Enlightenment:
A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter
cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk
when they're off their heads.
Wisdom:
So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'...they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'....
.: Alexi Sayle :.
If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.
This planet is fast turning in to a really nasty fucked-up version of itself... Are you crazy enough to try and stop it?
As the neocon foreign policy fiasco plays out like a slow motion viewing of the car wreck scene from The Blues Brothers, the neocons are backing into their burrows like frightened, angry wolverines. Like any other mustelid, when cornered they'll attempt to make their opponent stink, in the case of neocons by employing the smear. And their favorite smear of all is to call opponents "anti-Semitic." David Frum, of course, is the master slanderer, and he has gone as far as to imply that the mere use of "neoconsesrvative" is anti-Semitic. Well, Mr. Frum, it's not our fault that many neoconservatives are Jewish. But it's just as true that many neoconservatives are not Jewish, and that far more Jews are not neoconservatives than are.
Frum's whole idea is absurd. Most Nazis were German. So, if I were to mention that I dislike Nazism, am I being anti-German? Just about every member of the IRA is Irish. Is coming out against their views and tactics "anti-bog-trotter"?
In other words, Mr. Frum, stop being such an ass.
Another prominent neo-conservative hurler of the anti-Semitic spitball is Andrew Sullivan. (Let's be clear: I find Sullivan, whom I'd imagine is Irish, every bit as distasteful as Frum, whom I was not even aware was Jewish until he began announcing it regularly.)
A brief look at Sullivan's exercise in navel-gazing... I mean his blog... reveals that about every fourth entry accuses someone or other of anti-Semitism. The first instance I note is especially absurd: "The latest example: a story in the left-wing Scottish paper, the Sunday Herald, implicating Israelis in the 9/11 attacks.
Interesting isn't it? How the more Israel and the USA bleat on and on about terrorism (while happily doing it themselves) and the more they do the more the SANE part of the world sees them as dangerous and a threat to the rest of us... So they bleat on about it some more and accuse us all of being terrorists and dirty anti-semites.
For the first time, moral critique and self defence have coincided
Ever since its foundation, Israel has been troubled by the thought that it might have as much to fear from supposed friends as from avowed enemies. That is one reason why Israelis are often anxious monitors of public opinion in North America and Europe. Their anxiety, and perhaps their anger, showed a peak last week when the European Union's polling organisation released figures showing that Europeans reckoned Israel was a greater threat to world peace than any other country. The results reinforced the Israeli sense that the distance between them and the Europeans continues to grow and that the United States is their only reliable partner.
Most of the protests about the poll were disingenuous, since they were couched in terms suggesting that a sampling of public opinion somehow represents an act of European policy. But the poll itself was certainly suspect. The question 7,500 Europeans answered was too general. In particular, it left open whether the countries on the list were threats through grave fault of their own or, if they were, whether they shared that fault with another state or society with which they were in conflict. An EU spokesman this week confirmed that the poll unit had no plans to ask that particular question again in the near future.
Flawed as the question was, and misdirected as some of the protests were, the poll results, nevertheless, do suggest - along with other evidence - that there has been a critical change in European perceptions of Israel. Europeans have, of course, always seen the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a moral issue. They have also been conscious of it as springing, in part, from European acts in the past and, therefore, as being in some way a European responsibility. And they long ago grasped that it is a problem that affects European interests, whether those be good relations with Muslim governments, the loyalty of Europe's own Muslim minorities, or the availability of oil at acceptable prices.
What is new since September 11 is that Europeans sense a threat to their existence, and not just to their interests. In the past, there were times at which it seemed possible that a nuclear exchange between the two cold-war blocs might be ignited by Middle Eastern events. But apart from those one or two bad moments when the cold war could have become hot, Europeans felt that, although their lives could be damaged as a result of what happened between Israelis and Palestinians, they could not be devastated.
Now, because there could be terrorist acts on a new scale, they sense that devastation is indeed a possibility. Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli minister and peace negotiator, sees that "Europeans fear a backlash from what happens between us and the Palestinians", though he cautions against a view of the crisis that ignores its roots and the responsibility of the other party.
The 'Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange' program threatens privacy
On October 30, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed simultaneous requests in Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania for information about those states' participation in the "Matrix" program. (The program's formal name is the "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange.") In addition to those five states, four others -- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Utah --are participating.
The ACLU's requests seek to find out what information sources the Matrix uses, who has access to the database and how it's being used. They were made pursuant to each states' Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In October, the ACLU had sought similar information under the federal version of FOIA and in Florida, where the program originated.
What is the Matrix, and why is the ACLU so concerned? Those are the two questions I will address in this column. I will also argue that readers should be concerned, too.
The Total Information Awareness program Last September, Congress voted to close down the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. As I discussed in an earlier column, TIA would have allowed the federal government to search and combine the vast amount of data that exists in government and commercial (for profit) databases to create individual profiles of each of us.
TIA was premised on a belief that compiling as much information as possible about as many people as possible in a large-scale database would help thwart terrorist activity. The idea -- called "data mining" -- was that government officials would search the database for information, or patterns of information, that might identify terrorists.
Congress should be applauded for shutting TIA down. First, Congress banned the use of TIA against American citizens, in light of privacy concerns, as well as concerns about the potential for erroneous identifications of innocent persons as terrorists. The program was then renamed Terrorist Information Awareness. Then, Congress shut down that program as well.
Unfortunately, however, the same data mining ideas that inspired TIA have appeared again-- this time, in the guise of the Matrix.
What the Matrix is, and how it works The Matrix is run by a private corporation -- Seisint Inc. of Boca Raton, Florida, -- on behalf of a cooperative group of state governments. However, it is, at least in part, federally funded -- and may, in future, allow federal access.
The program has received $4 million from the Justice Department. It has been promised a further $8 million from the Department of Homeland Security. In addition, news reports indicate that Matrix officials have said they are considering giving access to the CIA.
What does the Matrix do? According to Congressional testimony and news reports, it appears to do just what TIA would have done, if enacted: Tie together government and commercial databases to allow federal and state law enforcement entities to conduct detailed searches on particular individuals' dossiers.
The Matrix Web site states that the data compiled will include criminal histories, driver's license data, vehicle registration records, and significant amounts of public data record entries. Company officials have refused to disclose more specific details about the nature and sources of the data. According to news reports, the data may also include credit histories, driver's license photographs, marriage and divorce records, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and the names and addresses of family members, neighbors and business associates.
Moreover, there is no guarantee that the type of data that the Matrix compiles will not be further expanded. And information in today's commercial databases encompasses purchasing habits, magazine subscriptions, income and job histories, and much more. Soon, we may be profiled based on what we read and buy, and how we live.
In Congressional testimony, a Florida lawmaker, Paula B. Dockery, described how the Matrix works: It combines government records with information from "public search businesses" into a "data-warehouse." There, dossiers are reviewed by "specialized software" to identify "anomalies" using "mathematical analysis." If "anomalies" are spotted, they will then be scrutinized by personnel who will search for evidence of terrorism or other crimes.
As with TIA, the idea is plainly that of data mining -- the concept that searches for patterns in this data (including so-called "anomalies") that can identify individuals possibly involved in terrorist or other criminal activity. But as with TIA, this kind of "data mining" may be ineffective, and has severe downsides, including its privacy costs.
"Show trial" of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr in London
by Joe Vialls
When British police arrested Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr on suspicion of the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, they did so in the certain knowledge that absolutely no hard evidence existed incriminating either suspect. The reason for the rapid arrests on 17 August 2002 at first appeared disarmingly simple. Just hours earlier, two small bodies had been found near the perimeter fence at USAF Lakenheath in Cambridgeshire, England, and the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street was terrified of a massive political scandal involving American servicemen transiting through the United Kingdom.
To gain an international perspective on this politically sensitive scenario, try imagining what would happen if two little Australian girls were abducted, brutalized, murdered and then found near the perimeter wire of the American base at Pine Gap in the Australian Northern Territory. Within the hour, sensing possible danger for their political masters over in Washington, Prime Minister John Howard and Attorney General Daryl Williams would probably order the Australian Federal Police to charge some poor retarded sap in Geelong or Girrawheen with the offence. No evidence needed - just enough political deception to shift the public gaze away from the American presence.
This certainly appeared the most likely scenario when Huntley and Carr were first arrested in Cambridgeshire, but over the nine months that followed, it became increasingly obvious that this cover-up was a lot more than a hasty deflection for a perverted American with an unhealthy taste for underage English schoolgirls. Normally in a case like this, the false charges against Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr would have been dropped after about three months, with the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman remaining open for discreet inquiry at a more leisurely pace.
Not this time. Someone somewhere in a position of stratospheric political power wanted Huntley and Carr convicted of murder, jailed for life, and the case closed forever. And whoever this someone was, he demonstrated his very obvious ability to manipulate three British County Police Forces, The Metropolitan Police Service, the British Home Office in London, and the American Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. Even at this early stage you must ask yourself who on earth is capable of wielding this colossal raw political power, and why he or they have chosen to do so in the [apparently] isolated case of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
A few weeks into the investigation, Cambridgeshire family liaison officer Detective Constable Brian Stevens appeared to uncover a new lead, and then the roof fell on his head and his career. At dawn on 12 September 2002, DC Brian Stevens was arrested on suspicion of child pornography offences, allegedly detected by the child pornography monitoring American “Operation Candyman”, run by the FBI with active CIA assistance. His actual arrest was manipulated by officials at The British Home Office in London, using the Metropolitan Police anti-pornography unit known as Operation Ore. Anything Brian Stevens might claim after that date would be tainted with the very same “pedophile” tag he was trying to uncover.
Think about this, people, think about it! One of the lowest ranking officers in one of the smallest British county police forces was deliberately silenced and discredited by the truly awesome combined power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the British Home Office and the Metropolitan police. But the false charges against Stevens would not stick, and were finally dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] on 21 August 2003. However, this was not to be the end of Brian Steven’s persecution. On 12 September 2003 West Midlands police arrested him again, and today Detective Constable Brian Stevens stands accused of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
As always the devil lies in the detail, so in order to understand the level of deception surrounding this sickening pedophile crime and its stratospheric international implications, it is necessary to take a very long trip down memory lane, and follow every step of the fatally flawed investigation. We need to cut through the complex web of government and media lies that led to two innocent young people being incarcerated in the most appalling of conditions, and to the destruction of a diligent British police officer’s career.
Shortly after Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr were arrested, British and American media organizations demonized both so successfully that public attention was diverted away from the American base at Lakenheath where the bodies were actually found, and focused instead on the young couple from Soham who had earlier willingly spoken to television crews about their concerns for the well being of the two missing 10-year-old girls. Both knew the girls reasonably well. Ian Huntley was the caretaker at Soham secondary school, and Maxine Carr was a former teaching auxiliary in Holly and Jessica’s primary school class.
Millions of viewers around the world watched Ian and Maxine being interviewed by the media, and most were impressed by the openness of their statements and their genuine willingness to help if possible. Experts in non-verbal communication also noticed that Ian and Maxine’s involuntary body and eye movements perfectly matched what they were saying verbally to the journalists.
Put another way, both Huntley and Carr appeared to be telling the truth both verbally and non-verbally, an almost impossible feat for even a trained liar to fabricate. It is critical to note here also that both came across on television as perfectly normal, sane individuals, a reality later to be inexplicably challenged by police and psychiatrists in Cambridgeshire.
If Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr had been involved at all with the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, would they have then been stupid enough to run the gauntlet of about 5,,000 American servicemen en-route, and dump the two small bodies in a location clearly visible from Lakenheath Control Tower, taxi track, and main runway?
An American serviceman with detailed knowledge of activities and procedures inside the base might get away with it unseen, but certainly not two civilians from Soham in Cambridgeshire. So the perimeter would be an ideal dumping ground for an American eager to return to “safe” territory at USAF Lakenheath, before either entering their barracks on the base, or catching a shuttle bus to USAF Mildenhall.
In an attempt to demonize Ian Huntley still further, police “leaked” the damning information that he had been arrested for rape a number of years earlier. Well, yes, almost. While still a teenager Huntley had consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was only 15-years-old at the time, an offence in the United Kingdom known as statutory rape. He was never charged with an offence however, and his former girlfriend [now age 21 years] recently confirmed it was a mutual crush [love affair], with enthusiastic sexual consent on both sides.
So for a while at least, police and media managed to deflect attention away from the two massive nearby USAF bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and the political minefield lurking just below the surface if the British public ever find out about the very large numbers of children abused, raped, and sometimes murdered by American servicemen on overseas duty. So let us properly consider the “American Connection”, before returning later in this extended report to the unbelievable ongoing psychological abuse of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr.
Though earlier in the investigation police declared they would be interviewing “700 known sex offenders” of British nationality, there was no mention of interviewing the 5,000+ US servicemen based in close proximity to Soham Village, or determining which other American servicemen has transited through the two bases, and on which flights, since Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman first disappeared on 4 August 2002.
The simple fact that Holly and Jessica’s bodies were found within yards of the USAF Lakenheath perimeter fence, which in turn provides access to the American barracks within, should have had British police knocking on Lakenheath’s front door immediately. Unfortunately, any such action might have accidentally undermined Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal slavish dedication to George W Bush's “War on Terror.”
It was almost an afterthought. On March 1, 2003, the War On Terror had finally served up the alleged paymaster of 9/11 - a shadowy Saudi by the name of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi. Yet his arrest just happened to coincide with the capture of a much bigger fish - the reported 9/11 mastermind himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - thus relegating Mustafa Ahmed to the footnote section of the "official" 9/11 Legend. But there was another, more explosive side to this tale. Only seventeen months before, a former London schoolboy by the name of Omar Saeed Sheikh was first exposed as the 9/11 paymaster, acting under the authority of a Pakistani general who was in Washington D.C. on September 11, meeting with the very two lawmakers who would subsequently preside over the "official" 9/11 congressional inquiry. Omar Saeed, as reported back then by CNN, was acting under the alias of...Mustafa Ahmed. So where is Omar now? Sitting in a Pakistani prison, awaiting his execution for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl - while another man fills the shoes of his pseudonym. What follows is a reconstruction of one of the most extensive disinformation campaigns in history, and the chronicle of a legend that may now shine a devastating spotlight on some of the cliques behind 9/11 - and the FBI Director covering the paper trails.
"The hijackers left no paper trail," proclaimed FBI Director Robert Mueller on April 30, 2002. "In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper...that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot." Yet in the weeks immediately following September 11, Mueller and his FBI had left the public with a very different impression - an impression that conjured the vision of truckloads of paper documents pointing any number of ways to the culpability of Osama Bin Laden for the events of 9/11. For one, there was the infamous handwritten "checklist" found not only in hijacker Mohamed Atta's abandoned luggage, but also in the car rented in hijacker al-Hazmi's name, discovered at Dulles Airport, and which included lofty Arabic prayers alongside last minute reminders to bring "knives, your will, IDs, your passport, all your papers." But more importantly, the treasure trove in al-Hazmi's glove compartment yielded a paper trail that led all the way to London - and to the arrest of a potentially major suspect.
On September 30, 2001, as reported in the Telegraph by David Bamber, British prosecutor Arvinda Sambir announced that authorities had arrested Lotfi Raissi, whose name was found in al-Hazmi's rental. A further search of Raissi's apartment had yielded up a video clip starring Raissi with alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour - all in all, another circumstantial slam-dunk in the snowballing case against al-Qaida. Or was it? For by April of 2002 - when Mueller made his "paper trail" declaration - Raissi would go free for want of evidence.
As we will shortly see, Raissi was being set up to play his part in a prearranged drama, one in which a definitive money trail leading to al-Qaida would be announced just in time for the October 7, 2001 launch into Afghanistan. Yet a brief, almost innocuous, article in the October 9 Times of India would lay havoc to this plan, necessitating a massive cover-up and a search for an alternative smoking gun that would unveil itself before a skeptical world audience on December 13, 2001 as the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession.
An essential player in that original plan was Omar Saeed Sheikh (hereafter Omar Saeed), a 27 year-old London-born man of Pakistani parentage who had attended the London School of Economics before answering the call of militancy, heading off to Bosnia, and from there, to Pakistan, where he would make his "bones" in a 1994 kidnapping, serving time in an Indian prison until being bartered out for hostages in a 1999 airplane hijacking. Packing a lifetime into the next two years, Omar Saeed caught the eye of the so-called militant faction of Pakistan's ISI (the Pakistani CIA), rounding out his curricular vitae by tinkering around with the al-Qaida computer network in Afghanistan.
Omar Saeed made his public post-9/11 debut on September 23, 2001, on the very same day that his pseudonym, Mustafa Ahmad, made its own post-9/11 debut through President Bush's Global Terrorist Executive Order, in which a "Shaykh Sai'id (aka Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad)" was mentioned as a financial operative in al-Qaida, among a list of 27 individuals and entities slated to have their assets frozen. On September 23, Nick Fielding of The Sunday Times reported: "British officials have now asked India for legal assistance in seeking the whereabouts of Omar [Saeed] Sheikh. British security services confirmed this weekend that they wanted him for questioning."
A week later, on September 30, 2001, we found out why, when David Bamber of the Telegraph reported: "Police also believe that ... Omar [Saeed] Sheikh, who is British, trained the terrorists in hijacking techniques." As Bamber implied, Omar Saeed was working in cahoots with Lotfi Raissi, who was just recently arrested and charged with training the hijacker pilots. In other words, in less than three weeks after 9/11, authorities were closing in on Raissi and Omar Saeed, the alleged trainers of the alleged hijackers.
Now all that remained was to furnish a "smoking gun" link to al-Qaida by way of a money trail, all in time for the planned October 7 invasion of Afghanistan. On the very day that the Telegraph outed Raissi and Omar Saeed as the 9/11 trainers, ABC News This Week announced that a $100,000 money trail had been traced in Florida from hijacker Atta to "people linked to Osama bin Laden."
The very next day, on October 1, Judith Miller of the New York Times reported that hijacker Atta received money from someone using the alias "Mustafa Ahmad". Five days later, on October 6, Maria Ressa of CNN, quoting terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp, officially unveiled Omar Saeed as the pseudonymous 9/11 money man: "He [Omar Saeed] is ... linked to the financial network feeding bin Laden's assets, so therefore he's quite an important person...because he transfers money between various operatives, and he's a node between al Qaeda and foot soldiers on the ground." Ressa went on to report: "Because investigators have now determined that [Omar Saeed] and Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad [the pseudonym] are the same person, it provides another key link to bin Laden as the mastermind of the overall [9/11] plot."
Two days later, on October 8, Ressa revisited the story, this time connecting Omar Saeed to an October 1 attack on the provincial legislature in Kashmir - an incident that led Pakistan and India closer to the brink. October 8, incidentally, was also one of the very last times that CNN touched upon Omar Saeed - at least until he bobbed up a few months later, on February 6, as the FBI's main suspect in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. Yet by then, CNN - and Maria Ressa - was stricken by a curious case of amnesia, neglecting to mention that Saeed was previously outed by them as the 9/11 bag-man. Why this sudden silence? And, more to the point, why did Omar Saeed virtually drop off CNN's radar after October 8?
Go back to bed America... Go back to bed Europe.... Sweet dreams China, don't let the terrorists bite... Only question is: WHO EXACTLY ARE THE TERRORISTS??????
Evidence has surfaced recently that the FBI has been spying on foreign nations for years.
The revelation is so sensitive that in the wake of the secret surfacing, the FBI has embarked on a mad scramble to cover up the evidence. The Bureau has gone as far as to pressure a federal judge into sealing previously public court records that open a window on the FBI's overseas spying mission.
In addition, with the help of the U.S. Attorney's Office (John Ashcroft's Justice Department) the FBI also sought, through a proposed court order, to seize any computer anywhere that the Bureau suspected might have contained the sensitive court pleadings.
The controversy stems from a civil rights case filed in federal court in Sacramento, Calif., by former FBI agent Lok Thye Lau. In his case, Lau filed a Declaration in late September that detailed his FBI career and the fact that he was engaged as a spy in a dangerous undercover assignment that required him to "work against hostile and aggressive foreign powers for years." Although he is precluded from discussing specifics about that assignment due to national security concerns, the public record available on his case indicates that the likely target country was China.
Why have you heard so little about this case? Well, for the most part, the mainstream media have ignored it—and consequently, the serious implications raised for civil liberties in this country. As evidence of how the big media were asleep at the wheel in this case, it was the San Antonio Business Journal, a small weekly in South Texas, that broke the story in early October.
After the Business Journal's story was already in print, a federal judge sealed the public court records that the newspaper used for that story. Those records included Lau's declaration and a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the nation's oldest Hispanic civil rights groups.
In addition, after the Business Journal's story had hit the streets, the U.S. Attorney's Office and FBI sought permission from the court to seize any computer that they suspected of containing the previously public court documents. The court, for now, has refused to grant the FBI that power.
The Associated Press followed the Business Journal's exclusive by publishing a story on the government's efforts to seize computers. In addition, several 1st Amendment press organizations have given the story attention—such as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The California First Amendment Coalition put its neck on the line by actually posting the controversial "sealed" court pleadings on its website. A web blog (bigleftoutside.com/) also stepped out on a limb and put links to the pleadings on its site.
The latest development in this breaking story was an effort by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento to pressure LULAC and Lau's lawyers to turn over documents and computers to the FBI absent a court order.
According to LULAC, the official from the U.S. Attorney's Office who contacted the group stated that he wanted to "shut down media coverage" on the case.
I think I have to agree with Dr. Mahatir of Malaysia, he has the courage to say that which all others fear. When you see fascism it's best to describe it accurately and voiciferously because otherwise you'll end up with a jack-boot crushing your throat. To voice dissent is to embody the spirit of democracy, to cow-tow to those who would seek to silence opposition is to simply make it easier for fascism to take root and flourish - how many of you want that?
Smearing Said and Hanan Ashrawi
by Robert Fisk
Is "Palestinian" now just a dirty word? Or is "Arab" the dirty word? Let's start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote--among many other books--Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia last month, Zev Chafets sneered at him in the New York Daily News in the following words: "As an Episcopalian, he's ineligible for the customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's honoured with a couple of female doctoral graduates."
According to Chafets, who (says the Post) spent 33 years "in politics, government and journalism" in Jerusalem, Orientalism "rests on a simple thesis: Westerners are inherently unable to fairly judge, or even grasp, the Arab world." Said "didn't blow up the Marines in Lebanon in 1983 ... he certainly didn't fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. What he did was to jam America's intellectual radar."
When I read this vicious obituary, I recalled hearing Chafets' name before. So I turned to my files and up he popped in 1982, as former director of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem. He had just published a book falsely claiming that Western journalists in Beirut--myself among them--had been "terrorised" by bands of Palestinians. He even claimed my old friend Sean Toolan, who was murdered by a jealous husband with whose wife he was having an affair, was killed by Palestinians because they disapproved of a US television programme about the PLO.
So I got the point. You can kick a scholar when he's dead if he's a Palestinian, and kick a journalist when he's dead if you want to claim he was murdered by Palestinians. But now the same sick fantasies are taking hold in Australia, where a determined effort is being made by Israel's supposed friends there to prevent the Palestinian scholar Hanan Ashrawi--of all people--from receiving the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize this week. A Jewish writer in Sydney has bravely defended her--not least because the local Israeli lobby appears to have deliberately misquoted an interview she gave me two years ago, distorting her words to imply that she is in favour of suicide bombings.
Ashrawi is not in favour of these wicked attacks. She has fearlessly spoken out against them. But Sydney University has already withdrawn the use of its Great Hall for the presentation of the peace prize and the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, has dissociated the City of Sydney, sponsor of the prize, from the presentation. And just to show you what lies behind this--apart from the fact that Turnbull's husband Malcolm is trying to get a nomination for a parliamentary seat--take a look through the following exchange between Kathryn Greiner, former chairwoman of the Sydney peace foundation, and Professor Stuart Rees, the foundation's director:
KG: "I have to speak logically. It is either Hanan Ashrawi or the Peace Foundation. That's our choice, Stuart. My distinct impression is that if you persist in having her here, they'll (sic) destroy you. Rob Thomas of City Group is in trouble for supporting us. And you know Danny Gilbert [an Australian lawyer] has already been warned off."
SR: "You must be joking. We've been over this a hundred times. We consulted widely. We agreed the jury's decision, made over a year ago, was not only unanimous but that we would support it, together."
KG: "But you're not listening to the logic. The Commonwealth Bank ... is highly critical. We could not approach them for financial help for the Schools Peace Prize. We'll get no support from them. The business world will close ranks. They are saying we are one-sided, that we've only supported Palestine."
There is more of the same, but Professor Rees is standing firm--for now. So is Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein in Zmag magazine. Ashrawi, he says, "has endured campaigns of hate based on slander and lies for most of her life, from those who are intent on silencing the Palestinian narrative ..." But how much longer must this go on? Ashrawi, I notice, is now being called an "aging (sic) bespoke terror apologist" by Mark Steyn in, of all places, The Irish Times.
And it's getting worse. Said's work is now being denounced in testimony to the US Congress by Dr Stanley Kurz, who claims that the presence of "post-colonial theory" in academic circles has produced professors who refuse to support or instruct students interested in joining the State Department or American intelligence agencies. So now Congress is proposing to set up an "oversight board"--with appointed members from Homeland Security, the Department of Defence and the US National Security Agency--that will link university department funding on Middle East studies to "students training for careers in national security, defence and intelligence agencies ..."
As Professor Michael Bednar of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin says, "the possibility that someone in Homeland Security will instruct college professors ... on the proper, patriotic, 'American-friendly' textbooks that may be used in class scares and outrages me."
So it's to be goodbye to the life-work of Edward Said? And goodbye to peace prizes for Hanan Ashrawi? Goodbye to Palestinians, in fact? Then the radar really will be jammed.
Why is it always those bloody religious nutters that have to try and spoil it for the rest of us. They want us all to live in fear and ignorance - just like they do.
The "Religious Right" and Middle East War
By no means is this below a criticism against all Fundamentalist Christians, but rather those who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to trying to bring it about. Such "believers" have become dominant among Republican leaders in Congress from Texas and Oklahoma, while politically they provide moral cover for the Israeli Lobby, which otherwise has lost much of its idealistic support.
According to them, Israeli government policies must never be criticized because Israel is doing God's will. But they do criticize any Israeli government which tries to bring peace, witness how Rabin and Barak were so attacked. These are the radical Dispensationalists. Their alliance with the Israeli Lobby is very two sided; each thinks it is using the other for its own ends. The Likud gets crucial support in the Republican Party for its West Bank occupation and settlements. The Dispensationalists get encouragement in their belief that the end of the world will come sooner. They believe that they then will go straight to Heaven without the pain of dying, while the rest of the human race, including Jews who don't convert, will soon be wiped out with great suffering. In their passion for the return of Christ, these people forsake the most fundamental Christian principles of humanity towards human beings and even Christians in the Middle East. They humiliate Muslims everywhere. Any policies that promote conflict and misery in the Middle East are "good" for their ends. The article below is about how the strange alliance got started.
The profound Catholic libertarian philosopher, Dr. Leonard Liggio, once remarked how he was always surprised how Americans who had lived in the overseas nearly all came to the same conclusions about American foreign policy. It is noteworthy that most Dispensationalists are very insular and know little about the outside world. Today they are a major factor in U.S. foreign policy.
Snoop on them, as they snoop on us! Power to the people!
From: the Peacewatchers at USAF’s Fairford and Welford bases in the UK
Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libya in the1980's as well as the first Gulf War.
At the weekend warplanes were flying over at a rate of roughly one every 15 minutes. As well as watching them from the ground the plane spotters have also been able to overhear pilots talking by listening to their radio frequencies.
At this rate some 288 warplanes would have passed over Scotland in three days.
It is thought that the planes have flown on a route from the US over the North Pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike at a country in the Middle East in the next week to ten days.
Please pass this information on as widely as possible- the US may be planning to use the pretext of "foreign" terrorist attacks on US personnel in Iraq to attack Iran or Syria. Please alert any sympathetic elected representatives, media representatives and other sympathetic organizations. Publicizing this military movement may prevent the air-strikes.
Phony Tony has a dark, dirty secret. One that could probably force him out of office, maybe worse. That's why he blindly followed Bush, because Bush showed him a copy of the file the CIA has on him... Well that's what I think anyway.
Riddle of Cheriegate disk stolen from Foster friend
A computer disk allegedly proving that Tony Blair lied over Cheriegate has been stolen from Aussie conman Peter Foster.
The disk is said to contain a photo of Mr Blair with disgraced Foster. But the Premier has always insisted he did not know him and never met him.
If the photo exists it could link Mr Blair to the property scandal in which Foster obtained substantial financial discounts on two Bristol flats, worth £525,000, for Cherie Blair.
It is claimed the British Secret Service may be involved in the theft.
In another bizarre twist Foster, 41 - one-time lover of Cherie's then style guru Carole Caplin - says 500 emails stored on his home computer have mysteriously vanished despite being protected by two virus firewalls.
He told friends: "It was the scariest thing. Something infiltrated my computer and sucked everything out of it. I felt a chill when it happened."
The computer disk was stolen from the home of Foster's close friend and legal adviser, barrister Sean Cousins, who lives at Mount Tambourine on Queensland's Gold Coast .
Mr Cousins claims he took the disk home from his chambers to give it to a third party this week.
He told only a handful of people of his intention in phone calls. But before he could hand the disk over it was stolen in a break-in. Nothing else was removed. Police yesterday confirmed they were investigating and said the circumstances of the theft were suspicious.
"Unnerved and distressed", Mr Cousins has told friends he believes the British Secret Service is involved.
Foster, a convicted fraudster, has written about his involvement with Cherie and Ms Caplin in his memoirs which are about to be published. He has claimed he did nothing wrong and was made the scapegoat for Cheriegate .
Bitter at being forced to leave Britain, and then Ireland, he said on his forced return to Australia in February he has a "smoking gun" which could bring down Mr Blair. Among damaging revelations is said to be a picture of Foster with Mr Blair during a European holiday with Ms Caplin.
Downing Street minders insisted last year: "The Prime Minister has never met Mr Foster."
I don't know if this story is true or not, but it raises enough interesting questions that I think it's well worth further analysis. I find it frightening to see how Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr have been treated since they were formally accused of having carried out this sick murder. One question I have is if this Huntley guy is such a complete nutter that he's been sectioned in "very unusual" circumstances; WHAT WAS HE DOING WORKING AT A SCHOOL IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?
British Police torture least likely suspects Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr from Soham Village, while deliberately ignoring thousands of more likely suspects from nearby American Air Force bases
Copyright Joe Vialls, 24 August 2002
When British police arrested Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr during the early hours of Saturday 17 August, on suspicion of the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, they did so in the certain knowledge that absolutely no hard evidence existed incriminating either suspect. The reason for the rapid arrests was very simple: Just hours earlier, two small bodies had been found near the perimeter fence at USAF Lakenheath, and the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street was terrified of a massive political scandal involving American servicemen based in, or transiting through, the United Kingdom.
Shortly after the arrests, British and American media organizations demonized Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr so successfully that public attention was diverted away from Lakenheath completely, and focused instead on the young couple from Soham who had earlier willingly spoken to television crews about their concerns for the well being of the two missing 10-year-old girls. Both knew the girls reasonably well. Ian Huntley was the caretaker at their school, and Maxine Carr was a former teaching auxiliary in their class.
Millions of viewers around the world watched Ian and Maxine being interviewed by the media, and most were impressed by the openness of their statements and their genuine willingness to help if possible. Experts in non-verbal communication also noticed that Ian and Maxine’s involuntary body and eye movements perfectly matched what they were saying verbally to the journalists.
In other words, both appeared to be telling the truth both verbally and non-verbally, an almost impossible feat for even a trained liar to fabricate. It is critical to note here also that both came across on television as perfectly normal, sane individuals, a reality later to be inexplicably challenged by police and psychiatrists in Cambridgeshire.
If Huntley and Carr had been involved at all with the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, would they have then been stupid enough to run the gauntlet of about 10,000 American servicemen en-route, and dump the two small bodies in a location clearly visible from Lakenheath Control Tower, taxi track, and main runway? A serviceman with detailed knowledge of activities and procedures inside the base might get away with it unseen, but certainly not two civilians from Soham in Cambridgeshire. So the perimeter would be an ideal dumping ground for American servicemen eager to return to “safe” territory at USAF Lakenheath, before either entering their barracks on the base, or catching a shuttle bus to USAF Mildenhall.
In an attempt to demonize Ian Huntley still further, police “leaked” the damning information that he had been arrested for rape a number of years earlier. Well, yes, almost. While still a teenager Huntley had consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was only 15-years-old at the time, an offence in the United Kingdom known as statutory rape. He was never charged with an offence however, and his former girlfriend [now age 21 years] recently confirmed it was a mutual crush [love affair], with enthusiastic sexual consent on both sides.
So for a while at least, police and media have managed to deflect attention away from the two massive nearby USAF bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and the political minefield lurking just below the surface if the British public ever find out about the very large numbers of children abused, raped, and sometimes murdered by American servicemen on overseas duty. So let us properly consider the “American Connection”, before returning later in this report to the unbelievable ongoing psychological abuse of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr.
Though earlier in the investigation police declared they would be interviewing “700 known sex offenders” of British nationality, there was no mention of interviewing the 10,000+ US servicemen based in close proximity to Soham Village, or determining which other American servicemen has transited through the two bases, and on which flights, since Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman first disappeared.
The simple fact that Holly and Jessica’s bodies were found within yards of the USAF Lakenheath perimeter fence, which in turn provides access to the American barracks within, should have had British police knocking on Lakenheath’s front door immediately. Unfortunately, any such action might have accidentally undermined Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal slavish dedication to George W Bush's “War on Terror.”
Though most members of the American military are unquestionably nice people, the small number who are not, are invariably psychotic savages. It is a matter of public record that many American servicemen have habitually carried out sickening attacks against civilians while on overseas duty, happy in the knowledge that the serious assault or murder of women or girls in Japan, Kosovo or England, carries a lesser penalty than at home.
One such case is that of Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi, who on 24 August 2000 pleaded guilty to sodomizing and killing an 11-year-old Kosovar girl in January the same year. A member of his platoon testified that Staff Sergeant Ronghi disdainfully claimed, “It’s easy to get away with this shit in a third-world country.”
The “shit” Ronghi referred to is described here by the US Army Pathologist for Europe. "Her right jaw was fractured, practically bisected," said Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen Ingwersen, "We found evidence of sperm and semen in her vagina, mouth and rectum," she testified to a hushed hearing. "There was trauma to the neck muscles, the trachea and the carotid artery," Colonel Ingwersen said, adding she had found evidence of "blunt trauma" as the child was apparently beaten, choked and forced to kneel, face to the ground, as she was sodomized.
But in a perverse way Ronghi was proved right about the overall American perception of the “lesser worth” of women and children, in what he and others continually refer to as the third world. At his trial the Staff Sergeant was sentenced to life imprisonment, despite the fact that an identical offence against an American woman in the USA, would have resulted in his execution.
It would be impossible to list here all such vile attacks against “locals” by American servicemen overseas because there have been far too many. However, in order to educate the British police [who mercifully are rarely exposed to similar atrocities in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk] it seems prudent to mention a handful, thereby proving that Staff Sergeant Ronghi is far from being an isolated case.
In 1955, an American soldier was sentenced to death for the murder of a six-year-old Okinawan girl, a sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment. During 1966 a US soldier confessed to strangling a young waitress. Then in 1972, US soldiers were sentenced to life imprisonment for strangling local women. Later In 1975, a US soldier was sent to prison for raping two junior high school students. Local Okinawan police arrested two US soldiers during 1985 in the act of raping a woman.
During a spate of crimes in 1995, a US soldier was arrested for the hammering death of a young woman., two children were killed by a drunken soldier, and three US soldiers brutally raped a young schoolgirl. In January 2000 a US seaman was sentenced for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old Japanese girl. Remember this is only a small part of the overall list, nor does it include the many more alleged perpetrators who Japanese and other authorities claim were “spirited out of the country and back to the USA” before they could be apprehended and charged.
The last point to consider before returning to the plight of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, is the strange fate of four wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the former home base of Staff Sergeant Ronghi. All four wives were allegedly killed by their Sergeant husbands when they returned from active duty in Afghanistan, during the same week that Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing. US Army authorities are currently trying to establish whether or not an anti-malarial drug all were taking contributed to the murders. The drug is acknowledged to have extra-pyramidal psychotic side-effects, and is prescribed to all US Servicemen in Afghanistan.
There are no direct flights out of Afghanistan to the USA, meaning that all American servicemen including those seriously affected by the drug, and also affected by PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) are obliged to change aircraft either in Germany or in England – normally at USAF Mildenhall. As a matter of urgency the British public should shame their local police into establishing accurately how many of these servicemen transited through USAF Mildenhall and USAF Lakenheath during the week that Holly and Jessica vanished.