Bilderberger treason goes unpunished!

It is ironic, as Daniel Estulin points out, that America’s fledgling democracy established the Logan act in 1799 to protect itself from Americans fostering foreign associations to intrude in our affairs. Named after Dr. George Logan, a pro Republican and prescient Quaker from Pennsylvania, it has remained almost unchanged and unfortunately unused since its passage, though it reads with great relevance in the shadows of the New World Order’s operatives . . .

It states, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

In fact, it is amazing that the Bilderberg Group has met since 1954 with funding from the CIA and is made up of the world’s most powerful people, notably US and world heads of state, made and in the making, numerous international corporate CEOs from business, banking, industry, media, as well as world royalty, plus high-ranking members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-Lateral Commission.

The Bilderberg goal has been to shape policy that deeply concerns the United States and its citizens in regards to innumerable foreign alliances without providing US citizens any awareness of same. And not once has any US member been indicted for their treasonous breaches in these actions.

Even though high-ranking members of the press attend Bilderberg annual meetings, there is little or no press coverage. They are there, as it were, to get with and push the program, albeit disguised. The meetings’ locales are announced only days before the events, always in a small town near a big city -- this year’s at the five-star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, May 14-17.

There are no press reports of discussions, agendas or conclusions released. Yet the matters discussed ranged this year from all facets of the US economy, including the dollar’s future, whether there will be depression or prolonged stagnation, US unemployment; more frighteningly, even to the destruction of the United States as we know it into the North American Union of Canada, the US, and Mexico.

Even though I read and favorably reviewed Estulin’s Bilderberg 2007: Welcome to the Lunatic Fringe, this new edition of the story lends new urgency to what has been happening in the darkness of the political night we live in, both north and south of us, including newly made associations of corporations, plans to usurp US laws to North American Union imperatives, all part of a scheme to hammer America into the pieces of this NAU like broken glass into an unrecognizable mosaic of oppression.

There will also be a push for the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, which depends on the Irish voting YES on the treaty in September or October. One of the Bilderberg concerns is neutralizing the anti-Lisbon treaty movement, Libertas, led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberg strategies, for instance, is a whispering campaign in the US media, suggesting that Ganley is funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military. Right there you have a bird’s eye view of the Bilderbergers in action, with enough evidence to imprison a weighty handful of them, including some top dogs. And dogs they are, dogs of overt and covert war.

Most notably, they include the multi-billionaire David Rockefeller and ex-Secretary of State and war criminal Henry Kissinger. The Rockefeller family, influence, and fortune constitute the very hub of the Bilderberg Group. Its various spokes connect to international finance, economics, media, science, world health, politics, public works, any phase of life and death you can think of.

Together they form the wheel of the New World Order, rolling towards a vast collectivist society in which free nation states are subsumed under the Bilderberg Big Brothers, most notably Rockefeller, with an expanded UN military force, supported by taxes on oil at the wellhead to maintain order and security.

It is a strangely utopian notion of a “World Company,” an uber capitalist corporation vs. the nation state, a whole new Brand X of authoritarian rule. Its model most closely resembles a free-trade capitalist China with a communist authoritarianism to buttress it, in which the individual vanishes literally and figuratively; in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and two classes are de rigueur, rich and slave-class.

It’s no wonder one of the first familiar faces we see on the introduction’s page xxx is Chinese-speaking, India-born Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. He is at the 2005 Germany-based Bilderberg meeting, then as president of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, connecting as it were with those of common interests. How far he’s come since then and how deep we’ve sunk in Treasury debt.

You will find this highly secret organization’s history exposed with an encyclopedic level of documentation, including over 100 pages of participant photos, documents, names, titles, endnotes by Daniel Estulin, in this The True Story of The Bilderberg Group, updated revised and expanded in his latest North American Union Edition, 385 pages in all. To date, the editions of this groundbreaking work have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide in 48 languages. The reason is its relevance for citizens of every free nation in the world, now an endangered species in the wake of Bilderberg connections and activities.

Estulin’s text reads like a mixture of Robert Ludlum, John LeCarre and Ian Fleming, given the world of intrigue he inhabits at the highest levels, meeting in the most luxurious, private-army and police guarded hotels. Estulin delivers secrets from an eyewitness point of view, having researched the group for the past 17 years and actually pierced the secret annual meetings well before his first 2007 edition.

One time it nearly cost him his life as he waited for an elevator in a hi-rise hotel with an information “source.” As the door opened, he stepped forward and was hauled back by the source’s iron grip. There was no floor. The elevator had been jimmied 800 feet down. One more step and he’d been silenced. Fortunately, Estulin’s family emigrated from Russia to Ottawa, Canada. His grandfather was high-level KGB, which gives him a genetic leg up in this predator’s game.

Estulin’s research has been augmented by many persons working in these hotels who, repulsed by the Bildies, have shared information on their dubious agendas, attendees, and locales. Then there are past and present intelligence officials from around the world, who report in as well, as the Bildies play “good old boys” club. They permit only a few wives to attend, a few noted media women, and the Queen of the Netherlands, one of the richest women in the world.

To give you a sense of its scope, the new Bilderberg edition is broken up into four sections: Part One: the Bildberg Group, including its foundation, bedfellows, objectives, puppets, a tale of the Watergate con game, and Bilderberg unmasked.

Part Two: The Council on Foreign Relations, includes Hit or Miss [that is a near miss of a hit on the author’s life in Italy], 1999, Crossover Partners, Journalistic Courtesans?, Enforced Disarmament, CFR Cabinet Control, CFR and Psycho-Political Operations, CFR and the Marshall Plan, Visible Partners.

Part Three: The Trilateral Commission, Back to the Future, Sophisticated Subversion, Packaging a President, Game of Monopoly, Bolsheviks’ Benefactors, Treason for Profit, Sacrificing a Nation [America].

The all-New Part Four: The North American Union (NAU), Detention, 2004, Overture, A Coming Union? Behind the Closed Door – In Documents & Pictures, Endnotes, a PS: actual Bilderberg Meeting Reports – 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, Author’s Afterward, and Index.

Again, as someone who read the earlier edition, I can say that all the new information is a substantial leap forward in exposing this shadow government that is working steadily for the US and other nations’ coups and subjugation to its New World Order.

The Bilderberg Meeting Reports give you a candid view of this motley crew, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe. The reports survey crossover relationships between ex-presidents, chiefs of state from yesterday and today, from their involvements in pointless wars and conflicts, all ending in private profit. You walk away with a real idea of the world elite’s plans for today and tomorrow, which are definitely not wine and roses for you.

In fact, the New World Order can be seen as a giant step backward in time to a form of feudalism governed with today’s technology and power brokers. It is an order ruled by raw power. The smell of this power seems to ooze out of the pages of the book and its tales, from Woodrow Wilson and his alter-ego, Edward M. House, working together to establish a NWO through the League of Nations . . . back to the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution by JP Morgan to undermine the power of the Czar and Russia.

As an alternate title to this review, I thought of “Flipping the Bilderbergers,” for in fact so many household names and faces of 20th and 21st century politics -- from history, business, media, banking and finance -- are revealed, involved in various predatory schemes to deflate or inflate currencies, destroy alliances, but most of all, to weaken America. And towards that end, is it any surprise that we find our industrial infrastructure in ruins, General Motors in bankruptcy, Chrysler about to be sold to Fiat, millions of American high tech jobs outsourced to India, millions more to near and far-eastern sweatshops, our economy bankrupted?

Is it any wonder that we find one bubble after another created and then broken in the stock market until the market itself is broken, a conspiracy of deregulation, and Greenspan’s photo turning up in various Bilderberg meetings, along with the ubiquitous Kissinger’s, like so many grinning cats who have swallowed the canaries? Is it any wonder that the Trilateral Commission has broken the world in three pieces: The Americas, Europe, and Asia, assigning South and Central Americas as our new sweat shops, Africa as Europe’s, and Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines as Japan’s?

And so, reading this True Story of the Bilderberg Group -- The North American Union Edition is an act of revelation. One that is necessary to help us protect ourselves against this final trashing of our borders as well as Canada’s and Mexico’s, which would pummel us into one entity ruled by the money-lust of corporate deal-makers, the same who have been planning this for years in their poisonous meetings.

Bottom line, the Fix is in. Innumerable deals have been and are being made between the north and south to weaken America like a brave bull by picadors, bleeding our strength, until the matadors thrust the final swords in us. Do not by any means underestimate their power or be overly afraid of it. When push comes to shove, there are more of us than them.

In fact, being exposed, opposed, deposed are the worst nightmares of the Bilderbergers, starting with its pointy-nosed, grinning zillionaire posing as a philanthropist, Dr. Doom himself, along with his cronies, from Bill Gates to Goldman Sachs, et al. We have to seek punishment for these men (and women) who have undermined the strength of our government and people with foreign alliances profitable only to them. We have to bring these treasonous persons to stand for their crimes. We have to use the Logan Act as it has never been used before and any and all other means to gain justice or face the consequences. That is Estulin’s message, loud and clear. Read it. See it. Believe it!

By Jerry Mazza

Source: Online Journal

DOJ moves to reverse AIPAC espionage case guilty plea and jail time

On May 1, government prosecutors dropped their espionage prosecution of former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.

Many expected a criminal trial to yield unprecedented accountability -- AIPAC’s opaque internal operations and unquenchable thirst for classified government information would finally be laid bare. Others saw the unprecedented application of the 1917 Espionage Act against non-government employees as a threat to freedom of speech.

Presiding Judge T.S. Ellis’ pretrial rulings made it nearly impossible for government prosecutors to prevail -- requiring them to reveal sensitive government information in court. Curiously, Ellis even wanted prosecutors to prove the defendants’ states of mind and ethereal intentions to harm the US rather than strict statutory culpability under the 1917 Espionage Act. Normally, Americans could now be either thrilled, outraged, or just blissfully unaware that the case has finally ended.

Except that it hasn’t ended.

Those concerned with rule of law were provided mixed relief but subtle hints of future maneuvers. In their formal motion (PDF) that Judge T.S. Ellis drop the case government prosecutors fired a Parthian shot by highlighting the “requirement of meeting an unexpectedly higher evidentiary threshold in order to prevail at trial.”

The New York Times recorded Joseph Persichini Jr. -- the top official at the F.B.I.’s Washington office -- was “disappointed” while FBI agents were “infuriated.” But the Times also hinted at politicization, reporting the decision chain extended from career attorneys all the way up to Attorney General Eric Holder -- who approved dropping the case. Dana J. Boente, Obama’s new acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was omnipresent at negotiations. Boente’s formal statement seemed to exude remorse “the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment.”

The AIPAC investigation did yield Colonel Lawrence Franklin’s guilty plea for leaking classified information to Rosen and Weissman. Franklin was sentenced to a $10,000 fine, 151 months of prison, and three years of supervised release. Surely with Franklin ensconced in jail, few would be again tempted to influence US policies through high stakes classified information gambits. Justice would have been done, to some degree. But is all the scripted remorse and regret just a ruse?

On May 19, a powerful coalition of 125 Rabbis signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting a probe into whether “anti-Semitism and/or anti-Israel sentiments” played any role in the original investigation of AIPAC. Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post published an article titled “Was Case Against AIPAC Lobbyists Anti-Semitic?“ It sternly noted that the case “wasn’t a total loss for the government” because it did win Franklin’s guilty plea. That plea is the only remaining evidence that wrongdoing occurred -- but for the Israel lobby, history reveals even this is totally unacceptable.

Last year, shortly before George W. Bush left office, intense lobbying finally won the posthumous pardon of Charles Winters. Winters was convicted of violating U.S. arms embargos for his role in the illicit shipment of aircraft to Jewish fighters in Palestine in 1948.

A Protestant from Boston, Winters didn’t have the lifelong ideological drive of co-conspirators Hank Greenspun and Al Schwimmer. Neither ever served any jail time. Greenspun, a newspaper man in Nevada, won a presidential pardon when John F. Kennedy entered office. Schwimmer simply emigrated to Israel. Both subsequently went on to play major roles in the Israeli arms smuggling segment of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. But the fact that only Winters ever did time for crime (18 months in jail and a $5,000 fine) was a lingering stain that couldn’t be erased. This has relevance for the plight of Lawrence Franklin.

AIPAC and other arms of the Israel lobby can’t now openly lobby President Barak Obama for a Franklin pardon so soon after his administration graciously dropped the case. But AIPAC also can’t wait four to eight years for a pardon or even function effectively while Lawrence Franklin languishes in prison for what many supporters consider heroic behavior.

The Bureau of Prisons -- which assigned Franklin inmate number 70425-083 -- indicates he is still not yet in custody, Fortunately for Franklin he may never set foot into his assigned minimum security prison in Cumberland, Maryland. Attorney General Eric Holder holds the key to his future.

The Department of Justice has recently admitted errors and asked a federal court to free two Alaskans and review their convictions in connection with the Senator Ted Stevens corruption probe.

Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder’s earlier and seemingly inexplicable recommendation that President Bill Clinton pardon tax fugitive Marc Rich once looked both tawdry and even career threatening before he became attorney general in the Obama administration Given recent moves to free other Bush era convictions, the incident looks highly relevant and so is the process to secretly erase Franklin’s guilty plea and sentence in court.

On May 14, US attorneys quietly filed a sealed motion (PDF) “as to Lawrence Anthony Franklin” in the Eastern District of Virginia. Judge Ellis then granted a hearing for June 12 at 9AM. On June 2, they filed a sealed memorandum about Franklin. Though sealed motions are of course secret, it is likely that under the watchful eye of Eric Holder the DOJ’s political appointees are arranging yet another special favor for the Israel lobby in order to steer around the Obama pardon dilemma.

As is now customary, any potential future downsides and details of such a sealed deal are not allowed to be publicly debated. Just as quiet clemency for Schwimmer and Greenspun paved the way for weapons smuggling to Iran, this quiet effort will undoubtedly yield some future crisis.

If Eric Holder springs Franklin he will have issued a facto license to AIPAC -- the likes of which haven’t been seen since former Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach quashed the DOJ’s massive drive to register the entire lobby as Israeli foreign agents. AIPAC can then not only traffic in as much classified US national defense information as it can carry, but execute larger and more audacious covert activities at US taxpayer expense under the immunizing banner of Israel.

In the broadest sense the AIPAC espionage scandal hasn’t ended -- it may be only just beginning.

By Grant F. Smith

Source: Online Journal

Mossad still stalking malls near U.S. military bases

Cells of young Israeli intelligence operatives continue to openly solicit relationships with U.S. military personnel from shopping mall kiosks, according to an informed source.

WMR has learned that one such kiosk operates at the MacArthur Center Mall in Norfolk, Virginia, where a number of U.S. Navy personnel from the nearby naval bases are regularly confronted by aggressive young Israelis selling Dead Sea cosmetic products who inquire about where the personnel are stationed and the nature of their jobs. Young Israeli women working at the kiosk also appear to want to strike up a closer relationship with some of the naval personnel.

The use of young Israelis, many of whom continue to serve in a reserve status with the Israel Defense Force, as intelligence agents, has changed somewhat over the past decade. Young Israeli “art students” first conducted unsolicited visits to the homes and offices of federal and military employees trying to sell cheap Chinese-made bogus Israeli artwork while casing neighborhoods and office buildings.

Israeli-operated mall kiosks have transitioned from selling toys to cosmetics.

On August 7, 2005, WMR reported: In November 2001, the INS arrested several Israelis, including some with military backgrounds, selling Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter toys from shopping mall kiosks and vending carts. Many of the malls were located near U.S. government facilities, including the Pentagon and CIA. A majority of the Israelis, arrested for visa violations instead of espionage, worked for a Florida-based company called Quality Sales. A spokesman for the company admitted the company hired vacationing Israeli students but they had the wrong visas. The spokesman also revealed the Israelis were deemed “special interest” cases by INS-- a new government designation applied to terrorism suspects in the wake of 911. Federal authorities suspect the Israelis were using the kiosks as intelligence fronts in the same manner that Israelis were using door-to-door art sales as covers. The National Counterintelligence Center (NCIX) stated in a report issued in March 2001 that, “In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork. Employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.” The report was temporarily removed from the NCIX web site.

One of the malls where the Israeli”toy sellers” based their operations was the Pentagon City Mall, just across Interstate 395 from the Pentagon. In July 2004, the mall served as the rendezvous point for alleged Israeli Pentagon spy Larry Franklin and Keith Weissman, an AIPAC official. Franklin warned Weissman that Iranian agents were going to start attacking American soldiers and Israeli agents in Iraq. Weissman then went to brief the account of the meeting to Steve Rosen, another senior AIPAC official. They both informed the Israeli embassy in Washington and Glenn Kessler, a reporter for The Washington Post. Those phone calls were being wiretapped by the FBI as part of its investigation of a major Israeli spy ring in the United States, an investigation that had been going on since before the 9/11 attacks. The FBI was also monitoring meetings between Franklin, Weissman, and Rosen, including one held in February 2003 at the Arlington, Virginia, Ritz-Carlton hotel, which adjoins the Pentagon City Mall.

In February 2005, an Israeli man named Ohad Cohen was deported, along with four other Israelis, from Omaha, Nebraska. In what was becoming a common occurrence in the United States, a total of 10 Israelis, who were working at shopping mall kiosks in the Omaha and Lincoln areas, were deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for illegally working in the United States on tourist visas. The Israelis operated out of Omaha’s Oak View Mall and Lincoln’s Gateway Westfield Mall. The Federal government probe was reported to be part of a wider probe of Israeli shopping mall kiosk activity throughout the Midwest. In December 2004, FBI and immigration officers arrested 15 Israelis in Minnesota and three operating from a mall kiosk in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Omaha is also the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC).

On January 13, 2009, WMR reported: WMR has also learned of other Israeli mall kiosks around the country that hired aggressive Israeli young men and women who badger customers and ask personal questions. Israeli mall kiosks engaged in the aggressive sales practices have been set up at the North Shore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts, and Northeast Mall in Hurst, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The mall kiosks in Peabody sell Israeli hand cream and nail files. The kiosk in Hurst has a male overseer, about 45 years old, who lives in the Bahamas.

Many of the Israeli mall vendors claim ignorance when told by customers that Israeli mall kiosks were identified as Mossad front operations in a Fox News report. More incredibly, some Israelis feign ignorance when the term “9/11” is used. They claim not to know what the term means.

In the same report, WMR reported: Last month, police in New South Wales, Australia, arrested the leader of an Israeli “art student” ring who was selling mass-produced paintings from China as valuable artwork from Israel. The Israeli man arrested, age 23, fit the profile of a number of Israeli “art students” rounded up, detained, and deported by U.S. authorities in the months prior to 9/11. The “art students” were casing federal offices, military installations, and the homes of federal agents and officials.

The Israeli was arrested by police in Wamberal on Australia’s eastern central coast. Fifty Chinese-made oil paintings were found in the Israeli’s Mitsubishi station wagon. He was attempting to sell the paintings for between 500 and 1,000 Australian dollars. The Israelis in Australia visited a number of homes and claimed they were university students from Israel. The Israeli arrested lived in Sydney’s Bondi Beach neighborhood.

Recently, there was yet another story about the use of Israeli mall kiosk operators as intelligence agents. In the most recent case in Perth, Australia, an Australian man was arrested and charged with violation of an Australian hate crime law for exposing the activities of Israeli-run mall kiosks owned by an Israeli firm in Melbourne whose products are called “Seacret -- Minerals From The Dead Sea.” The president of the Australian Union of Jewish Students lodged a criminal complaint against the investigator who maintained that Israeli nationals were attempting to obtain classified information on the Royal Australian Navy’s Collins class submarine as well as other defense programs.

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Online Journal

Stop and search? Carry the card

Download this handy card, warning police officers that if a stop and search is intrusive, unlawful or malicious, you will take action

The debate about the use of stop and search – be it protesters or young black and Asian men, be it in the case of stopping knife crime or deterring terrorism – is one that has (understandably, perhaps) been fixed on the police results rather than the times they get it wrong.

But it is in the cases where they get it wrong that attitudes towards police are sharpened and the rights we feel we have as citizens practically defined. So I offer this card for readers to download, print and carry. It warns police officers that if a stop and search is intrusive, unlawful or malicious, you will pursue the issue through the Independent Police Complaints Commission and, if necessary, to civil proceedings. You might want to offer this card to an officer before a search takes place. Enjoy.

Click here to download a pdf of the card. Then print, cut it out, fold it in half and carry it around with you.

Source: The Guardian

The police even follow me into the loo

Photocopy of a police officer’s notebook received by Marc Vallée after a data protection request.

The Metropolitan police are reluctant to reveal why they've been filming journalists. But we've got a special weapon – the law

On Monday – the day the Guardian published a police surveillance film showing Emily Apple and Val Swain being violently arrested at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year – solicitors acting for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) wrote to Christopher Graham, the new information commissioner to make a formal complaint on behalf of five frontline journalists – I am one of them.

Why the complaint? For some time now the NUJ has had "serious concerns about the manner in which press-card carrying journalists are being monitored by the police, specifically by the Metropolitan police's forward intelligence team (Fit)".

These concerns have been raised by the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, in ­letters to and meetings with the Home Office and the Metropolitan police. The NUJ

"suspect that certain journalists are the target of police surveillance because they speak to people who the police ­consider to be "anarchists"; and/or because they frequently cover protest situations; and/or because the police consider them likely to have footage which may be relevant in criminal proceedings involving others".

As the complaint states, all the journalists have been

"filmed and photographed on numerous occasions by the forward intelligence teams; they are clearly known by the Fit officers as they are referred to by name; their personal details have been taken by officers on many occasions; and they have all been subjected to repeated searches under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and/or section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994."

When covering a Gaza protest early this year, I was even followed by two Fit officers when I nipped into a pub to use the toilet.

In an attempt to get a clearer picture of the extent of police monitoring, five journalists – including me – applied to the Met and other police services in an attempt to discover what information is being held on us – photographs, documentation, details of when we have been stopped and searched. The Data Protection Act 1998 gives the public the right of subject access: in short, the right to find out what information is held about us in electronic and paper records.

In my case, the only piece of data that I have received from the Metropolitan police service after a four-month wait was a copy of a page of a police officer's notebook (above). This is despite the fact I sued the Met in 2006, and in legal correspondence the Met refers to Fit film footage of me being assaulted by police officers. The purpose of the NUJ letter was to see if the information commissioner "would be willing to investigate whether the ­Metropolitan police service are ­complying with their obligations under the Data ­Protection Act 1988 and Human Rights Act 1998."

Why is this important? Why are the police targeting journalists in this way? And why are the police refusing to hand over the files when requested?

If this type of targeting worked, investigations by the press into police treatment of groups such as Fit Watch would not see the light of day. To me it seems clear that the police are targeting journalists to discourage us from working on investigations they do not like.

At the NUJ photographers' conference in May, Roy Mincoff – the NUJ legal officer – asked for an assurance from Commander Bob Broadhurst, the head of the Met's public order branch and boss of the Fit, that journalists' details were not being kept on a database.

His reply did not inspire confidence:

"What I will do on that one is I'll give you a written answer. I'm pretty sure we don't. There might be the odd journalist whose name we know and whose photograph appears somewhere and to say we don't keep a database and then you'll find that one or two are on it. I can guarantee that we don't as a matter course take your photographs to create a database."

The NUJ is still waiting for that letter

Source: The Guardian

Arrested for asking a policeman for his badge number

The Guardian has obtained police footage of Emily Apple and Val Swain being arrested by surveillance officers after asking for their badge numbers at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year. The two women speak to Paul Lewis about their arrest, 4-day imprisonment and official complaint. All charges were dropped.
more

source www.guardian.co.uk

700 doctors demand the removal of WMA president for involvement in torture

700 doctors from 43 countries sent a letter of protest to the Word Medical Association (WMA), which is considered the WMA’s governing body, demanding the removal of the newly appointed president, an Israeli doctor, for ignoring the participation of medical staff in the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the Guardian reported.

The Israeli doctor, Yoram Blachar, has been the head of the Israeli Medical Association since 1995, and became the head of the WMA of November of last year.

The physicians, who signed the protest letter, are senior professors and physicians from England, Europe and the United States.

They stated that Blachar had failed to respond to charges that a number of Israeli doctors are involved in the torture of Palestinian detainees during interrogation in Israeli prisons.

In 1996, the Amnesty International reported that doctors, working with the Israeli security services, are taking part in torturing Palestinian detainees, mistreating and humiliating them in a manner that violates medical ethics.

Pediatrician Alan Meyers, from Boston University School of Medicine, in the United States, said that the presidency of Blachar to the WMA mocks the principles of the association which was founded in 1947.

A 1975 declaration in Japan states all Physicians in all situations should not participate of help in torture or any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures, including in armed conflicts and civil unrest.

In its annual meeting two years ago, the institution decided that all doctors are obliged to document cases of torture they are aware of, and that the lack of documenting such cases would be considered tolerance to torture, and lack of assistance to the victims.

The Guardian said that Blachar sent an email to it promising to respond to the allegations, and described the news as baseless imaginary allegations.

In 1997, Blachar sent a letter to the Lancet medical Journal defending the participation of physicians in torturing Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.

In his letter, Blachar claimed that ‘moderate physical pressure’, similar to the torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration against Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and other CIA black sites in several countries, ‘does not violate the international law’.

This so-called ‘moderate’ torture used by the CIA includes beating the detainees, depriving them from sleeping, isolating them, subjecting them to extreme hot and cold, humiliating them in addition to various illegal methods.

Meyers, who is also Jewish and well known for his stances for human rights in Israel since many years, stated that physicians who are involved in torture should not be allowed to practice medicine, and should be held accountable for their participation in torture.

In June 26 of 2008, the Israeli Physicians For Human Rights published a report accusing Israeli doctors of ignoring the human rights of the Palestinian detainees.

It is worth mentioning that dozens of Palestinian detainees died due to torture, dozens more died due to medical negligence, while hundreds of detainees are currently in urgent need for medical care, including cancer patients, and detainees who suffer chronic illnesses and disabilities, but are not receiving the needed medical treatment.

Saed Bannoura - IMEMC

Source: RINF News

Amend smoking ban says AWT

Forest patron Antony Worrall Thompson (above) launches the new Save Our Pubs & Clubs: AmendTheSmokingBan.com campaign.

We were joined at the Buckingham Arms in Westminster by the Rt Hon Greg Knight MP (Conservative) and David Clelland MP (Labour). Lib Dem MP John Hemming sent a message supporting the campaign.

The campaign is supported by Forest, the liberal think tank Progressive Vision, the Adam Smith Institute, which champions the free market, and the Manifesto Club which campaigns for “freedom in everyday life”. See press release HERE.

Apart from Antony, Greg Knight and David Clelland, speakers included Progressive Vision's Mark Littlewood and Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club.

Other speakers were landlords Paul Lofthouse (Queen's Head, Coggleshall), Simon Esnard (Butcher's Arms, Luton) and Sean Spillane (Luton Social Club).

UKIP leader Nigel Farage made a surprise appearance and said his party would support the campaign in any way it could.

The ASI's Eamonn Butler has blogged about the launch HERE. Likewise Dick Puddlecote HERE.

Meanwhile:
TV chef joins campaign for limited pub smoking (Independent)
Amend smoking ban, save pubs (Morning Advertiser)
Campaigners launch bid to amend smoking ban (Publican)

Update: to support the campaign please click HERE.

Source: Taking Liberties

Change? We spunk on change. And fuck improvement.

Once upon a time there was a tedious, corrupt little cunt called John "Socialist Shitbag Masquerading As A Tory" Bercow.

Mister Bercow had some unfortunate experiences with some "expenses": essentially, he quite happily, and with malice aforethought, took the taxpayer to the cleaners and ran away laughing. Because he's a corrupt cunt.

Last month, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that Mr Bercow “flipped” the designation of his second home between London and his constituency when he sold two houses in the space of a year, enabling him to avoid paying capital gains tax (CGT) on the profits from either sale.

He denied any wrongdoing but said he would pay £6,508 plus VAT to HM Revenue & Customs to cover the tax he could have been asked to pay on the sale of one of the homes.

The Tory MP for Buckingham also claimed almost £1,000 for the cost of hiring an accountant to fill in tax returns. Members of the Government were criticised for submitting similar claims because it was rare for members of the public to be allowed to reclaim accountants’ bills as a legitimate expense.

Not only did John Bercow use "the rules" to avoid tax that any of the rest of us would have to pay but, as Guido so helpfully points out, he also maxed out his allowances in previous years.


In other words, John Bercow is a filthy fucking trougher who is never happier than when spending our hard-earned cash on... well, whatever he fucking fancies, frankly. He is a disgustingly corrupt, unpleasant little cock-weasel with dumplings for testicles.

I just want to make this absolutely fucking clear, because it has a bearing on what follows: John Bercow is a corrupt little fuck who has not only maxed out his expenses account with our money, but he has also bent the rules to within breaking point in order to avoid the taxes that he is happy to impose on us—the taxes, in fact, that fund his lavish lifestyle through his fat fucking salary and his ludicrously high expenses claims.

I would also like to point out that the Speaker of the House of Commons resigned because not only had he happily presided over the raiding of the public purse by MPs, and not only because he did his level best to stop any of the details coming out (using lawyers paid for with our money), but also because he himself was incredibly corrupt—bending the rules to within breaking point (sounding familiar?) and maxing out his expenses claims.

So, the Speaker has resigned.

At this point in time, the reputation of our Parliament is at an all-time low; rarely has the entire institution been held in so much contempt. This is because those who occupy the House—those who plonk their well-padded arseholes on the well-padded seats—have abused our trust, lived above the laws that they make to control us, raped our wallets and bankrupted the country.

And now this institution needs a new Speaker—the previous Speaker having resigned for being, basically, a corrupt, Glaswegian fucknuts.

So, what MPs should do is to elect a reasonably uncorrupt person to be Speaker, don't you think? Especially since it is the Speaker who oversees the MPs and ensures that they stick to the rules (such as they are).

After all, these very same MPs have been telling us how ashamed they are, how they realise that their actions were wrong, how they understand the people's anger. As such, they surely must want to elect an untainted Speaker who will be able to summon some moral authority when bringing reform to the system of allowances benefits-in-kind.

No. These corrupt little bastards have elected another corrupt little bastard as Speaker.

The only good thing about this whole sorry episode is... at least they didn't elect that fucking horse-faced cunt, Margaret Beckett.

Source: The Devils Kitchen

'Munich' Shouldn't Be Such a Dirty Word

Seventy years ago this month, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler once, twice and then a third time. On Sept. 30, 1938, they agreed that the German-speaking "Sudetenland" of Czechoslovakia should be ceded to Germany. Ever since, the name of this Munich agreement has been used as the ultimate political curse.

In truth, the story of the agreement is far from what is usually supposed. Over and again, "Munich" has been wilfully misunderstood and misinterpreted, with repeatedly disastrous consequences.

The Georgian crisis has just brought more cries of "appeasement" and "Munich." One writer in the Times of London described French President Nicolas Sarkozy as coming back from Moscow "waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time," the ill-fated words Chamberlain used on his return to London. Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia to the 1938 "Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia." These are only the latest in a long line of mischievous claims that any compromise is "another Munich" -- and they run alongside a line of sorry military adventures for more than 50 years conditioned by the fear of emulating Chamberlain.

When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal in 1956, one London politician after another recalled the 1930s. "It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war," said Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 to protest appeasement even before Munich, was driven by the dread of being seen as another Chamberlain. Eden mounted a foolish military expedition that turned into a national humiliation and ended his career.

Although the Suez plot was thwarted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who asked Eden, "Anthony, have you gone out of your mind?"), not all Americans agreed with Ike. The Senate majority leader told him he should let the British know that "they have our moral support to go in." Ten years later, that senator -- Lyndon B. Johnson, by now the president -- learned the hard way that going in could be easier than getting out, and became another victim of the "Munich complex."

One of his top military advisers was Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had angrily told President John F. Kennedy to his face that refusing to take military action against Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich." Still spooked by the shadow of Munich, LBJ would escalate the Indochina war to show that he "wasn't any Chamberlain umbrella man."

Nor did President Bill Clinton want to be another Chamberlain. He bombed Serbia in 1999 and mused, "What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?"

And of course, the present administration has endlessly exploited the rhetoric of Munich. Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compared opponents of the Iraq war with the earlier appeasers, and last May, President Bush derided the idea of negotiating with terrorists: "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' " So Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, Bush is another Churchill (at any rate, he keeps a bust of Churchill in the White House), and there must be no more Munichs. We see the outcome today.

Quite apart from their unhappy consequences, all these invocations of Munich begin by rewriting history. Chamberlain was a democratic leader who knew that most of his people understandably did not want to go to war in 1938, only 20 years after another terrible war in which about three-quarters of a million British men had been killed.

Besides which, Chamberlain was far from alone in thinking that he was addressing a real grievance. The one accurate thing about Kagan's quaint comparison is that the residents of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia no more want to be ruled by Georgia today than the Sudeten Germans wanted to be ruled by the Czechs 70 years ago.

While it's lamentably true that German resentment at "the slave treaty of Versailles" following World War I helped bring Hitler to power, there is another inconvenient truth: Between the wars, British and American liberals almost universally believed that the post-1918 settlement had been unjust. H.N. Brailsford, the leading leftist English commentator on foreign affairs, had written in 1920 that, of all the Versailles treaty's redrawing of borders, "the worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule." Experience seemed to show that nationalism was the great force of the age and that it needed to be assuaged -- or appeased, a word first used, it should be remembered, by those who advocated doing so.

To be sure, Churchill denounced the Munich agreement in a resonant speech: "This is only the first sip, the first bitter foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time." But he was speaking as someone untroubled by any sympathy for national self-determination.

As the blogger Andrew Sullivan has said, every Republican nowadays wants to be Churchill. But they should look at his record more closely. A few years earlier, Churchill had broken with the Conservatives (and all enlightened opinion) over his opposition to any form of self-government for India: He had no time for Indians (or later Egyptians) taking their own "stand for freedom." Churchill was a realpolitiker who believed in imperialism and spheres of influence -- the very things that Bush and the neoconservatives now profess to abhor.

And Americans most of all should pause before invoking Munich. After 1918, the United States had withdrawn from the world, with Congress slamming the door on immigrants (even desperate Jews fleeing Nazi Europe) and refusing to join the new League of Nations (a fact of which Bush seems unaware whenever he refers scornfully to the League). In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, the Democrats were at least as isolationist as the Republicans, and as late as the fall of 1940, FDR was still campaigning for a third term on the unambiguous promise to keep the United States out of any foreign wars. That helps explain why he sent a telegram reading "Good man" to Chamberlain when his British counterpart returned from meeting Hitler, and subsequently told the U.S. ambassador in Rome, "I am not a bit upset over the final result."

No American of any significance advocated military resistance to Hitler in the 1930s, and no such intervention would have been possible anyway. In September 1939, the U.S. Army was smaller than the Belgian army, and as the first grave setbacks in North Africa in 1942-43 would show, it was scarcely ready for serious fighting even after the United States entered the fray.

Some other words of Churchill's are too rarely quoted. They are from one of the finest and most moving, though least known, speeches he ever gave, paying tribute to Chamberlain after his death from cancer in November 1940. It had been Chamberlain's fate "to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man," Churchill said. "But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? . . . They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart -- the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour."

In his bow to Chamberlain's memory, Churchill showed a magnanimity and wisdom that others have lacked. "Long and hard, hazardous years lie before us," he continued, "but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts."

Never once did Churchill advocate preemptive war, and he always recognized that democracies should use arms only as a last resort. Maybe the presidential candidates should be asked whether the United States entered the Iraq war "united and with clean hearts." That could be the real "lesson of Munich."

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Source: The Washington Post

How Good Was the Good War?

Patrick J. Buchanan deserves respect for blasting open an important historical question that the gatekeepers of allowable opinion probably assumed they had welded shut. According to the official version of American history, we are supposed to draw from World War II only a series of neat lessons about “appeasement” and our government’s unquenchable thirst for justice. Innocently wondering if there might have been some alternative to 50 million deaths and the most terrible war in history is enough to make you an object of suspicion—what are you, some kind of extremist?

Even from parts of the Right, the subject of World War II elicits the shrill denunciations, the smears, and the unchallengeable orthodoxies for which conservatives have traditionally condemned the politically correct Left. Buchanan may be wrong (though I do not think he is), but there is nothing wicked or perverse about considering contrary-to-fact scenarios in light of historical evidence. His prose is measured and non-polemical, and his judgments, which are shared by a great many historians and other figures of distinction, deserve to be considered on their merits. Claims that Buchanan’s version of history is politically motivated can hardly be taken seriously, especially coming from people who have made comfortable livings out of distorting the historical record on behalf of their own foreign-policy ambitions.

Munich is the most obvious example. Counting on popular ignorance, neoconservatives never weary of applying the “lessons of Munich” to modern American foreign policy. These so-called lessons turn out to be a decontextualized muddle of half-crazed maxims about the pointlessness of negotiation, the self-serving fraudulence of all enemy grievance claims, and the risk that unless the United States responds with overwhelming force to the slightest modification of the status quo—the justice or injustice of which is not up for discussion—we’ll soon be speaking Ruritanian. Cartoon history begets cartoon policy.

If only the matter had been as simple as modern propaganda about Munich would have it. In 1919, in defiance of the much heralded principle of self-determination, 3 million Germans had been consigned to what became second-class status in the new Czechoslovakia. German grievances, most of which were considered reasonable by just about everyone, had to be addressed one way or another if an endless cycle of war and punishment was to be avoided.

In other words, crushing Germany in a war over the Sudetenland would merely have returned Europe to square one: more punitive peace terms, further German resentment, and yet another episode of hyperpatriotic German politics aimed at revenge. Diplomats in the real world, denounced today as fools and appeasers, had a difficult situation on their hands as they approached this problem.

Buchanan makes a strong case against Britain giving a war guarantee to Poland rather than drawing a realistic line in the West that Hitler could not cross without risking war. George Kennan, as mainstream as they come, said so in a letter to Buchanan in 1999. And Ernest May, my old professor at Harvard, noted, “a government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications, now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.” A swashbuckling Polish regime was thus given the power to decide whether Britain would be drawn into war, a war Britain was absurdly unprepared to wage, much less win.

The number of politicians—and, later, historians—who considered Chamberlain’s war guarantee reckless and ill advised will surprise most readers. Lloyd George called it a “frightful gamble” and laughed out loud at the suggestion that it would deter Hitler. Even Churchill, in his official history, wondered (albeit disingenuously in light of his own position in 1939): “How could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? … Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”

Why should legitimate opinions like these be beyond the pale?

Probably the most important reason that free discussion of World War II—the diplomatic blunders, the Allied atrocities, all the what ifs—has been frowned upon or suppressed is that some people perceive an implicit disregard for the unspeakable fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet it was the war itself that put Europe’s Jewish populations in danger in the first place, an obvious point that has been missed by all but a few writers.

In February 1942, for example, Goebbels wrote in his diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe. … The Führer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.” A month later, after describing the deportations from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels observed, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”

“Because Britain issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany,” writes Buchanan, “by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans.” If he’s right, then with more sensible British diplomacy, the Jewish populations of Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, and Yugoslavia would have survived, just as the Jewish populations of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Iberian Peninsula did.

David Gordon, a (Jewish) scholar Buchanan thanks in his acknowledgments, has likewise wondered in light of all this: “Was it not a clear moral imperative to avoid the outbreak of war and, if possible, to secure the evacuation of the Jews from parts of Europe likely to fall under German control? Further, once war broke out, was it not imperative to end the war as soon as possible?” This, surely, is a morally serious position.

No one would have begrudged Buchanan a quiet retirement. He chose instead to re-examine a historical episode that all sectors of society treat with religious reverence, knowing full well how his work, which most of his opponents would not bother to read, would be received. But once the guardians of acceptable opinion have finished venting their spleens at what a scoundrel Buchanan is for not dutifully repeating the things he was taught in seventh grade, normal people may begin to evaluate his thesis rationally. The existence of this symposium suggests that that process may have begun.

by Thomas E. Woods Jr

Source: The American Conservative

Turkey-EU Relationship None of America's Business

Imagine British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visiting Mexico, where he proceeds to extol the relationship between London and Mexico City. Although Mexico is suffering through internal difficulties, he lauds its role as a regional leader. And he concludes his remarks by urging the United States to bring Mexico into the American union—in essence, to add political equality and free immigration to the open market created by the North American Free Trade Agreement. After all, he explains, the United States and Mexico have much in common and union would strengthen American as well as Mexican institutions.

Officials in Washington, D.C. would not likely be amused. Indeed, they probably would inform the British foreign secretary that who the American states invite to join their political compact is a matter for Washington, not London. Maintaining a bare patina of diplomatic civility, the secretary of state likely would suggest that Great Britain butt out of America’s affairs, especially controversial political disputes.

For this reason, Prime Minister Brown is unlikely ever to make such a trek to Mexico City. No more likely to go is French President Nicolas Sarkozy or German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But President Barack Obama went to Ankara where he proclaimed that the European Union should add Turkey as a member.

“Let me be clear,” he told the Turkish parliament:

the United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European Union. We speak not as members of the EU, but as close friends of Turkey and Europe. Turkey has been a resolute ally and a responsible partner in transatlantic and European institutions. And Turkey is bound to Europe by more than bridges over the Bosphorus. Centuries of shared history, culture, and commerce bring you together. Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith—it is not diminished by it. And Turkish membership would broaden and strengthen Europe’s foundation once more.

All this may be true—though lauding a “shared history” involving several wars might not be wise—and the argument is not new for Washington. The United States long has viewed Turkey as a critical ally, anchoring NATO’s eastern flank, deterring Soviet expansionism southward during the cold war, and improving Washington’s relations with the Muslim world. So in America’s view, European acceptance of Turkey is a small price for someone else to pay to advance our agenda. Previous administrations have been no less vocal in their support for Turkish membership.

It’s a reasonable argument. But it isn’t Washington’s decision.

The European Union is a unique organization. It began small, focused on coal and steel, and evolved into a large-scale open market. Since then it has been transformed again, moving from developed west to underdeveloped east, and turning toward political as well as economic consolidation.

Up till now, at least, the EU has promoted economic growth by linking twenty-seven nations together in a larger market and squeezing out many of the inefficiencies created by national economic regulation. But Brussels increasingly is micromanaging more than member economies, transforming culture and politics as well.

Even now European states are struggling with the impact of increasing Muslim populations and a growing influx of workers from the new, poorer members of the EU. France and Germany are particularly wary of further EU expansion so long as workers are free to move freely throughout the continent. Whether such concerns are warranted or not from America’s perspective is not the issue. Membership in the EU means much more than just increased trade. It means societies changed in unpredictable and ever more unpopular ways.

Turkish membership would have an even larger impact on the organization. Large, poor and Muslim, Turkey claims European status only on the basis of propinquity. In terms of development, culture and religion, Ankara differs substantially from the rest of the continent.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Europe wouldn’t benefit from Turkey’s inclusion. But it means that there would be costs too, resulting in a complex balance to be struck. A balance that only Europe can make. Under the circumstances, French President Sarkozy was surprisingly restrained when he responded to President Obama’s remarks: “I have been working hand in hand with President Obama, but when it comes to the European Union it’s up to members states of the European Union to decide.”

Of course, the EU members should consider the larger geopolitical issues at stake. A pro-Western Turkey yields obvious strategic benefits. It helps counterbalance less friendly and more dictatorial Middle Eastern states. Ankara’s friendship with Israel, though recently strained, gives the latter more room to maneuver. A liberal democratic Turkey, along with Indonesia, is an important symbol to other Islamic states looking for a way out of oppression and dictatorship. All these ends are advanced by drawing Ankara westward in orientation.

Which is why Washington so fervently supports Turkey’s entry into the EU. And the U.S. government has a perfect right to make its views known across the continent. But such opinions should be shared privately with European governments, not proclaimed publicly to Turkey. After all, the benefits from Ankara’s membership are speculative, especially since Turkish public opinion has shifted against America and Europe. Most important, it is European, not American, society which would be transformed, perhaps dramatically, by EU expansion to Asia Minor.

Like his predecessors, President Barack Obama believes that the United States is anointed to lecture the rest of the world on subjects big and small. It’s time for some of the “change” that the president promised: more humility in Washington. Whatever American policy makers believe to be good policy, Turkish membership in the EU is up to the Europeans, not the United States.

Source: The National Interest

Abe Foxman's 'Anti-Semitic Pandemic'

If there were a Nobel Prize for Hypocrisy, Abraham Foxman would have been a great candidate. The director of the Anti-Defamation League, who once interpreted even International Holocaust Remembrance Day as an expression of the Gentiles' latent desire to see Jews dead, has published a new survey on anti-Semitism in Europe [.pdf]. One of the assertions respondents were asked to agree or disagree with was "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country"; an affirmative response was considered indicative of anti-Semitism.

Indeed, doubting the loyalty of a minority is not nice. And the fact that many Zionists would affirm that assertion, or at least expect a Jew to be more loyal to Israel than to his country of residence, is a weak excuse for agreeing with such a characterization of all Jews. But let's put things in perspective: even if about half of Europeans say it's "probably true" that Jews are more loyal to Israel, not a single European party is pledging to revoke Jews' citizenship unless they prove their loyalty. I haven't heard of such a demand toward any other native minority either, in Europe or elsewhere. Even the late Joerg Haider did not go that far.

There is one exception, of course. The foremost campaign slogan of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu Party has been "No Loyalty – No Citizenship," which is aimed at Israel's Arab minority. Thirteen percent of Israelis gave Lieberman their vote. What does Abe Foxman have to say about that? Well, Foxman actually defends Lieberman, describing him as harmless: "He's not saying expel them. He's not saying punish them." Not at all: he's just demonizing them and threatening to deprive them of their citizenship. No big deal.

So a private person who doubts the loyalty of Jews in a telephone interview is a dirty anti-Semite to Foxman. But a major political party that publicly defames Arab Israelis and pledges to revoke their citizenship gets a pass from the director of the Anti-Defamation(!) League, purportedly committed to "Fighting Anti-Semitism, Bigotry, and Extremism"!

A Biased Survey

The ADL survey as a whole deserves some critical analysis. Conducted for the second time in seven European countries, the survey consisted of a short list of assertions respondents were supposed to take a stand on.

Note that respondents were given only two choices: they had to refer to each assertion as either "probably true" or "probably false." All the assertions were phrased in a way that "probably true" was the choice considered anti-Semitic. This suffers from the notorious "confirmatory bias," which "inclines people toward accepting assertions, rather than thinking more extensively and seeing the flaws in those assertions" (see Jon Krosnick, "Maximizing Questionnaire Quality" [.pdf]). A serious survey would have phrased some of the assertions in the negative to overcome this natural bias. But the ADL followed its own bias: anti-Semitism should always be found, and the more the better. In fact, if some of this bias, as research indicates, is due to the desire of individuals of lower social status to defer to individuals of higher social status, this could explain why the ADL's survey consistently found that levels of anti-Semitism were higher among people who did not continue education beyond the age of 17.

One also wonders whether the assertion "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust" (note the suggestive adverb "still"!) has much to do with anti-Semitism (cf. Yehuda Elkana's [.pdf] classical "The Need to Forget" [.pdf]). And what on earth made the ADL waste two of their six questions on almost identical assertions ("Jews have too much power in the business world" and "Jews have too much power in international financial markets"), which almost always yielded the same result (correlation coefficient 0.922). Was there a shortage of anti-Semitic assertions?

Just a couple of weeks ago, Foxman – not a man of understatement – made it to the headlines by decrying "a pandemic of anti-Semitism" as a consequence of Operation Cast Lead: the crisis was "the worst, the most intense, the most global that it has been in most of our memories."

Operation Cast Lead began on Dec. 27, 2008. Now the ADL survey was conducted Dec. 1, 2008-Jan. 13, 2009; that is, its last third was conducted during the devastation of Gaza. If there is an "anti-Semitic pandemic" due to the Gaza events, as Foxman claims, a serious survey should have made a clear distinction between data collected before and after the outbreak of that "pandemic." Actually, the ADL should have simply read its own survey to see the necessity of making such a distinction: one of its findings is that "23 percent of those surveyed say that their opinion of Jews is influenced by the actions taken by the state of Israel."

At any rate – careful scientific distinctions aside – if all this were true, a survey conducted partly after the outbreak of the Gaza atrocities would be influenced by the alleged "pandemic" and show a significant rise in anti-Semitism.

Was this the case? Not quite. Actually, as the ADL admits, "A comparison with the 2007 survey indicates that over the past two years levels of anti-Semitism have remained steady in six of the seven countries tested." Who was the party-pooper? Great Britain, of course, home of some of the most effective initiatives to boycott Israel: "The United Kingdom was the only country in which there was a marked decline" in anti-Semitism. Steadiness in six continental countries, a marked decline in the UK – and this in a survey conducted partly during an alleged "pandemic" of anti-Semitism. Go figure.

Don't Confuse Us With Facts

Obviously, the survey was reported widely in the Israeli media. In fact, much like anti-Communism in the U.S. during the 1980s, anti-anti-Semitism is (Jewish) Israel's national religion. Every non-Jew is an anti-Semite, potentially if not actually – be it a bad-tempered waiter in a French restaurant or even Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Anti-Semitism is our best excuse: We do not believe in peace because all Arabs are anti-Semites. We must attack Iran because all Muslims are anti-Semites and want to annihilate us, and the rest of the world is anti-Semitic and doesn't care if we are annihilated. And of course every criticism of Israel's occupation is purely anti-Semitic.

Obviously, reports of steady or declining levels of anti-Semitism is not what Israelis want to hear: anti-Semitism should always be on the rise, to boost our national cohesion.

Therefore both Ha'aretz (Feb. 11, Hebrew) and YNet (Feb. 10, Hebrew) used the partial data of "31% of Europeans Blame the Jews for the Economic Crisis" as an ominous headline. Both focused on the absolute figures of 2009 and kept the inconvenient trend to a marginal penultimate paragraph. Even then, Ha'aretz journalist Natasha Mozgovaya went out of her way to translate the ADL's "marked decline" in British anti-Semitism as "a small decline" (not even bothering to mention what it was compared to), whereas YNet omitted the adjective and wrote just "a decline." And both followed the ADL summary and quickly "balanced" the overall positive trend by emphasizing the negative fraction of the findings.

Make no mistake: some level of racism, including anti-Semitism, does exist in any society; racist Israel is the last place to deny that. But just like real anti-Semitism undermines the Palestinian cause, so do biased surveys and manipulative declarations about anti-Semitism undermine the struggle against racism. And Foxman criticizing one form of racism while supporting another is despicable.

Source: AntiWar.Com

Torture and Impunity

by Chuck Fager

A cargo airliner whose owners are only known to fly for the CIA, refeuling at the Shannon, Ireland, International Airport. There have been many protests against such CIA flight stopovers in Ireland. Photos by Chuck Fager

Will government-sponsored torture remain a shocking anomaly in U.S. public life? Or will it become an accepted precedent, one of the many tools of power in the hands of our rulers?

I believe the United States is approaching a crucial shift from the first state to the second. It can be called the torture transition.

As this is written, our rulers have built Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, a string of secret gulags, and a vast clandestine infrastructure to support them. Their inmates, who number in the thousands, have no legal protections. As the outlines of this system of suffering have been revealed, its architects have trumpeted their open and flagrant defiance of our own laws, international treaties, and the preponderance of informed world opinion.

I spent six weeks in Europe last spring, giving talks about the need for international action to dismantle this torture system. Along the way, I got a taste of just how repelled most thoughtful people on that continent are by this sordid spectacle. And while there, I came to understand better the torture transition and the importance of stopping it.

To be sure, each country I visited has its own shameful history of torture and abuse. Yet the reactions I experienced are not to be confused with hypocrisy. These people know their own countries’ failings well enough. That’s part of the reason for their dismay: they expected better from the United States, the self-proclaimed bastion of freedom and justice.

Nevertheless, most of those I spoke with were holding their breath, and still are, waiting for the rapidly approaching change of administration in Washington. Things are certain to get better then, they seem to feel; how could they possibly get worse?

I’ll tell you how. Things could get worse if the U.S. makes the torture transition.

What’s that?

The answer can be summed up in two words: impunity and precedent.

Impunity means getting away with it. If those who created the torture system and those who managed it are not held to account, they will have achieved impunity, which is now their primary goal.

The "torture transition" is coming nearer, day by day.

And with impunity will come a shift in the underpinnings of torture. It will move from being an outrageous aberration in our public order to being an accepted part of it. It will become precedent. With that change, all the laws and treaties against torture will be worthless, dead letters.

How does this work?

A homely local example will serve. At Quaker House, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I work, there is a sign in the front yard that says, as you might expect, “Quaker House.” It and its predecessors have been there for more than 35 years.

But this sign is in fact illegal. It openly violates local ordinances for residential neighborhoods like ours.

Nevertheless, because it’s been there so long without challenge, it has de facto become legal over time; the term of art is that it is now “grandfathered.” Fayetteville’s ordinance still stands, but so does our sign. We’ve gotten away with it; our sign has achieved impunity.

The same thing could happen with torture, even though—from various reports I’ve seen and heard—there is a good chance that the new President will say that torture is bad and that it will now stop.

Such an action would be good as far as it goes. But it could well mean no more than if, for instance, someone took a weapon that had been used in deadly assaults and put it away in a drawer.

It will still be there, at the ready, when—not if—the temptations of power begin to make the new ruler’s hands itch to use something “more effective,” when pushed to revisit the dark side, and pressed to use it to head off some new forecast of the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario.

If we think a new President, especially one many of us might support, would never do such a thing, I suggest that this is an overly optimistic view.

The weapon of torture will still be there. And next time, if the current perpetrators achieve impunity, it can be used again without hope of restraint. Torture will have been grandfathered into our system as surely as the sign on the Quaker House lawn.

Dick Marty, a Swiss senator and investigator for the Council of Europe, whose reports lifted the curtain on European governments' involvement in torture flights

That’s the torture transition. And it’s coming nearer, day by day.

So what are the chances for impunity? How likely is it that those responsible for the U.S. torture machinery will escape punishment?

According to a man named Dick Marty, right now the chances are good. Very good, in fact.

Dick Marty should know. He’s the Swiss equivalent of a U.S. Senator—and the chief anti-torture investigator for the Council of Europe.

Marty produced two groundbreaking investigative reports that disclosed many hidden details about illegal U.S. torture flights to and across Europe. The reports named Poland and Romania as the sites of similarly unlawful secret U.S. prisons. And Marty charged that the UK had permitted torture flights too—a disclosure that proved correct despite initial government denials.

These reports are now available in book form, under the title CIA above the Law? Secret Detentions and Unlawful Inter-State Transfers of Detainees in Europe, published by the Council of Europe. At $46, the book is pricey, especially because of the decline of the U.S. dollar—which has weakened along with our international reputation. You can still find the reports online, though, for free at “The Council of Europe: Marty’s First Report” and “The Council of Europe: Marty’s Second Report.”

The CIA shrugged off Marty’s reports, and they got little play in the U.S. But elsewhere they are recognized as landmarks, and they haven’t exactly burnished the U.S. image abroad.

While in Europe, I sought an appointment with Dick Marty. Having done some investigative reporting myself, I wanted to pay respects to the author of such a superlative piece of work. More important, I hoped to get his candid view about the torture transition and what to do about it.

We met in his simply furnished office in the stunning city of Lugano, which hugs the shore of a sparkling lake in southern, Italian-speaking Switzerland. Its alpine serenity made a sharply incongruous backdrop for talk about such a grim subject.

Marty himself was informal and mild-mannered, his English limited. But his understanding of the subject was as sharp as I expected.

A protest banner outside Aero Contractors in Smithfield, N.C., October 2007

Without much in the way of introduction, I laid out my key query: Given what he knows, is there any way to stop the torture transition? Or would the perpetrators skate off into the sunset on rollerblades of impunity? (Pardon the amateur crime-fighter argot, but it fits; before Marty ran for the Swiss parliament, he was a tough prosecutor who bested mobsters and drug barons in his home canton of Ticino, which adjoins Italy.)

Marty’s response was unmistakable: “That’s exactly the right question to be asking,” he said.

After that he didn’t have much encouragement to offer, but he’s not in the optimism business. Sure, he agreed, torture is a crime under both international and national treaties and statutes. We don’t need any new laws.

But at a secret NATO meeting in Athens in late 2001, he told me, the U.S. demanded and got assurances of impunity for its military and intelligence agencies for any actions related to the “war on terror” on their territories. Several non-NATO nations, such as Ireland, later signed on as well.

On the home front, repeated government assertions of the doctrine of “state secrets” have thus far stymied efforts even by certifiably innocent torture victims to gain any redress. So, right now, it looks like a lost cause: tough luck, torture victims. And as for lovers of the Bill of Rights: better luck next time.

But Marty wasn’t suggesting I just go home and give up. “This will be a long work,” he said. “It will require patience and determination.” Which means that the current forecast for torturers may be sunny, but, like the weather, that can change.

How? In a lot of ways, mostly a bit at a time.

Here’s a scenario. Pressure keeps building in many countries for investigations of torture. This includes the U.S. after a new administration takes office in January 2009, driven by anti-torture groups and a growing list of their allies. Reporters keep disclosing ugly aspects of the torture structure and the efforts of its architects to achieve impunity. Public opinion begins to shift away from support for torture.

In several other countries, these probes eventually produce legal actions, including lawsuits and criminal complaints. (Reliable reports say that cases are already being prepared in several countries, to surface beginning next January.) And maybe the next President might just decide to keep out of their way.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and other defendants resist and evade the actions, some successfully. But sooner or later, one or more of them makes a misstep. For instance, they travel to a country that honors an outstanding warrant, and the police are waiting.

Behind the fence, at Aero Contractors

If you think this scenario is too far-fetched, think again. Something very much like it happened in the most famous anti-impunity case so far: the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in October 1998. Pinochet was detained there for over a year, and his arrest gave a great impetus to anti-impunity efforts back home in Chile.

But to make anything like that happen in the U.S., where would such a buildup of public pressure come from?

Believe it or not, the most likely place is U.S. churches. There are already several interchurch anti-torture coalitions at work here. Numerous monthly and yearly meetings have joined in, adopting minutes opposing torture. The Quaker Initiative to End Torture has held two conferences on the subject.

Nor are these stirrings limited to the usual liberal suspects. There’s now a group called Evangelicals for Human Rights, based in Atlanta, which has persuaded some heavy hitters in that constituency to sign on and speak out.

All this is encouraging. But even so, Dick Marty’s sober counsel still rings in my mind. Torture is a subject that sends chills down the back for large numbers of us. For too many, those chills freeze the action response. Denial takes over; energy flows to other, less unnerving issues.

That’s been the response in many churches. And thus far, Friends are no exception. It’s been relatively easy for Quaker anti-torture workers to obtain minutes from meetings. But these are merely—pardon the expression—pieces of paper. It’s been much harder to gather a focused, working committee of Friends who are under the weight of this concern and carry leadings for long-term work. Such focused groups have been the necessary nucleus of just about all the best Quaker campaigns over the centuries. We’re still waiting for one to emerge in this effort.

This lag worries me. The stakes in the struggle are extremely high. If the torture transition comes to pass, torture will be regularized in U.S. governance. Our rulers will have effectively gained the ability to declare any citizen outside the protection of the law. And they can do that from above and beyond the restraints of the law, with impunity.

Those two powers—first, to declare any citizen outside the law’s protection, and second, to do so without fear of the law’s restraints—are the essential components of a police state, the pillars of tyranny. That is why I believe in making the prevention of impunity and stopping the torture transition top priorities for work against torture in the coming years.

The torture transition won’t be achieved in one bold declaration; that would risk rebellion. Instead, as it has been coming in recent years, it will advance incrementally, step by step, camouflaged by the rhetoric of “national security,” and hidden behind secrecy wherever possible.

Likewise, this transition will not be halted by any one massive act of protest or by a single election. If impunity is stopped, it will also be bit by bit, case by case. After all, once Augusto Pinochet yielded power in Chile in 1988, it took ten years of persistent work before Scotland Yard showed up at his door in London. Along the way, the Catholic Church was a major factor in breaking through the walls of impunity he tried to build around himself and his minions.

In this kind of work in the U.S., steadfast Friends can join with others to play a significant role. The early phases will not be dramatic: the gathering of an active and rooted Quaker committee; conferences, workshops, and other educational efforts among Friends; building connections with other human rights groups to multiply our impact; and keeping it up for the years to come.

The two Quaker conferences on torture were an excellent start, but the work since has lagged. I hope it will soon be relaunched in the focused, ongoing way called for by the gravity of the task it faces.

When it is, I plan to send Dick Marty a postcard. (How do you say “patience and determination” in Swiss-accented Italian?)

Source: Friends Journal

The Depth of Corruption

The theft of public money by members of Parliament, including government ministers, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill tombstones of column inches and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a public relations man to sell the "leak." Why?

The answer lies in a deeper corruption, which tales of tax evasion and phantom mortgages touch upon but also conceal. Since Margaret Thatcher, British parliamentary democracy has been progressively destroyed as the two main parties have converged into a single-ideology business state, each with almost identical social, economic, and foreign policies. This "project" was completed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, inspired by the political monoculture of the United States. That so many Labor and Tory politicians are now revealed as personally crooked is no more than a metaphor for the anti-democratic system they have forged together.

Their accomplices have been those Westminster journalists and their editors, who have "played the game" willfully, and have deluded the public (and sometimes themselves) that vital, democratic differences exist between the parties. Media-designed opinion polls based on absurdly small samplings, along with a tsunami of comment on personalities and their specious crises, have reduced the "national conversation" to a series of media events, in which the withdrawal of popular consent – as the historically low electoral turnouts under Blair demonstrated – has been abused as apathy.

Having fixed the boundaries of political debate and possibility, self-important paladins, notably liberals, promoted the naked emperor Blair and championed his "values" that would allow "the mind [to] range in search of a better Britain." And when the bloodstains showed, they ran for cover. All of it had been, as Larry David once described an erstwhile crony, "a babbling brook of bullsh*t."

How contrite their former heroes now seem. On May 17, the leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent £10,000 of taxpayers’ money on "media training," called on MPs to "rebuild cross-party trust." The unintended irony of her words recalls one of her first acts as social security secretary more than a decade ago – cutting the benefits of single mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a "revolt" among Labor backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair’s new female MPs, who had been elected "to end male-dominated, Conservative policies," spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor women. All voted for it.

The same was true of the lawless attack on Iraq in 2003, behind which the cross-party Establishment and the political media rallied. Andrew Marr stood in Downing Street and excitedly told BBC viewers that Blair had "said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right." When Blair’s army finally retreated from Basra in May, it left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid, and 4 million refugees.

As for the "celebrating" Iraqis, the vast majority, say Whitehall’s own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation – they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters of the British population wanted.

Such venality goes far beyond the greed of the uppity Hazel Blears.

"Normalizing the unthinkable," Edward Herman’s phrase from his essay "The Banality of Evil," about the division of labor in state crime, is applicable here. On May 18, the Guardian devoted the top of one page to a report headlined, "Blair Awarded $1m Prize for International Relations Work." This prize, announced in Israel soon after the Gaza massacre, was for his "cultural and social impact on the world." You looked in vain for evidence of a spoof or some recognition of the truth. Instead, there was his "optimism about the chance of bringing peace" and his work "designed to forge peace."

This was the same Blair who committed the same crime – deliberately planning the invasion of a country, "the supreme international crime" – for which the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg after proof of his guilt was located in German cabinet documents. Last February, Britain’s "justice" secretary, Jack Straw, blocked publication of crucial cabinet minutes from March 2003 about the planning of the invasion of Iraq, even though the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has ordered their release. For Blair, the unthinkable is both normalized and celebrated.

"How our corrupt MPs are playing into the hands of extremists," said the cover of last week’s New Statesman. But is not their support for the epic crime in Iraq already extremism? And for the murderous imperial adventure in Afghanistan? And for the government’s collusion with torture?

It is as if our public language has finally become Orwellian. Using totalitarian laws approved by a majority of MPs, the police have set up secretive units to combat democratic dissent they call "extremism." Their de facto partners are "security" journalists, a recent breed of state or "lobby" propagandist. On April 9, the BBC’s Newsnight promoted the guilt of 12 "terrorists" arrested in a contrived media drama orchestrated by the prime minister himself. All were later released without charge.

Something is changing in Britain that gives cause for optimism. The British people have probably never been more politically aware and prepared to clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish while stepping angrily over the babbling brook of bullsh*t.

Source: Anti War.Com

The Fading American Dream: The Constitution Circumvented: H.R. 1966 The End of Free Speech and Dissent. THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

The Fading American Dream: The Constitution Circumvented: H.R. 1966 The End of Free Speech and Dissent. THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

Dr. Rand Paul endorses Retakecongress.com

Dr. Rand Paul has just endorsed www.retakecongress.com

"For too long Congress has been controlled by special interest. It's about time for the people to Retake Congress from those Special Interest. I whole-heartedly endorse Retake Congress.com" -- Rand Paul

Dr. Rand Paul is one of other great men that have endorsed www.retakecongress.com and we thank him for his endorsement and his dedication to Liberty. Now Dr. Rand Paul joins men like G. Edward Griffin, Dr. Edwin Viera, Bob Schulz. Their endorsements will soon appear on the website. Come and help us retake congress and put our country back in the hands of the people.

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The reason we founded this organization was to start replacing our elected officials that do not obey the constitution with true Statesman that will not only obey our constitution but will also make sure our rights are protected as written in the constitution and follow it to the letter.

We have also gone a step further than any other political group. Every candidate listed on our web site is required to sign a legal contract that states in short that should they not keep their oath to our platform and their oath to the constitution THEY WILL RESIGN their seat in the congress, then and only then do we accept and add these candidates to our website.

Our goal is to restore the congress to where it was meant to be, elected officials that actually work for the people not their own personal gain and the influence of big corporations and special interest groups.

If we are to make real changes for the better of this country we all need to work together to make this happen. Please volunteer to help a candidate on this website.

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Source: Daily Paul

Has the U.S. Played a Role in Fomenting Unrest During Iran’s Election? by Jeremy R. Hammond &laquo...

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