none of the men were active in the mosque. ...
Mr. Cromitie was there last June, and he met a stranger.
He had no way of knowing that the stranger's path to the mosque began in 2002, when he was arrested on federal charges of identity theft. He was sentenced to five years' probation, and became a confidential informant for the F.B.I. He began showing up at the mosque in Newburgh around 2007, Mr. Muhammad said.
The stranger's behavior aroused the imam's suspicions. He invited other worshipers to meals, and spoke of violence and jihad, so the imam said he steered clear of him.
"There was just something fishy about him," Mr. Muhammad said. Members "believed he was a government agent."
Mr. Muhammad said members of his congregation told him the man he believed was the informant offered at least one of them a substantial amount of money to join his "team."
So a creepy thug buttonholes people at a mosque, foaming at the mouth about violence and jihad? This is law enforcement? Just imagine if someone did this at a local church, or some synagogue. And the imam says the people "believed he was a government agent."
Preying on these losers, none of whom were apparently actual Muslims, the "confidential informant" orchestrated the acquisition of a disabled Stinger missile to shoot down military planes and cooked up a wild scheme about attacking a Jewish center in the Bronx.
It gets even more pathetic:
The only one of the four suspects who appears to have aroused any suspicion was Payen, a Haitian native who attended the Newburgh mosque. Assistant imam Hamid Rashada said his dishevelment and odd behavior disturbed some members, said the assistant imam, Hamid Rashada.
When Payen appeared in court, defense attorney Marilyn Reader described him as "intellectually challenged" and on medication for schizophrenia. The Associated Press said that when he was asked if he understood the proceedings, Payen replied: "Sort of."
Despite the pompous statements from Mayor Bloomberg of New York and other politicians, including Representative Peter King, the whole story is bogus. The four losers may have been inclined to violence, and they may have harbored a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But it seems that the informant whipped up their violent tendencies and their hatred of Jews, cooked up the plot, incited them, arranged their purchase of weapons, and then had them busted. To ensure that it made headlines, the creepy informant claimed to be representing a Pakistani extremist group, Jaish-e Muhammad, a bona fide terrorist organization. He wasn't, of course.
It is disgusting and outrageous that the FBI is sending provocateurs into mosques.
The headlines reinforce the very fear that Dick Cheney is trying to stir up. The story strengthens the narrative that the "homeland" is under attack. It's not. As I've written repeatedly, since 9/11 not a single American has even been punched in the nose by an angry Muslim, as far as I can tell. Plot after plot -- the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge! bombing the New York Subways! taking down the Sears Tower! bombing the Prudential building in Newark! -- proved to be utter nonsense. |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (265) | 5/26/2009 1:42:56 AM | | From: Broken_Clock | | | | Obama’s Democratic Authoritarianism
He's bad – really bad – on civil liberties
by Justin Raimondo, May 25, 2009
He’s not closing Guantanamo, he’s continuing the "preventive detention" policy of the Bush administration under a new rubric ("prolonged detention"), he’s on board with military commissions ("reformed," of course) and the denial of habeas corpus – and last, but certainly not least, his supporters in Congress have launched a campaign to give him and his cabinet officials the power to close down the Internet in the name of "national security."
I won’t go on at length about the brazen hypocrisy and general slipperiness exhibited by Obama and his fans when it comes to key civil liberties issues such as these. Jack Goldsmith, former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Rachel Maddow, progressive commentator on MSNBC, have done a superlative job of that. Goldsmith, of course, notes the president’s turn on a dime with obvious approval, arguing that the Bush approach was haphazard and lacked any substantive legal basis, while Maddow is horrified that, instead of abolishing these Bush-era assaults on the Constitution, her former hero is intent on formalizing and "legalizing" them. Go here to see her deliver the kind of stinging rebuke to Obama and his administration that Rush Limbaugh and his fellow radio ranters could never hope to match.
Maddow strikes a powerful blow against Cheneyism-without-Cheney by pointing out that the president’s preventive detention policy – which claims for the U.S. government the right to hold anyone, including American citizens, indefinitely, without trial, without formal charges, and without telling anyone – is worse than anything Bush ever attempted in one important sense. The Bushian effort was secretive and strictly ad hoc; the Obamaites, however, are quite openly constructing what Obama calls "a new legal regime" to preside over this wholesale assault on the Constitution.
At least the Bush crowd had enough remnants of a moral sense to sneak around and try [.pdf] to hide their crimes against liberty and the rule of law. Although they tried to rationalize their actions with after-the-fact legal arguments, the effort seems to me rather halfhearted: they weren’t really all that concerned with legalizing their power grab. They just went ahead and did it, and damn the torpedoes.
The Obamaites, on the other hand, have a different style – but the substance is essentially the same, with the addition of a few minor tweaks and rhetorical flourishes. They want to bureaucratize and institutionalize the horrors of the past eight years and make what used to be unthinkable routine.
This Memorial Day should be devoted to reviving and refreshing the failing memory of the American people, or, at least, those millions who voted for Obama in hopes of a better day. Remember the campaign promises, the soaring rhetoric about "the rule of law" and our "constitutional liberties"? Remember this: "Gitmo. That’s an easy one: close it"? Remember the promise of "change"?
As for this last, well, yes, the Obama administration is indeed carrying out a sea change in the realm of civil liberties, there’s no doubt about that. It’s a continuation of the transformation effected by Team Bush and made possible by the post-9/11 hysteria, in which the leaders of both parties were caught up – and which they continue to stoke for political gain.
Witness Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s assertion that the jailing of terrorist suspects in American prisons somehow represents a threat to this country’s security. Obama himself is not above this: in rationalizing his escalation of the Afghan war and occupation, he continually harks back to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as if they justified the decades-long occupation of Afghanistan and surrounding areas envisioned by his favored policy wonks.
The baddies, Obama avers, are "plotting to attack America" from their "safe havens" in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Which raises the question: So the f**k what? How much of a "safe haven" do they need to "plot," anyway? Answer: A space no bigger than an apartment in Hamburg, Germany, or a small town on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where the 9/11 attacks were plotted and carried out.
The 9/11 attacks provided the neoconservatives with the opportunity they had been waiting for: as the Twin Towers came down, so did the traditional safeguards against tyranny that had been erected over the past 200 years by the Founders and their successors. The neocons, in effect, pulled off a coup d’état: as Bob Woodward has pointed out, their method was to set up "a separate government," with Cheney at its head, that did an end-run around the institutional safeguards built into the system. Bush usurped the constitutional lines of authority that acted as a rein on the unrestrained use of government power. Obama’s "reforms" will make that usurpation permanent.
Change? You bet.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I just have one thing to say about the recent arrest of four losers who were plotting to bomb New York-area synagogues: while the FBI was busy carefully setting up these would-be terrorists-without-a-clue, luring them into an improbable scheme involving Stinger missiles and in effect setting up a government-subsidized terrorist cell, how many al-Qaeda sleeper cells were going about their business undetected?
Now, don’t you feel safer already? |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (267) | 5/28/2009 5:32:18 PM | | From: Broken_Clock | | | | Sotomayor Ruled in "D-Bag Case"
Ruled teen's blog post created a created "foreseeable risk of substantial disruption"
By YVONNE NAVA AND LEANNE GENDREAU
Updated 12:16 PM EDT, Thu, May 28, 2009
President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill a Supreme Court vacancy has yet another tie to Connecticut. She sided against a student in the infamous “douche bag” case, and that has upset some free-speech advocates.
In August 2007, Judge Sonia Sotomayor sat on a panel that ruled against an appeal in Doninger v. Niehoff.
Avery Doninger was disqualified from running for school government at Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington after she posted something on her blog, referring to the superintendent and other officials as "douche bags" because they canceled a battle of the bands she had helped to organize.
The case went to court and in March 2008, Sotomayor was on a panel that heard Doninger’s mother’s appeal alleging her daughter’s free speech and other rights were violated. Her mother wanted to prevent the school from barring her daughter from running.
Sotomayor joined two other judges from the 2nd Circuit in ruling that the student’s off-campus blog remarks created a “foreseeable risk of substantial disruption” at the student’s high school and that the teenager was not entitled to a preliminary injunction reversing a disciplinary action against her, Education Week reports.
In their opinion, the judges said they were “sympathetic" to her disappointment at being disqualified from running for Senior Class Secretary and acknowledged her belief that in this case, “the punishment did not fit the crime.”
However, the judges decided they were not called upon to determine if school officials acted wisely.
“As the Supreme Court cautioned years ago, “[t]he system of public education that has evolved in this Nation relies necessarily upon the discretion and judgment of school administrators and school board members,” and we are not authorized to intervene absent “violations of specific constitutional guarantees.”
The ruling in this case has come under heavy criticism from some civil libertarians. Some say this case presents a solid rationale for rejecting Judge Sonia Sotomayor of New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals to fill the seat of retiring Justice David Souter.
“The continual expansion of the authority of school officials over student speech teaches a foul lesson to these future citizens,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, told the New Britain Herald. “I would prefer some obnoxious speech [rather] than teaching students that they must please government officials if they want special benefits or opportunities.”
Copyright Associated Press / NBC Connecticut |
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