The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., May 17, 2007: “Bush, shaking with rage, is determined to keep the thoroughly discredited Wolfowitz and the obviously grossly incompetent Gonzales as members of his control circle. That Wolfowitz is a foul-mouthed asshole and Gonzales a brainless Bush hand puppet, they will stay where they are if Bush has his way…and he probably won’t. George is in the corner now and fighting like a sick cat to defend his rapidly shrinking territory and almost non-existent authority. While Israeli leaders are quivering with joy over the election of Sarkozy, they are furious about the coming AIPAC trials and over the probable departure of Wolfowitz, the prime architect of the Iraqi war they so earnestly desired.

The hoped-for invasion, or at least attack, on Iran is not going to happen. It’s not that there is not a will but there is not a way. We are so tied down in Iraq and an attack on Iran could have serious military consequences if they resisted and, worse, counterattacked, that the joint U.S./Israeli plan has been shelved. However, that having been said, I have heard pretty strong rumors that while conventional bombing and ground battles are out, there is a possibility that BW/CW might not be. The Israelis are so furious that we will not do their dirty work for them, that they are threatening some kind of clandestine blackmail against us by threatening to loose anthrax on Iran and blame it on someone else. Who could that be? Why us, of course. They would know nothing. This has the Pentagon, and others, very rattled because Israel is entirely capable of doing this. I suppose they have heard the rumors that the Arabs are going to let smallpoz loose in their country so perhaps they are using this as a preemptive strike. In any case, we would be much better off with either no allies at all or much more rational ones.”

Report: Israel Soldiers Hurt In Secret Anthrax Experiment

May 15, 2007

by Ryan R. Jones –

AHN Middle East Correspondent

Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) - Dozens of Israeli soldiers are today suffering from a wide range of illnesses, some incurable, after participating in a secret experiment to develop an anthrax vaccine.

Israel's Channel 2 News reported that the soldiers have developed skin tumors, severe lung infections, serious migraine headaches, bronchitis and even epilepsy.

Some 800 Israeli soldiers from have participated in the program since 1999. They were sworn to secrecy, and forbidden to tell even their families about the program even after they began displaying serious medical symptoms.

The investigative reporter behind the expose charged that Israel's Defense Ministry has so far refused to take responsibility for the medical care of the soldiers in an effort to maintain the program's secrecy.

Syria, which some military experts fear may soon engage Israel in a war involving heavy use of long-range ballistic missiles, is believed to have a large stockpile of anthrax.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007352603

'Jews have too much sway in US policy'

May. 14, 2007

AP

Many Europeans believe the Jews dictate US policy in the Middle East, wield disproportionate global economic influence and talk too much about the Holocaust, according to a report released Monday by the Anti-Defamation League.

The report's findings found that significant numbers of people in five European countries continue to hold anti-Jewish stereotypes, said Abraham Foxman, national director of the US group.

"A large number of Europeans continue to be infected with anti-Jewish attitudes, holding on to classical anti-Jewish canards and conspiracy theories," Foxman said at a news conference where he presented the report.

The survey of 2,714 people in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland found that 51 percent of respondents believed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they live. In the Spanish sample, the figure was 60%. In France, only 39% agreed.

Foxman said the widely-held belief in dual allegiances was particularly troubling.

"Disloyalty is a classical canard of anti-Semitism," Foxman said. "Hitler did not begin with Aryan supremacy. Hitler began with charging the Jews of not being good Germans, of selling out Germany for their own interest."

The statement that "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust" was seen as "probably true" by 58% of poll respondents in Poland, where many of the World War II Nazi death camps were located. The average for the five countries polled was 47% in agreement.

Poles were also most likely to subscribe to another long-standing belief, with 39% of respondents there saying they somewhat agree or strongly agree that the Jews "are responsible for the death of Christ." Overall agreement with that statement was 20%.

An average of 44% across the countries surveyed said Jews "probably" have too much influence on international financial markets, while close to half believe that "American Jews control US policy in the Middle East," the report said.

Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed said they believed that Jews had too much power in the business world.

In each country surveyed, anti-Jewish stereotypes were more widely believed by those over 65 and those without a college education, the report said, adding that negative attitudes toward Jews had worsened in some areas and remained unchanged in others, compared to a similar survey in 2005.

Foxman said the results showed a "significant relationship" exists between attitudes to Jews and events in the Middle East.

On the Israeli-Arab conflict, a majority of respondents believed Israel had no right to use military force against Lebanon last summer after Hizbullah fighters kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, the report said.

Overall, a majority of respondents considered Hamas a terrorist organization and supported withholding foreign aid to the coalition Palestinian government in which Hamas is a partner, until its leaders renounce violence against Israel and recognize its right to exist.

The survey was conducted by London-based Taylor Nelson Sofres from March 21 through April 16. The margin of error was 4 percentage points.

18/05/2007

Poll: 71% of Israelis want U.S. to strike Iran if talks fail

By Aluf Benn,

Haaretz Correspondent

Fully 71 percent of Israelis believe that the United States should launch a military attack on Iran if diplomatic efforts fail to halt Tehran's nuclear program, according to a new poll.

The survey, commissioned by Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center and the Anti-Defamation League, found that 59 percent of Israelis still believe the war in Iraq was justified, while 36 percent take the opposite view. Some 65 percent believe that the United States is a loyal ally of Israel, with only 11 percent saying the opposite. A slightly higher proportion, 73 percent, described President George W. Bush as friendly. Forty-eight percent attributed U.S. support for Israel to strategic considerations, while 30 percent credited American Jewry and 17 percent cited shared values and a shared democratic tradition.

Regarding America's importance to Israel, there was near consensus: 91 percent said that close relations with the U.S. are vital to Israel's security. Some 51 percent of respondents predicted that the U.S. will ultimately impose an agreement on Israel and the Palestinians, while 43 percent disagreed.

In addition, 52 percent of respondents described American Jewish support of Israel as "sufficient," while 33 percent did not. About half of all Israelis believe that American Jewry is in danger of disappearing due to assimilation, the poll found.

Jerry Falwell: A right-real influence

May 18, 2007

by Bill Berkowitz

Asia Times

OAKLAND, California - The right-wing US Christian evangelist Jerry Falwell, who died on Tuesday at the age of 73, is perhaps best known for his fundamentalist social positions and tirades against lesbians, gays and feminists, not to mention "pagans", "abortionists" and assorted other miscreants.

But Falwell also had a significant impact on US foreign policy over the past 30 years, and was one of the founding fathers here of so-called Christian Zionism - the belief that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical "End Times" prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support.

From his pre-Moral Majority days when he preached against religious folk involved in the civil rights movement, to his support for president Ronald Reagan-backed contra movements in Central America and Africa that were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, to his invective against Nelson Mandela and South Africa's African National Congress and his support for the apartheid regime, Falwell was a Republican Party stalwart and a dependable voice of reaction.

Today, conservative evangelicals are a formidable lobby group in the United States and a key component of the Republican voting base. However, they had largely stayed out of politics until the mid-1970s, when Jimmy Carter's declaration during the 1976 presidential campaign that he had been "born again" rejuvenated the political activism of the evangelical community.

But Carter's more liberal positions on some social issues, and his support for a Palestinian homeland shortly after his election in 1977, alienated right-wing Christian Zionist leaders in the movement, like Falwell and New Right figures Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, who steered evangelicals toward the Republican Party - where they remain today.

In the 1980s, Israel's Likud Party drew closer to the right wing in the US, and Falwell was a key figure in mobilizing conservative Christian voters. In her book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, Sara Diamond notes that Falwell, "often through his television broadcasts and his frequent trips to Israel, played a key role in drawing evangelicals to pay closer attention to Middle East politics".

In 1979, Israel rewarded Falwell with a private jet. Two years later, he received Israel's Jabotinsky Award for his support.

According to one press account, "Jewish-evangelical relations had become so close by the early '80s that, immediately after Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin telephoned Moral Majority leader Reverend Jerry Falwell before calling president Ronald Reagan to ask Falwell to 'explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing'."

Falwell also served on the board of advisors of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, an organization founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the president of the conservative Jewish organization Toward Tradition, and Christian conservative evangelical Gary Bauer, founder of American Values.

This past September, Falwell's church hosted Christians United for Israel's (CUFI) pastor John Hagee, who accused Iran of being behind the summer war between Hezbollah and Israel. "They gave Syria 14,000 missiles and 100 million dollars," he claimed. "Those missiles were given to Hezbollah." Falwell served on the board of CUFI.

In the hours since his death, a number of Falwell's supporters have unstintingly praised him as a seminal and courageous figure of the New Religious Right.

Senator John McCain, who during the 2000 Republican presidential primary called Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance" but had recently sought his support, issued a statement praising Falwell for his contributions.

While Falwell helped place conservative evangelicals at the forefront of the political landscape, he was also in part responsible for coarsening the political dialogue in this country. In a career that was marked by a continuous stream of controversial - and sometimes wacky - statements, perhaps none was as mean-spirited as his reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks. Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club and told Robertson's viewers:

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle ... all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen."

He later apologized for those remarks.

Falwell dated his political activism to the Supreme Court's Roe vs Wade ruling in 1973 that established a woman's right to an abortion. "Believing life begins at conception, I became very exercised over this," he said.

In the late 1970s, Paul Weyrich, widely considered as the guru of the modern conservative movement, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie, the godfather of conservative direct mail, and Howard Phillips tapped televangelist Falwell to head up the Moral Majority. Over the years, as Falwell became more controversial and influential politically, he became a favored guest on cable television's news programs.

With Falwell at the helm, the Moral Majority, founded in 1979, prospered. And, unlike some of his televangelist brethren who were severely wounded by sexual and financial scandals, Falwell's enterprises prospered throughout the 1980s.

After the Moral Majority officially shut down in 1989, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, Dr James Dobson's Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and a host of other conservative Christian groups stepped into the breech. In 2004, Falwell, seeing a political opening and hoping to reconnect with his funding base, announced the formation of an organization called the Moral Majority Coalition, which he characterized as a "21st century resurrection of the Moral Majority".

In his early seventies, after recovering from a serious illness, Falwell focused on making the Christian liberal arts college, Liberty University, which he founded in 1971, his everlasting legacy. The 4,400-acre campus is home to 9,600 students, and another 15,000 are enrolled in its distance learning program.

The mending-fences visit of McCain to the Liberty University campus last year was an example of Falwell's continued involvement in top-level Republican politics. His connection to the founding of the pastor John Hagee's lobbying group, Christian Zionist Christians United for Israel, also showed that Falwell wasn't only about setting up multi-million dollar endowments and fashioning impressive real estate deals.

Nearly 30 years after entering the political fray, Falwell had formidable political clout up until his death.

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column "Conservative Watch" documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the US Right.

Russia sues Bank of New York for 22.5 billion dollars

17.05.2007

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia's Federal Customs Service filed a 22.5 billion dollar lawsuit Thursday against the Bank of New York for money laundering, a lawyer for the service told AFP.

"From 1996 to 1999, the Bank of New York took part in a money laundering scheme in which the Russian Federation suffered 22.5 billion dollars' worth of harm," lawyer Maxim Smal said after filing the suit at Moscow's arbitration court.

A spokeswoman for the court said she could not comment on the case as it had not yet been officially opened.

The bank has been at the centre of a series of Russian money-laundering investigations since 1998, when the FBI and US tax authorities launched a probe into the laundering of seven billion dollars through a Bank of New York (BNY) account by two Russians.

The account was opened in 1996 by Peter Berlin and Lucy Edwards, two Russians living in the United States, allowing billions of dollars in funds to be channelled out of Russia without the payment of capital taxes.

BNY agreed to pay 38 million dollars (28 million euros) to settle the case in a US court in November 2005, including 12 million dollars in compensation to victims and a fine of 26 million dollars.

In 2000, Swiss authorities targeted the bank in an investigation into the suspected embezzlement of a 4.8-billion-dollar International Monetary Fund loan to Russia via BNY accounts.

The Russian Federal Customs Service declined to comment on the current case, and BNY representatives could not be immediately reached for comment.

BNY, which is the oldest bank in the United States, has assets of 103.4 billion dollars, according to the bank's web site

Russian customs service sues Bank of New York for $22 bln

MOSCOW, May 17 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Customs Service filed a suit with the Moscow Arbitration Court against the Bank of New York, a global leader in securities servicing, for $22.5 billion in damages, the service lawyer said Thursday.

"In 1996-99, the bank organized an illegal scheme to launder the money received for Russian exported goods, which caused damages of $22.5 billion to the state," Maxim Smal said from the courtroom.

Russian customs officials or bank representatives could not be reached for comment.

Russian media said Thursday the Bank of New York case was the first "Russian mafia" inquiry that came into the focus of American justice in the late 1990s.

Russia heard about the case in August 1999 from publications in USA Today and The New York Times. The reports cited anonymous FBI sources as saying the bank had helped launder up to $10 billion from Russia and Eastern Europe in 1996-99.

There was speculation that the money could have included Russian loans from the International Monetary Fund, the Russian business daily Kommersant said.

In September, Russian law enforcement officials visited the U.S. to check the reports. But Russia's chief delegate, Deputy FSB Director Viktor Ivanov, said the FBI had refused to provide evidence in the case.

Prosecutor checks in Russian banks suspected of illegal money transfers overseas revealed no violations.

Investigators said $7 billion of Russian money had gone through the Bank of New York, but it later transpired that the funds did not belong to the "Russian mafia," but were untaxed profit of Russian exporters. Prosecutors said Russian citizens and companies had made more than 160,000 illegal transfers abroad in the three and a half years.

In September 1999, a federal court of New York opened criminal proceedings against Lucy Edwards, vice president of the Bank of New York's London branch who dealt with clients in Eastern Europe, and her husband, a Russian emigre and head of the Benex and Becs companies.

The couple were accused of unlicensed bank operations and assistance in money laundering through the Bank of New York.

Edwards and Berlin pleaded guilty and got away with a brief arrest and insignificant fines. They acknowledged charges of illegally transferring Russian money and hiding it in offshore accounts for $1.8 million in kickbacks.

In November 2005, the bank itself pleaded guilty of violating U.S. laws on control over financial flows, and was ordered to pay a $38 million fine.

Maxim Smal, the Russian Customs Service lawyer, said Thursday the suit had been filed "on the basis of an agreement acknowledging guilt, which the Bank of New York had signed with the U.S. government, and on the basis of Lucy Edwards accepting her guilt."