The Voice of the White House

            Washington, D.C. August 20, 2010: “We must thank Julian the Apostate for all of his recent activity with purloined and classified U.S. government documents. Julian and others think that there are under some kind of control but in fact, they are not. Manning sent a number of these around to his hacker friends and they, in turn, sent them to other kindred spirits. This is something that can’t go back into Pandora’s Box and I must say, the reading is a revelation in one sense and a confirmation on the other. Believe it, in these cases (i.e. the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…and now Pakistan) the sins of the fathers will most certainly be visited upon the children.”

Ambassador Report      

{Classification level and other information redacted}

Anne Patterson, Ambassador Islamabad     

To: Department of State

Date: Monday, January 25, 2010

            I refer here to the December 30^th, 2009 attack by Afghanistan terrorists on what was believed to be a “totally secure” C.I.A. base, an attack that killed seven C.I.A. agents and injured, some severely, six others.

             Forward Operating Base Chapman in southeastern Afghanistan is located near town of Khost, not far from Camp Salerno, a larger base used by U.S. Army Special Operations troops.

            The base has been a focal point for counter-terrorism operations against the Haqqani network, a particularly dangerous militant group that operates on both sides of the Afghan border.

            This group has secure bases located inside Pakistan and our intelligence indicates that the Pakistani ISI is in “close and friendly” contact with the leaders of the Haqqani group. The bomber appears to have been a member of this group but identification of the remains has proven to be difficult.

             Forward Operating Base Chapman used to be a U.S. military facility base but was later turned into a C.I.A. base.

            Among those killed, was the C.I.A. chief of the Khost base, who was a mother of three and a veteran of the agency’s clandestine branch. Besides the seven C.I.A. operatives who died, the blast also wounded six agency employees and Harold E. Brown Jr., a State Department employee of Fairfax, Va., also died in the attack,

            The bomber appears to have worn an explosives-laden suicide vest under an Afghan National Army uniform. The attack happened close to dusk, when some people at the base were relaxing in the gym before dinner.

            The bomber had been taken onto the base as a possible informant and was not subjected to the usual rigorous screening. Once inside the perimeter, the bomber had managed to elude security and reach the base’s gym. C.I.A. personnel regularly take foreign agents onto the base before sending them on intelligence collection missions in eastern Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan

            The bomber was being cultivated by agents of the C.I. A. as an informant and it was the first time he had been brought inside the heavily-guarded camp. An experienced CIA debriefer had come in from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose was to gain intelligence.

            Over the past year, the C.I.A. has been building a multiplicity of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, moving significant numbers of agency operatives out of the relative protection of our embassy in Kabul and closer to their targets.

            The C.I.A. has always had a paramilitary branch known as the Special Activities Division, which secretly engaged in the sort of operations more routinely carried out by the U.S. Army’s Special Operations troops. But the C.I.A. branch was a very small, seldom used, part of its overall operations.

             But after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush gave the agency expanded authority to capture or kill Qaeda operatives around the world and wherever they might be found, regardless of diplomatic considerations,  and from that point onwards, the C.I.A. have relied much more on the Special Activities Division because battling suspected terrorists does not involve fighting other military units. Rather, it involves a form of clandestine warfare, permitting C.I.A. personnel to secretly move in and out of countries such as Pakistan and Somalia where the American military is not legally allowed to operate.

            At the present time, the agency is, in effect, running a war in Pakistan. It has also established a network of secret overseas jails where terrorist suspects were subjected to very brutal and often sadistic interrogation techniques, and it set up, and executed,  an assassination program that at one point was outsourced to employees of a private security company, known as Blackwater USA.

             What was once believed could be a quickly-concluded military campaign against Afghanistan terrorists and their allies, [both in that country and in Pakistan,] has gradually turned into a military and political disaster: the mounting lack of success and increased U.S. military casualties have been reflected in current methodology of dealing with the Taliban.

            The current administration has accelerated the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, using Predator and Reaper aircraft to launch missiles and rockets against militants. Or even suspected, in Pakistan.

            These attacks are carried out by elements of the C.I.A. using U.S. Army bases that have been requisitioned for that purpose. Unfortunately, this has led to very serious friction between the higher commands of the Army and the C.I.A. because the Afghanistan and Pakistani population see the Army as the entity that has done considerable damage to the civilian population.

                Additionally, I have received the most severe demands from the Pakistan Interior Ministry that the United States must avoid causing the deaths of Pakistani civilians. Not only does it make the USA hated in this country, but it aso makes the maintenance of order more difficult for the government, and provides grist for the propaganda mills of its opponents.

Also, the Army has stated, repeatedly, that these drone attacks have done little to interdict the Taliban but a great deal to discredit their reputation. The Army feels that what they term “wanton and unnecessary slaughter” of civilians negates their own pacification programs. (See attached report by Defense Attaché Rear Admiral Michael LeFevre) ED. Not included in this posting

            But the Army’s protestations have been overridden by official policy. In early 2009, the White House approved a C.I.A. plan to expand the drone operations in Pakistan into Baluchistan, where top leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia are thought to be hiding, with the full knowledge of the Pakistani government and their ISI

            The C.I.A. has also recently begun sending more operatives into Pakistan to, among other things, gather target intelligence for the drone program. In so doing, the C.I.A., and by association the Army and Special Forces, have drawn highly negative attention to themselves in Pakistan civilian and governmental agencies, and further, have gained the unwelcome attention of the population of Pakistan.

            Over the past year, the C.I.A. has built up a vast network of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, moving their agency operatives out of the embassy in Kabul and closer to their targets.

            These bases most often are, or were, U.S. Army bases and the Afghanistan terrorists believe that their enemy is the Army and its units.

            Afghan President Karzai has been highly critical of the actions of US/NATO forces, although, the bulk of his crriticism has been, and is, aimed at the CIA-controlled drone attacks that have killed many Afghan civilians, to include a dispropotionate number of children.

            Claims of civilians killed by foreign forces are a highly emotional issue among Afghans and feed strong, and growing,  resentment of all international soldiers

            Further, as many of these drone attacks are also directed at targets inside Pakistan and appear to be aimed solely at civilians, there is growing disquiet from the Pakistani government as well.

            As a case in point, the  recent attack in Kunar province has created growing friction between the Afghan government, which said 10 civilians were killed, and NATO, which said there was no evidence to substantiate that claim. In point of fact, independent queries by the Embassy staff here indicates that 20 civilians, eight of them small children, were killed, with an additional 35 maimed or otherwise injured.

            The muted but growing conflict between the various branches of our services, i.e., the Army and the C.I.A., are causing what amount to open rifts in our ranks and these are now being exploited by elements in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other entities outside this arena. It is felt at this level, that such internicine warfare could prove disasterous and in order to present a unified front to our enemies, the heads of the various conflicting groups should, of necessity, get together and resolve these conflicts.

            Perhaps a neutral assessment of the drone attacks should be made and the results presented to higher authority so that a determination can be made regarding their future use.

Anne Patterson, Ambassador Islamabad     

(END)

(Current background…not included in Ambassador’s Report)

             “NATO, the world’s only and history’s first international military bloc, now counts among its members and global partners at least 70 nations on five continents, and has troops from seven Asia-Pacific nations (Australia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Tonga) serving under its command in Afghanistan.

            It has expanded from the northern Atlantic Ocean region over the equator to the Antipodes and the reach of its operations extends from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic, from Africa’s Gulf of Guinea to the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden.

             Securing the safety of Washington and Brussels requires the expansion of a U.S.-dominated military alliance into “the Euro-Asian and Asian-Pacific regions.” Having subdued and subordinated almost all of Europe through membership and partnership expansion over the last eleven years, at its Lisbon summit this November NATO will formalize its 21st century Strategic Concept in respect to placing the European continent under a U.S.-controlled interceptor missile system and expanding military partnerships into those corners of the planet so far left unincorporated into the network of the global, expeditionary military formation among other initiatives.

            NATO troop deployments, utilization and upgrading of bases, armed combat operations, air patrols, naval surveillance and interdiction, armed forces training programs and regular military exercises now occur on the borders and off the coasts of China (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikistan), Iran (Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iraq, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates) and Russia (Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine). There are no longer buffer states between the Western military alliance and major non-NATO nations in Eurasia.

            At the same time the Pentagon is escalating at an unparalleled pace military provocations near China – the recently concluded Invincible Spirit war games in the Sea of Japan with the nuclear-powered supercarrier ‘USS George Washington,’ the same aircraft carrier docking in central Vietnam along with the guided missile destroyer ‘USS John S. McCain’ on August 8 for unprecedented naval exercises in the South China Sea, the Pentagon announcing that the ‘George Washington’ will soon enter the Yellow Sea near China’s coastline – and leading the largest-ever Khaan Quest military exercises in Mongolia with the participation of, for the first time, troops from fellow NATO nations Germany and Canada along with France, as well as four Asian NATO candidates that were included in Khaan Quest 2009: India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Mongolia shares borders with China and Russia.

            Russia, China and Iran are the only major nations outside Latin America that serve as serious barriers to American worldwide military expansion and dominance. By driving into former Soviet territory in the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia, the Pentagon and NATO are completing their military advance on all three nations. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are situated in a compact zone between China, Iran and Russia, and all but Uzbekistan border one or more of the three nations.

             Notwithstanding the deadly upheavals in Kyrgyzstan this April and June, the U.S. and NATO have substantially increased the deployment of troops – at least 50,000 a month – and equipment through the nation for the West’s 150,000-troop, nine-year war in Afghanistan. Washington and Brussels have activated the Northern Distribution Network to transport supplies to the Afghan war front from ports on the Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas through the Caucasus and Central Asia, pulling Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian states deeper into the Western military phalanx.

            This year leading Pentagon, State Department and NATO officials have paid visits to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, including the first trip by a U.S. Secretary of Defense in five years and a Secretary of State in eighteen years to the first-named state. In April President Obama secured military overflight and transit rights from his Kazakh opposite number, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in a nation adjoining China and Russia.

            U.S. ambassador-designate to Azerbaijan, preeminent post-Soviet space hand Matthew Bryza, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 20 that his future host country, “located at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and bordering Iran,” immediately after September 11, 2001 ‘offered us unlimited overflights…for our military aircraft.’

            He added: ‘Today, Azerbaijan continues to provide valuable overflight, refueling, and landing rights for U.S. and coalition aircraft bound for Afghanistan.

             ‘Azerbaijan has also contributed troops to U.S. and coalition military operations in Afghanistan, as well as Kosovo and Iraq….Azerbaijan has also remained a steadfast supporter of Israel.’

            At the same hearing the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, connected the war in Afghanistan and beyond with America’s trans-Eurasian energy campaign against Russia and Iran: Troops and military equipment go to the east and oil and natural gas to the west by the same route.

            ‘I am concerned that the continuing absence of a Senate-confirmed US representative there Azerbaijan could impede progress toward several US national security goals. Our Committee has worked closely with our Envoy for Eurasian Energy, Ambassador Richard Morningstar, to promote the expansion of the Nabucco pipeline, the key element of a southern energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian region to Europe.

             ‘Progress on this measure will allow our allies to diversify energy supplies, while providing nations in the region with a focus for closer cooperation. The Nabucco pipeline’s commercial and political viability will depend on both Azerbaijan’s commitment of its indigenous resources and its willingness to serve as a transport hub for Central Asian energy across the Caspian from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and possibly other countries.

            ‘A close partnership with Azerbaijan and other nations in the South Caucasus will also be essential to ensure the transit of supplies to our troops in the Middle East and to resolve complex disputes concerning the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.’

             Reinhard Mitschek, managing director of Nabucco Gas Pipeline International GmbH in charge of the Western natural gas project from Kazakhstan to Europe, underscored Lugar’s point this June in stating ‘Europe is interested in the purchasing of natural gas from Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iraq and Turkmenistan via the Nabucco pipeline. We came into agreement. Iran’s participation in this project is not a point at issue.’

            In the same month Agence France-Presse quoted the U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan, Ken Gross, confirming that the Pentagon plans to construct a new military facility in the Central Asian nation: ‘The plan includes almost $10 million to build national training center for the Tajik armed forces.’ The new base is to be called the Karatag National Training Center and, according to Gross, could house U.S. military personnel.

            The August 7 edition of the Washington Post substantiated earlier reports that the U.S. plans to establish a comparable base in Kyrgyzstan, which like Tajikistan borders China.

            The article revealed that ‘The United States is planning to move ahead with construction of a $10 million military training base in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, the site of a bloody uprising in June….Called the Osh Polygon, the base was first proposed under former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev as a facility to train Kyrgyz troops for counterterrorism operations. After the ouster of Bakiyev… discussions continued under the new Kyrgyz president, Roza Otunbayeva, with whose government Washington is trying to broaden relationships…Osh Polygon will consist of a secure garrison compound with officers’ quarters and barracks for enlisted personnel, plus range facilities, firing pistols, rifles, crew-served weapons and explosive ordnance….’

            Earlier this month the EurasiaNet website posted a feature titled ‘Is the U.S. Violating Turkmenistan’s Neutrality with the NDN?’ Quoting a Russian source, the piece describes the role of the U.S. and NATO Northern Distribution Network (NDN) in the Turkmen capital: ‘U.S. freight transited through Ashgabat is in fact military in nature and even constitutes criminal contraband. Airport employees claim they saw armored vehicles, combat helicopters and crates of ammunition. These reports challenge both the notion of Turkmen neutrality and the supposed nature of the bilateral agreement between Turkmenistan and the U.S.’

             Turkmenistan is a member of the NATO Partnership for Peace program, but its government doesn’t acknowledge supporting U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention those being prepared against Iran, its neighbor to the north.

             However, ‘The U.S. has gained access to use almost all the military airfields of Turkmenistan, including the airport in Nebit-Dag near the Iranian border, which was reconstructed at American expense. In September 2004, at the Mary-2 airfield, U.S. military experts appeared and began reconstructing the facility with the help of Arab construction companies, which provoked the protest of Moscow….An American military contingent is located in Ashgabat to oversee the operations related to refueling of military airplanes. NATO is also trying to open up a land corridor to bring freight by road and rail….’

            With regards to Uzbekistan, where German NATO troops remain at the Termez airbase although the U.S. military was ousted in 2005, Leonid Gusev of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations was cited last month maintaining that ‘The U.S. is interested in close cooperation with Uzbekistan, as the Central Asian country is strategically important for the U.S.” and that “Uzbek authorities have recently strengthened cooperation with the U.S. and other Western countries.’

            Gusev added: ‘Now non-military goods are delivered through Uzbekistan to Afghanistan for NATO troops.

            ‘There is a free industrial and economic zone, ‘Navoi,’ in Uzbekistan on the border with Afghanistan. It is the main transit point for shipments of goods to Afghanistan.

            ‘This zone may soon be transformed into a transcontinental forwarding air point, which will link the Far East, South-East Asia, South Asia and Europe….The U.S. plans to build a new military base near the Uzbek border to turn Uzbekistan into an important transit point for access to Afghanistan….It is planned to build an operational center, living accommodation, tactical operations center, warehouses, training complex, logistics center…etc. within this project.’

            Last week Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted Afghan and Tajik presidents Hamid Karzai and Emomali Rahmon in Tehran and, according to a Reuters report, ‘Iran’s president told the leaders of Afghanistan and Tajikistan…that the three neighbors could provide a counterweight to NATO in Asia once foreign troops quit the region.’ This is advice that China and Russia are now  taking under serious consideration.

             Ahmadinejad was quoted during a meeting with his counterparts stating ‘The Europeans and NATO are not interested in the progress of our three countries. Those who put pressure from abroad are unwanted guests and should leave.’

            With the announcement of new U.S. military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in addition to the indefinite maintenance of those in the latter country, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and with American and NATO military strength in Afghanistan at a record 150,000 troops, there is no indication that the Pentagon and the North Atlantic military bloc intend to leave the strategic arc that begins in the South Caucasus and ends at the Chinese border.”

NATO Admits to Killing Five Afghan Civilians in Air Strike

Warplanes Targeted Compound Full of Civilians

August 15, 2010

by Jason Ditz,

AntiWar

            NATO issued a statement today, admitting  that reports of civilians killed in an air strike against the Helmand Province of Afghanistan were true, and that at least five civilians were confirmed killed.

Though they insisted that the investigation is still ongoing, NATO conceded that there was “evidence civilians were in the compound targeted by coalition forces during the operation.” This evidence, it appears from the report, included a number of dead and wounded Afghans found inside the compound.

US Brig. Gen. Timothy M. Zadalis expressed regret at the killings, saying “our first objective is to protect the people of Afghanistan, and in this case we may have failed.” The killings were the latest in a rising number of civilian deaths in the nine year long war in Afghanistan.

Though official reports insist the Taliban is responsible for the majority of those killings, the US and its NATO allies are taking considerable blame for the rising toll, likely in no small part because high profile incidents like the one admitted to today keep happening with alarming regularity.

U.S. Leading The Terror In Afghanistan

August 12, 2010
by Ghali Hassan
Countercurrents.org

            “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a real threat to our force”. General Stanley McChrystal, former U.S.-NATO commander in Afghanistan

The U.S.-led war on Afghanistan is like the U.S.-led war on Iraq; to destroy the country and to indiscriminately kill large numbers of Afghan civilians. The aim is to terrorise the civilian population into submission using the so-called “War on Terrorism” as a cover-up for a U.S.-led war of terror.

             According to media reports, the number of Afghan civilians killed by U.S.-NATO troops has more than doubled this year. U.S.-NATO forces killed seventy-two civilians in the first three months of 2010, compared to twenty-nine during the same period in 2009. At least 6000 civilians were killed in 2009. While Western media often blames the “Taliban”, Afghan media sources and few Western media outlets continue to report crimes committed by U.S.-led NATO forces. The following are selected cases as part of an ongoing bloodbath in Afghanistan.

            On 27 December 2009, “American Special Forces” with helicopters landed at Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern Province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them were school students in grades six, nine and ten, and one of them was a guest, the rest from the same family. They handcuffed them before murdering them in cold blood, according to a statement on U.S.-installed “President” Hamed Karzai’s website. According to Jerome Starkey of The Times (31 December 2009): “At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village. … The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.” (See also, Nieman Watchdog).

            As always, U.S.-NATO officials have denied civilians were killed, but Afghan investigators said nearly all those killed were school-age boys. A statement released by Hamid Karzai’s office said that a unit of U.S.-NATO forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village and took ten people from three homes shot them dead.

            On 12 February 2010, in pre-dawn attack, U.S.-NATO forces killed two pregnant mothers, a teenage girl and two local officials in a pre-dawn attack in Khataba, just outside Gardez. Two children who survived the initial attack, slowly bled to death denied medical care. The invading forces then tried to cover-up the murder by claiming that the three pregnant women had been discovered bound and gagged, murdered execution style. According to The Times (05 April 2010), U.S.-NATO forces have “admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night”.

            On 08 May 2010, The New York Times, which often downplays U.S. war crimes, including the atrocity in Afghanistan, revealed that: “Shootings of Afghan civilians by American and NATO convoys at military checkpoints have spiked sharply this year, becoming the leading cause of combined civilian deaths and injuries at the hands of Western forces”. At least twenty-eight Afghans civilians have been killed and forty-three wounded at checkpoints this year. Afghan civilian casualties jumped by 33 percent in a recent month-long period. There were 173 civilian deaths reported from March 21 to April 21 this year.

            On 19 June 2010, The New York Times reported that: “Ten civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in U.S.-NATO airstrikes in Khost Province, the provincial police chief said Saturday. Five other civilians were killed, as were two Afghan National Army soldiers and two police officials, in other violence around the country on Saturday”.

            The Associate Press reported on 09 July 2010, U.S.-NATO forces killed six Afghan civilians and wounded several others in Jani Khel district of Paktia Province in eastern Afghanistan in what described as and artillery shells “went astray”. The attack was “just one day after six Afghan soldiers died in a botched NATO airstrike”. Initially, the U.S. government and the media tried to bury the story and U.S. leaders denied that civilians were killed. It has become nearly impossible to conceal Western-perpetuated war crimes against defenceless population.

            On 24 July 2010, according to Afghan National Directorate for Security, as many as 52 innocent Afghan civilians killed and many more were seriously injured in a U.S.-NATO a missile strike in Rigi village in Sangin district of southern Helmand Province. According to a local press release; “Based on reports by the National Directorate of Security, a house in Rigi village in Sangin district of southern province of Helmand was hit with a rocket launched by NATO/ISAF troops leaving 52 civilians dead including women and children”. Men, women and children were massacred as they took cover, according to the, said the press release.

0n 04 August 2010, more than a dozen Afghan civilians were killed in a night-time raid by U.S. troops in Sherzad district in the Nangahar Province in eastern Afghanistan, reported the Los Angeles Times on 06 August 2010. It is possible that the number of civilians killed in the raid is much higher than it was originally reported.

            These were not few isolated massacres of innocent civilians, but rather part of U.S. ongoing terror against the people of Afghanistan. Evidence shows that the U.S. has always deliberately and indiscriminately targeted the civilian population in its wars against defenceless nations for political gains. The deliberate and systematic destruction of Iraq, including the mass murder of millions of innocent Iraqi civilians (the majority women and children) and the displacement and disappearance of at least 5 million Iraqis as a result of premeditated war of aggression and thirteen years of U.S.-enforced genocidal sanctions (a U.S.-enforced infanticide) followed by seven years of murderous Occupation is a case in point.

            It is true that U.S. crimes are often ignored or downplayed by Western media. However, most of the information about U.S.-led NATO war crimes in Afghanistan, which the organisation Wikileaks took credit for publishing, is available on the Internet and in some of the print media. There are no new “revelations”. Wikileaks provides confirmations of U.S.-led barbarism against defenceless civilian population.

            The Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary, which details a large portion of U.S.-NATO war crimes in more than 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010 is a slap in the face of those, including “progressive” opportunists and colonial feminists, who claim that the war on Afghanistan is for the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people and “democracy”. But, Westerners don’t really care about their governments committing war crimes abroad, especially if the victims are women and children with brown skin colour.

            Today’s Western citizens are carefully manipulated and are too ignorant to care about others. As the philosopher, Bertrand Russell observed: “It is the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know and care about circumstances in the colonies”. People, particularly in the West, are conditioned not to think and not to ask questions. They are fed a daily diet to promote consumerism and militarism. It is a type of brainwashing that Adolf Hitler and his henchmen would have been proud of. That is why war criminals like George W. Bush, Tony Blair – who has become a multi-millionaire from the proceeds of his crimes – and the Australian John Howard were re-elected to power while their armies were involved in two bloodbaths against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

             According to a new epidemiological study concerning the population of Iraq found that, as a result of the use of weapons of mass destructions (WMD), such as “Depleted Uranium” (DU) by U.S. forces on the Iraqi civilian population in Fallujah, the rates of infant mortality, fatal deformities and cancer (mainly Leukaemia) are much higher than those reported by Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. (Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 7, 2010, PDF). Like the criminal attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the attack on Fallujah is a criminal act of terrorism on an epic scale.

            While Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary confirms the U.S. and its allies as bloodthirsty invaders by providing a large and comprehensive summary of information of war crimes, there is nothing new or “top secret” about U.S. militarised violence. The U.S. is the most militarised and dangerous outlaw nation in the world today, second only to the fascist regime in Israel. The U.S. spends more money on its offensive military than all other countries in the world combined, while millions of Americans live in extreme poverty. The stated aim is to project violence on a global scale. U.S. leaders are addicted to violence and there are only a few bloodthirsty fascists outside the U.S. military. “It is fun to shoot some people”, said General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command who has a long and violent record of war crimes against defenceless civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just listen to testimonies by U.S. soldiers themselves to validate their war crimes.

            The enormity of the war crimes in Afghanistan even forced the most violent people in U.S. military to tell the truth. Before his dismissal, former U.S.-NATO commander, Stanley McChrystal, admitted that: “In the nine-plus months I’ve been here in Afghanistan, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it”. McChrystal was not a saint; he was an assassin. He was replaced by a more violent commander, Gen. David Petraeus, who promised to escalate the violence in order to subdue the Afghan Resistance and forced them to make a deal with Washington.

             Furthermore, in an Op-Ed for The New York Times (05 August 2009), former army officers and supporters of U.S.-led war on defenceless nations, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum have called for a halt on civilian killing. Quoting Pakistani sources, they write that, U.S. unmanned drones had “killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent – hardly ‘precision’”. They believe too much violence is exposing the true goal of U.S. imperialist ideology which is to control Afghanistan’s geostrategic position in Central Asia.

            The principle of U.S. Christian-fascist ideology has always been to intervene in other nations’ affairs, using military threat, terrorism and overwhelming violence against the civilian population. U.S. politicians and U.S. apologists justify this “policy of barbarism” as U.S. “exceptionalism” or U.S. “right”, which is based on the false assumption that the U.S. and its allies can dominate and change societies through violence and suffering. For example, despite overwhelming evidence of needless bloodbath in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. government and U.S. vassals continue to insist that their wars on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are “morally and politically justifiable” wars, using the manipulative rhetoric of “democracy” and “human rights” as a cover.

            What the Afghan War Diary does, it supports the C.I.A. propaganda and provides U.S. Zionist leaders with ammunition to attack Pakistan and Iran. It is possible that the C.I.A. and the Pentagon use Wikileaks to spread anti-Pakistan and anti-Iran propaganda. In fact, the C.I.A. has a history of leaking false information to manipulate public opinion and cover-up U.S. war crimes. According to Wikileaks co-founder, Julian Assange: “We contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the white House did not accept that request”. So, where is the “top secret” or “classified” information?

            In reality, the U.S. and the British governments expressed no serious interest in the Afghan War Diary and have criticised Pakistan alleged support for the “Taliban”. However, Western politicians and Western media use the Afghan War Diary to threatened and warn ordinary people who oppose the war. Wikileaks is being accused of “moral culpability” as if Western leaders who were responsible for the premeditated mass murder of millions of Afghan and Iraqi civilians are Christian saints. George Bush, Tony Blair and their accomplices should be arrested and tried for war crimes.

            U.S. President Barack Obama used Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary to announce “change in strategy”. The President pleaded for the U.S. House of Representatives to pass legislation to fund the war on Afghanistan for another year. Thirty-six hours after Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that funds the bloodbath in Afghanistan with extra $33 billion and 30,000 more troops.

            The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has accused Pakistan of “exporting” of terrorism, forgetting his own country’s complicity in terrorism and the mass slaughters of innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians. Credible media sources revealed that the U.S. and Britain are secretly financing and arming different groups through the increase in the cultivation and trafficking of narcotic drug. (See: Peter Dale Scott, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 5, 2010). According to Russian and Iranian media sources, the U.S. earn “about $50 billion a year from trafficking in drugs often transported out of Afghanistan in body bags on American planes”. The U.S.-NATO aim is to prolong the violence and justify long-term occupation of the region (Daniella Peled, The Guardian, 25 May 2010) using the pretext of “terrorism” as a cover.

            The fact that, the West’s major pro-war newspapers, the British Guardian, the Zionist New York Times and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel have been contacted first to publish the so-called “revelations” is suspicious. Indeed, the Guardian and the New York Times have called for the escalation of the war. “It’s very strange that such a large cache of information can be leaked to the mainstream media so conveniently. Is something deliberate? What is its purpose? We’ll be looking into that”, a Pakistani official familiar with the Wikileaks’ “revelations” told Declan Walsh of the Guardian. The information serves the U.S. purpose of targeting Pakistan and Iran, both fingered by Wikileaks of supporting the “Taliban”. Of course, India and Israel couldn’t be happier.

            The Afghan War Diary plays in the hands of the anti-Muslims warmongers. According to The Guardian: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency“. Where is the evidence? Can anyone imagine the Guardian accusing the U.S. of fuelling the Afghan Resistance (the so-called, “Mujahideen”) against Soviet troops? The allegation that Pakistan’s intelligence agency is arming and training the “Taliban” is a falsehood. Western media and politicians have become addicted on attacking Pakistan and deliberately making false accusations against Pakistan in order to deflect attention away from their own crimes.

It is important to remember that Pakistan (a Muslim nation) is forced (by the U.S.) to participate in U.S.-led war not only against the people of Afghanistan but also against its own people and Pakistan vital strategic interests. Since the U.S. illegal invasion of Afghanistan, 

“Pakistan has lost more soldiers than the combined losses suffered by foreign forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and five times more civilians than those lost in the 9/11 strikes, which eminently reflect on Pakistan’s commitment to the war on terror”, writes Javed Hussain, a retired officer in the Pakistan Army. For each targeted assassination by U.S. drones in Pakistan, 140 innocent Pakistani civilians were also killed in a deliberate act of terrorism. According to Pakistani media, attacks by U.S. drones killed 708 people in 44 attacks targeting the Pakistani tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. “On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day”. (Dawn, 02 January 2010). Meanwhile, the leader of the Pakistani corrupted elites (President Asif Ali Zardari) is visiting European leaders – his nation’s enemies – at a time when the Pakistani people are struggling to cope with the worst-ever floods in Pakistan’s history. Taking advantage of a corrupt government in Pakistan, U.S. leaders have extended their war into Pakistan, using the same pretext to cover-up the war on Afghanistan with dire consequences for the people of the region.

             Afghanistan was not “a training camp for terrorists”, as it is often accused by Western politicians and Western media. The truth is, in 1979 the U.S. government of president Jimmy Carter began covert operation of training and arming warlords and militias against the democratically-elected Afghan government months before Soviet troops went into Afghanistan. In the early 1980s, the U.S. established a training base (‘al-Qaeda’) in Afghanistan to sabotage and fight the Soviet troops in the country, using militant fighters from around the world. They were named by the C.I.A. the “Mujahideen” to associate them with Islam. After the Soviets withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the “Mujahideen” took control of the country and began a bloody infighting. The “Taliban” – funded and armed by the C.I.A. – defeated the “Mujahideen” in a criminal war that ravaged the country. According to C.I.A. officials, there are no more than 100 ‘al-Qaeda’ fighters in Afghanistan today. (For an analysis, see: Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story). The linking Afghanistan to the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. is a flawed argument.

            There is no evidence to prove Afghanistan’s or any other Muslim nation involvement in the 9/11 attacks. All Muslim nations and organisations have unequivocally condemned the attacks. In order to commit attacks like 9/11, one needs state-of-the-art resources and well-connected contacts. The official story remains unsubstantiated and unproven.

             Overwhelming evidence shows that the Israeli Mossad agents, the C.I.A. and influential U.S. Zionists in the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Early this year, Israeli Mossad agents were able to acquire and counterfeited more than twenty foreign passports to murder a Palestinian politician Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, an act of terrorism that was condoned by several Western nations. Israel is the only nation which welcomed the 9/11 attacks. “It is very good” for Israel, said Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli Prime Minister. (See: Christopher Ketcham, CounterPunch, 07 March 2007).

            The 9/11 attacks were used as an “opportunity” not only to justify war against Muslim nations, but also to instil fear and disseminate anti-Muslim propaganda. Many People, including most Americans have been coerced and indoctrinated to believed that it was morally justified to attack Afghanistan and Iraq as a response to the 9/11 attacks. The argument advanced by Western politicians and Western media that, “We were attacked and we have to fight back” is preposterous.

             According to Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, the U.S. and its allies have no case for self-defence, because: “The necessity for self-defence must be ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice for means, and had no moment for deliberation’”. Like the war on Iraq, the war on Afghanistan constitutes an act of illegal aggression in violation of UN Charter and international law.

             According to credible media and NGOs reports, the Afghan Resistance against the U.S.-NATO war is a collection of native Afghani movements, legitimately fighting to liberate their land from foreign invaders. There are no “terrorist bases” in Afghanistan that threaten Western societies. The biggest terrorist bases in the world are not in Muslim nations, they are in Washington and Tel Aviv. From there, nearly all terror operations are organised and financed. The two countries are war-hungry and rightly viewed by the majority of world’s people as the two greatest threats to world’s peace and stability.

             Meanwhile, a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights claims over two-thirds of Afghans live in dire poverty. The report criticises the “international community” for emphasizing security over development and also cites widespread corruption within the U.S.-installed puppet government of warlords and criminals. The ‘National Survey 2010’ by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) revealed that, under the Occupation, corruption has worsened, particularly in the police, justice, health, and education sectors where the Occupation authorities exert most power. Corruption, of course, is one of imperialism’s most effective tools to control the occupied population, violence is the other. There is no occupation without a corrupted and criminal puppet government. It is not coincident that Afghanistan and Iraq are ranked very high among the most corrupt countries in the world.

            Finally, the U.S.-NATO Occupation is responsible for the worst human rights abused, including torture, rape and denial of personal freedom. Moreover, the Afghanistan Rights Monitor reported: “In terms of insecurity, 2010 has been the worst year since the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001”. Security is the new pretext for the ongoing Occupation. Women rights have all but disappeared even before the Occupation.

            The situation for women (one of the pretexts to invade Afghanistan is to “liberate” Afghan women) is far worse than before the invasion. The U.S.-backed “Mujahideen” and “Taliban” warlords have reversed all the gains that had been made in 1970s and the 1980s under the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) progressive government of Noor Mohammad Taraki. It is shameful, that Western politicians, academics and colonial feminists use women rights to advocate for ongoing Occupation of Afghanistan.

            If anything, conditions have gotten worse for children in Afghanistan since the invasion. According to a report by UNICEF, under U.S.-NATO Occupation, Afghanistan is the worst place for children to be born. The report says: “Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world with 257 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 70 percent of Afghans have access to clean water” The country “is especially dangerous for girls”, added the report. One-quarter of Afghan children will not reach the age of five, and life expectancy for Afghans is only 44 years. A new study says nearly two out of every three male youths jailed in Afghanistan are physically abused. The children’s rights organization Terre des Hommes says its findings are based on interviews with 40 percent of all those jailed in Afghan juvenile detention centres. One hundred thirty out of 208 male youths said they had been beaten since their arrest.

            The vast majority of the people of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) have rejected the Occupation and demanding an end to the presence of foreign troops in their countries. After nine years of murderous Occupation, opposition to the U.S.-led terror in Afghanistan is also rising among the populations of the countries involved in the Occupation. The latest Gallup opinion poll shows support for the Obama Administration’s war policy has declined from 48 per cent in February 2010 to 36 per cent. Moreover, 43 per cent of Americans believe the war was illegal. In Britain, 72 per cent of the public opposes Britain involvement in the Occupation and the ongoing terror in Afghanistan.

            The U.S. has inflicted great suffering on the people of Afghanistan. It is time for U.S. leaders and U.S. allies in the war on Afghanistan to renounce the use of violence and terrorism, and withdraw their forces from Afghanistan. The U.S. should concentrate instead on developing friendly and peaceful relations with all nations based on mutual respect and broad common interests to safeguard world peace.
Australia         
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in
 
U.S. Strategy in Pakistan Is Upended by Floods

August 18, 2010

by Mark Landler

 

New York Times

             WASHINGTON — The floods in Pakistan have upended the Obama administration’s carefully honed strategy there, confronting the United States with a vast humanitarian crisis and militant groups determined to exploit the misery, in a country that was already one of its thorniest problems.

While the administration has kept its public emphasis on the relief effort, senior officials are busy assessing the longer-term strategic impact. One official said the disaster would affect virtually every aspect of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan, and could have ripple effects on the war in Afghanistan and the broader American battle against Al Qaeda.

With Pakistan’s economy suffering a grievous blow, the administration could be forced to redirect parts of its $7.5 billion economic aid package for Pakistan to urgent needs like rebuilding bridges, rather than more ambitious goals like upgrading the rickety electricity grid.

Beyond that, the United States will be dealing with a crippled Pakistani government and a military that, for now, has switched its focus from rooting out insurgents to plucking people from the floodwaters. The Pakistani authorities, a senior American official said, have been “stretched to the breaking point” by the crisis. Their ragged response has fueled fears that the Taliban will make gains by stepping in to provide emergency meals and shelter.

“It certainly has security implications,” said another official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss internal policy deliberations. “An army that is consumed by flood relief is not conducting counterinsurgency operations.”

On Thursday, the United Nations will convene a special meeting devoted to the floods, hoping to galvanize what has been a lackluster global response. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce that American public aid has surpassed $100 million, an official said.

“We’re obviously not oblivious to the political and strategic implications of this catastrophe, but right now, we are fully focused on the emergency relief effort and trying to get a good assessment of the needs,” said the administration’s special representative to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke.

Noting that several weeks remain in the monsoon season, Mr. Holbrooke said, “Worse may be yet to come.”

The disaster comes after a period in which the administration seemed to have made strides in repairing the American relationship with Pakistan. Mrs. Clinton visited Islamabad in July with a long list of pledges, including the upgrading of several power plants and a plan to promote Pakistani mangoes. Now, these projects seem almost beside the point.

“Before, there were power plants in need of refurbishment,” said Daniel S. Markey, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Now there are power plants underwater.”

In recent days, the United States has sent 15 helicopters, rescuing nearly 6,000 people. On Wednesday, military cargo planes delivered 60,000 pounds of food and other relief supplies, bringing total deliveries to 717,000 pounds. The speed and scale of the effort, officials in both countries said, have helped bolster the checkered American image in Pakistan.

In another hopeful sign, officials said Pakistan and India had been in close touch about the floodwaters, some of which are flowing into Pakistan from India. Such communication, between historic archenemies, could augur reduced tension in other areas, one of the officials said.

Against that, however, are the staggering dimensions of the disaster. A senior Pakistani official told the administration on Tuesday that the next flood surge was likely to inundate much of Punjab, the densely populated region that borders India and produces much of Pakistan’s food.

So far, this official said, the greatest damage has been in regions that are also hotbeds for Islamic insurgents, which has set back the army’s fight against extremist groups. Local governments in those places have largely collapsed, leaving the army as the only source of authority.

With 20 million people displaced from their homes, the Pakistani authorities are girding themselves for an immense migration to the major cities, which they fear could sow further instability.

“Americans have not yet registered the enormity of the crisis,” Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said in a telephone interview from Islamabad, the capital.

Pakistani and American officials said reports of hard-line Islamic charities providing relief were exaggerated. One pointed out that the floods had hurt the insurgents as well: there was a report of small arms and ammunition belonging to a militant group floating in the water.

Still, people in both countries warned that if rebuilding and rehabilitation efforts bogged down, the Taliban and other militant groups would try to take advantage of it. “The real test is, can their government provide the most fundamental services?” said an administration official.

Parallels to this crisis are hard to find. One official cited the example of the Indonesian province of Aceh, which had been racked by a three-decade insurgency fought by the separatist Free Aceh Movement. After the tsunami swept through in 2004, killing 170,000 people, the separatists and the Indonesian government quickly signed a peace treaty, in August 2005.

There are, however, big differences between a localized separatist group and an international jihadist movement.

“If the flood proves to tilt the balance of power in Pakistan, it’s more likely to tilt toward the militants than toward the government,” said Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence official who helped the administration formulate its initial policy for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Already, Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, has been exposed to withering criticism at home for going on a trip to Europe during the early days of the flood. American officials said they were determined not to get drawn into the dispute, noting that in any event, Mr. Zardari had been stripped of many of his powers in a recent constitutional change.

Decisions on how the flood will affect American economic aid may be influenced by a trip to Pakistan by Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who co-sponsored the five-year nonmilitary assistance package with Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana.

Senator Kerry, accompanied by Dan Feldman, a deputy to Mr. Holbrooke, is scheduled to tour the flooded areas on Thursday. Mr. Kerry has said he is open to redirecting aid money, though some analysts said they were skeptical that Congress would approve additional financing. Military aid may also come under scrutiny, according to administration officials.

“Every dimension of our relationship — politics, economics, security — is going to see major shifts as a result of this historic disaster,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “All the tools of diplomacy have to be examined in light of this new reality.”
                         

Robert Fisk: US troops say goodbye to Iraq

Torture. Corruption. Civil war. America has certainly left its mark

August 20, 2010

The Independent/UK

When you invade someone else’s country, there has to be a first soldier – just as there has to be a last.

The first man in front of the first unit of the first column of the invading American army to reach Fardous Square in the centre of Baghdad in 2003 was Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment. For that reason, of course, he pointed out to me that he wasn’t a soldier at all. Marines are not soldiers. They are Marines. But he hadn’t talked to his mom for two months and so – equally inevitably – I offered him my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. Every journalist knows you’ll get a good story if you lend your phone to a soldier in a war.

“Hi, you guys,” Corporal Breeze bellowed. “I’m in Baghdad. I’m ringing to say ‘Hi! I love you. I’m doing fine. I love you guys.’ The war will be over in a few days. I’ll see you soon.” Yes, they all said the war would be over soon. They didn’t consult the Iraqis about this pleasant notion. The first suicide bombers – a policeman in a car and then two women in a car – had already hit the Americans on the long highway up to Baghdad. There would be hundreds more. There will be hundreds more in Iraq in the future.

So we should not be taken in by the tomfoolery on the Kuwaiti border in the last few hours, the departure of the last “combat” troops from Iraq two weeks ahead of schedule. Nor by the infantile cries of “We won” from teenage soldiers, some of whom must have been 12-years-old when George W Bush sent his army off on this catastrophic Iraqi adventure. They are leaving behind 50,000 men and women – a third of the entire US occupation force – who will be attacked and who will still have to fight against the insurgency.

Yes, officially they are there to train the gunmen and militiamen and the poorest of the poor who have joined the new Iraqi army, whose own commander does not believe they will be ready to defend their country until 2020. But they will still be in occupation – for surely one of the the “American interests” they must defend is their own presence – along with the thousands of armed and indisciplined mercenaries, western and eastern, who are shooting their way around Iraq to safeguard our precious western diplomats and businessmen. So say it out loud: we are not leaving.

Instead, the millions of American soldiers who have passed through Iraq have brought the Iraqis a plague. From Afghanistan – in which they showed as much interest after 2001 as they will show when they start “leaving” that country next year – they brought the infection of al-Qa’ida. They brought the disease of civil war. They injected Iraq with corruption on a grand scale. They stamped the seal of torture on Abu Ghraib – a worthy successor to the same prison under Saddam’s vile rule – after stamping the seal of torture on Bagram and the black prisons of Afghanistan. They sectarianised a country that, for all its Saddamite brutality and corruption, had hitherto held its Sunnis and Shias together.

And because the Shias would invariably rule in this new “democracy”, the American soldiers gave Iran the victory it had sought so vainly in the terrible 1980-88 war against Saddam. Indeed, men who had attacked the US embassy in Kuwait in the bad old days – men who were allies of the suicide bombers who blew up the Marine base in Beirut in 1983 – now help to run Iraq. The Dawa were “terrorists” in those days. Now they are “democrats”. Funny how we’ve forgotten the 241 US servicemen who died in the Lebanon adventure. Corporal David Breeze was probably two or three-years-old then.

But the sickness continued. America’s disaster in Iraq infected Jordan with al-Qa’ida – the hotel bombings in Amman – and then Lebanon again. The arrival of the gunmen from Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian camp in the north of Lebanon – their 34-day war with the Lebanese army – and the scores of civilian dead were a direct result of the Sunni uprising in Iraq. Al-Qa’ida had arrived in Lebanon. Then Iraq under the Americans re-infected Afghanistan with the suicide bomber, the self-immolator who turned America’s soldiers from men who fight to men who hide.

Anyway, they are busy re-writing the narrative now. Up to a million Iraqis are dead. Blair cares nothing about them – they do not feature, please note, in his royalties generosity. And nor do most of the American soldiers. They came. They saw. They lost. And now they say they’ve won. How the Arabs, surviving on six hours of electricity a day in their bleak country, must be hoping for no more victories like this one.

 

Then and now

 

3,000 The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed last year. That’s less than a tenth of the 34,500 killed in 2007 but it’s still testament to the dangers faced each day by Iraqis.

 

200 The number of Iraqis known to be still held in US custody – a fraction of the 26,000 held in military prisons three years ago.

 

15.5 The average number of hours of electricity a day Baghdad receives, a marked impovement from the six hours it got three years ago but still not up to pre-invasions standards, when Iraqi cities could rely on 24-hour power.

The right’s latest weapon: ‘Zionist editing’ on Wikipedia

‘Idea is not to make Wikipedia rightist but for it to include our point of view,’ Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council says.

August 18, 2010

by Nir Hasson

          For years now, Wikipedia has been a fierce battleground between the Israeli right and left. One key battle was over the entry for Bil’in and whether the weekly struggle at that village near the security fence should be described as violent.

Another battle was over the description of the Ariel University Center. Was it “the largest public college in Israel”? Or should an institution in Ariel not be considered as being in Israel? So a compromise was reached: “the largest Israeli public college.”

Now the Yesha Council of settlements and another right-wing group, Israel Sheli, are embarking on a Wikipedia battle: Zionist editing on the Web-based encyclopedia. The first course was held yesterday in Jerusalem.

“The idea is not to make Wikipedia rightist but for it to include our point of view,” said Naftali Bennett, the director of the Yesha Council.

“The Internet is not managed well enough, and Israel’s position there is appalling. Take for example the Turkish flotilla [to Gaza]. During the first hours we were nowhere to be found. In those first hours millions of people typed the words Gaza-bound flotilla and read what was written on Wikipedia.”

The course was designed to teach how to register for, contribute to and edit for Wikipedia.

The organizers’ aim was twofold: to affect Israeli public opinion by having people who share their ideological viewpoint take part in writing and editing for the Hebrew version, and to write in English so Israel’s image can be bolstered abroad.

The Yesha Council also announced a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor” – the person who over the next four years incorporates the most “Zionist” changes in the encyclopedia. That lucky encyclopedist will receive a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.

Some 50 people took part in the course, nearly all of them religious and many from settlements. Ruthie Avraham, who lives in Beit El and works in media, said she already knew the subject of the first Wikipedia entry she planned to write about.

“The entry on Jewish family,” she said. “The first sentence will be that the Jewish family is the ultimate response to the Western crisis of isolation and lack of affection.”

According to Einat Bornstein, another participant in the course, “I came here to have an impact. I think people are afraid to write rightist responses.”

She didn’t hesitate when asked about the first entry she intends to contribute to: Hanin Zuabi, the Arab MK who took part in the flotilla. “And also about the Turkish flotilla and the settlements and the settlement enterprise.”

 

 

The Conversations with the Crow

          When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert  T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.

             Crowley did not listen to them (no one else ever does, either) and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.

            Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:

http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm🙂

 

Here is the twenty-fourth  chapter

Conversation No. 24

Date: Wednesday, July 17, 1996

Commenced: 9:20 AM CST

Concluded: !0:11 AM CST

RTC: Good day, Gregory.

GD: And a good day to you, too. How are you doing?
RTC: A decent day today. And you?

GD: Busy with the new Mueller book.

RTC: Anything of interest to me?
GD: No, probably not at this point. I am working on the real origins of the Second World War at this point. Not the he-said or they-said fictional crap and pap but the real meat. Taylor[1] covered much of this in his book on the subject but there is more. I discuss the threat of Poland in 1932 to physically invade Germany if Hitler were not silenced. They moved troops to the borders but the threats gradually subsided. Hitler, on the other hand, did not forget this. And Beck, their foreign minister, was an idiot and could easily have diverted the German threat of aggression. But I look more into the economic aspect of the war. Germany lost all her gold reserves after the war because she had to pay everyone in sight for a war she did not start. Then the western states kept the corrupt Weimar government afloat with short-term and high-interest loans. Weimar was corrupt and degenerate but Germany was a great producer of saleable goods so she was encouraged to work more. All of this post-Wilsonian manipulation was directly responsible for the conditions that allowed Hitler to assume power. There were two things he did that assured eventual war with England and the United States. One, he instituted the barter system whereby Germany would trade, let us say, new locomotives to the Argentine in exchange for their beef and wheat. Normally, Germany would have gone to the London banking houses for a loan, high interest of course. Or the Argentine people would have done the same. The barter system completely bypassed them and they stood to lose billions of pounds thereby. And, do not forget, that the British bankers were almost all Jewish and there was on-gong anti-Semitism in Germany. It wasn’t Hitler’s aim, postwar bullshit pseudo-historians to the contrary, to kill off all the Jews. He only wanted to root them out of German society and force them to emigrate.

RTC: But to where? No one wanted any of them. Jews are not liked, you know.

GD: Nor trusted. Müller set up training schools so that Jews could learn farming and go to Palestine. Wonderful! The Arabs howled and so did the British. They did not want Jews there at all. Diplomatic representations were made and Ribbentrop ran to Hitler so the useful project was stopped. Then, Mueller told me he chartered the SS.’St. Louis’ to take 900 Jews to Havana. Everything OK except that when Roosevelt found out about this, he forced the Cubans to cancel their landing permits. Isn’t that wonderful of him? And Roosevelt and Breckenridge Long did everything they could to keep Jewish Germans out of the country. Even little children. And parenthetically, note that in 1941, Roosevelt seized over two hundred million dollars in Jewish assets in this country and kept them. Never gave a penny back either. His son got some of it. Oh, all in the archives but believe me, Robert, not a word then, now or ever in our press. Can’t do that. It was all the evil Hitler, not Roosevelt. 

RTC: You say that if Hitler were not such an anti-Semite, there might not have been a war?
GD: Hitler was institutionally anti-Semitic, Robert. You see, the Germans had always gotten along with their Jews who had been in the country for a long time. No, after Pilsudski, the same one who threatened to invade Germany in ’32, came to power in Poland, he forced out huge numbers of Polish Jews, most of whom fled either to Germany or the United States. The German Jews were Sephardic, Semitic and cultured but the Polish Jews were Khazars, Mongoloid Turks, brutal, nasty and detested by both the Polish and the Imperial Russians. I have met a few in situ and believe me, they are all vicious swine. So, they flooded into a prostrate Germany in the early ‘20s and stole everything they could. By the way, these so called eastern Jews were detested by the German ones. But these were the Jews that enraged their German hosts and brought down the active persecutions and expulsions.  Interesting to note that after the war when many of the Polish Jews were released from the detention camps, they tried to go back to Poland where they were promptly subjected to pogroms and wholesale death. No, they then went to Israel where they make up most of the population and now practice their filthiness on the defenseless Arabs. But that’s off the topic here. It was Hitler’s attitude towards the Jews coupled with the potentially lethal barter system that spelled his doom. The Jewish bankers both in Britain and here got together and started a huge propaganda campaign against the Germans and egged both Roosevelt and Churchill into making trouble.

RTC: But Churchill was not in power in the late ‘30s.

GD: I know but he had influence and wrote for the press. These bankers hired Winnie to front for them and whore that he was, he went right along with them.  You can find some of this in Fuller and the rest in other unnoticed publications but it’s all there. Marx was right when he discussed the economic backgrounds to major wars. Yes, Robert, make room for General Fuller in your library and you will have a much clearer view. Of course none of this will ever get into the American press because guess who owns it?
RTC: I well know, Gregory. But they work with us and I see no Don Quixote-like necessity to cut my own throat or that of the Company. The Jews have a great power in this country now and one does not attack them; one works with them if you take my drift.

GD: Oh, I understand fully. Do you like them, Robert?

RTC: Evil little rats, Gregory, treacherous, envious and dangerous in the extreme. I know this sounds terrible but even though I am well aware that Hitler never gassed them, he should have. All of them and then there would be peace. There will never be peace in the Middle East unless and until Israel grabs up all the useful Arab lands and expels them from the area the way they were expelled from Poland and Germany. Remember, Gregory, that the abused child becomes the abusing parent.  Send me the references on Fuller and I will send you a stack of papers on this subject. And if you choose to use them, for the Lord God’s sake, keep me out of it. The Jews would make my life miserable here.

GD: I know. They would insert a newly discovered chapter into the fake Ann Frank diaries all about you visiting Holland during the war and shoving plump Jewish babies into bonfires. By the way, all seriousness aside, I have discovered rare documents that at least partially supports the silly Holocaust stories. Would I bore you?

RTC: No, certainly not.

GD: In April of 1943, all the Jews of Europe were transported to Berlin and when there, were jammed into the Alexander Platz in Berlin. At the stroke of noon on April 20^th, his birthday, Hitler came out onto his balcony and addressed an immense crowd of German Girl Scouts and school children. A cannon was fired and this huge army of girls, all armed with weenie forks, charged into the Alexander Platz and butchered at least thirty million screaming Jews. My God, the Swedish Ambassador wrote that huge raging rivers of blood roared down the Berlin streets, swamping cars and drowning thousands of Berliners before running into the Spee and Havel rivers. Ah, Robert, the truth is worse than the fictions. And the SS and Postal Employees barbecued the remains, after removing interesting tattoos for the lampshade makers, and Berlin feasted for weeks afterwards.

RTC: (Loud and prolonged laughter) Gregory, you are really a terrible person. You will kill me with these stories. No, I know it isn’t true. I mean I knew that when you mentioned the Postal employees.  If you ever told that story to a Jew, he would either beat you to death with his purse or literally explode with anger. Do tell that to Tom Kimmel, why don’t you? I would love to hear him when he rang me up, babbling about how psychotic you are. Or, better still, why not tell it to Wolfe?

GD: Oh, I think not. Bob is very old and getting senile and he might just melt down like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving only a pair of sodden dignity pants and a beanie behind. No, I just thought you would like to hear what that nut Irving calls the Real Truth for once.

RTC: Well, such a nice history, lesson Gregory. The Hebrews should be happy you have a limited audience or they might get agitated.

GD: Pascal once said that to destroy a man, make a fool out of him. Humor is a great weapon and as I have said before when I tell my little stories, always look for the truth in the jest!

(Concluded at 10 :11 AM CST)

Dramatis personae:

James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden, and fatal, “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight to the United States.

James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organizaed the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.

Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.

Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley.) Lives comfortably in a nice house overlooking the Mediterranean.

Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first, the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.

Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired and lives in retirement in Florida

Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.

Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller  became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.

Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this. Neither were his employers.

Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarian and then failed them. First, a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.

Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Archives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers.

Note: We understand that a large collection of documents, assembled by Robert T. Crowley, will be offered to the public in the near future. Here is a listing of some of the documents which will be included:

DOCUMENT CATALOG

 

Catalog Number               Description of Contents                                      __________________________________________________________________________________

1000 BH            Extensive file (1,205 pages) of reports on Operation PHOENIX. Final paper dated January, 1971, first document dated  October, 1967. Covers the setting up of Regional Interrogation Centers, staffing, torture techniques including electric shock, beatings, chemical injections. CIA agents involved and includes a listing of U.S. military units to include Military Police, CIC and Special Forces groups involved. After-action reports from various military units to include 9^th Infantry, showing the deliberate killing of all unarmed civilians located in areas suspected of harboring or supplying Viet Cong units. *

1002 BH            Medium file (223 pages)  concerning the fomenting of civil disobedience in Chile as the result of the Allende election in 1970. Included are pay vouchers for CIA bribery efforts with Chilean labor organization and student activist groups, U.S. military units involved in the final revolt, letter from  T. Karamessines, CIA Operations Director to Chile CIA Station Chief Paul Wimert, passing along a specific order from Nixon via Kissinger to kill Allende when the coup was successful. Communications to Pinochet with Nixon instructions to root out by force any remaining left wing leaders.

1003 BH                  Medium file (187 pages) of reports of CIA assets containing photographs of Soviet missile sites, airfields and other strategic sites taken from commercial aircraft. Detailed descriptions of targets attached to each picture or pictures.

1004 BH            Large file (1560 pages) of CIA reports on Canadian radio intelligence intercepts from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa (1958) and a list of suspected and identified Soviet agents or sympathizers in Canada, to include members of the Canadian Parliament and military.

1005 BH          Medium file (219 pages) of members of the German Bundeswehr in the employ of the CIA. The report covers the Innere Führung group plus members of the signals intelligence service. Another report, attached, covers CIA assets in German Foreign Office positions, in Germany and in diplomatic missions abroad.

1006:BH            Long file (1,287 pages) of events leading up to the killing of Josef Stalin in 1953 to include reports on contacts with L.P. Beria who planned to kill Stalin, believing himself to be the target for removal. Names of cut outs, CIA personnel in Finland and Denmark are noted as are original communications from Beria and agreements as to his standing down in the DDR and a list of MVD/KGB files on American informants from 1933 to present. A report on a blood-thinning agent to be made available to Beria to put into Stalin’s food plus twenty two reports from Soviet doctors on Stalin’s health, high blood pressure etc. A report on areas of cooperation between Beria’s people and CIA controllers in the event of a successful coup. *

1007 BH            Short list (125 pages) of CIA contacts with members of the American media to include press and television and book publishers. Names of contacts with bios are included as are a list of payments made and specific leaked material supplied. Also appended is a shorter list of foreign publications. Under date of August, 1989 with updates to 1992. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Bradlee of the same paper, Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson and others are included.

1008 BH            A file of eighteen reports (total of 899 pages) documenting illegal activities on the part of members of the U.S. Congress. First report dated July 29, 1950 and final one September 15, 1992. Of especial note is a long file on Senator McCarthy dealing with homosexuality and alcoholism. Also an attached note concerning the Truman Administration’s use of McCarthy to remove targeted Communists. These reports contain copies of FBI surveillance reports, to include photographs and reference to tape recordings, dealing with sexual events with male and female prostitutes, drug use, bribery, and other matters.

1009 BH            A long multiple file (1,564 pages) dealing with the CIA part (Kermit Roosevelt) in overthrowing the populist Persian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Report from Dulles (John Foster) concerning a replacement, by force if necessary and to include a full copy of AJAX operation. Letters from AIOC on million dollar bribe paid directly to J.Angleton, head of SOG. Support of Shah requires exclusive contracts with specified western oil companies. Reports dated from May 1951 through August, 1953.

1010 BH            Medium file (419 pages) of telephone intercepts made by order of J.J. Angleton of the telephone conversations between RFK and one G.N. Bolshakov. Phone calls between 1962-1963 inclusive. Also copies of intercepted and inspected mail from RFK containing classified U.S. documents and sent to a cut-out identified as one used by Bolshakov, a Russian press (TASS) employee. Report on Bolshakov’s GRU connections.

1011 BH            Large file (988 pages) on 1961 Korean revolt of Kwangju revolt led by General Park Chung-hee and General Kin-Jong-pil. Reports on contacts maintained by CIA station in Japan to include payments made to both men, plans for the coup, lists of “undesirables” to be liquidated  Additional material on CIA connections with KCIA personnel and an agreement with them  to assassinate South Korean chief of state, Park, in 1979.

1012 BH            Small file (12 pages) of homosexual activities between FBI Director Hoover and his aide, Tolson. Surveillance pictures taken in San Francisco hotel and report by CIA agents involved. Report analyzed in 1962.

1013 BH             Long file (1,699 pages) on General Edward Lansdale. First report a study signed by DCI Dulles in  September of 1954 concerning a growing situation in former French Indo-China. There are reports by and about Lansdale starting with his attachment to the OPC in 1949-50 where he and Frank Wisner coordinated policy in neutralizing Communist influence in the Philippines.. Landsale was then sent to Saigon under diplomatic cover and many copies of his period reports are copied here. Very interesting background material including strong connections with the Catholic Church concerning Catholic Vietnamese and exchanges of intelligence information between the two entities.

1014 BH            Short file (78 pages) concerning  a Dr. Frank Olson. Olson was at the U.S. Army chemical warfare base at Ft. Detrick in Maryland and was involved with a Dr. Gottleib. Gottleib was working on a plan to introduce psychotic-inducing drugs into the water supply of the Soviet Embassy. Apparently he tested the drugs on CIA personnel first. Reports of psychotic behavior by Olson and more police and official reports on his defenstration by Gottleib’s associates. A cover-up was instituted and a number of in-house CIA memoranda attest to this. Also a discussion by Gottleib on various poisons and drugs he was experimenting with and another report of people who had died as a result of Gottleib’s various experiments and CIA efforts to neutralize any public knowledge of these. *

1015 BH            Medium file (457 pages) on CIA connections with the Columbian-based Medellín drug ring. Eight CIA internal reports, three DoS reports, one FBI report on CIA operative Milan Rodríguez and his connections with this drug ring. Receipts for CIA payments to Rodríguez of over $3 million in CIA funds,showing the routings of the money, cut-outs and payments. CIA reports on sabotaging  DEA investigations. A three-part study of the Nicaraguan Contras, also a CIA-organized and paid for organization.

1016 BH            A small file (159 pages) containing lists of known Nazi intelligence and scientific people recruited in Germany from 1946 onwards, initially by the U.S. Army and later by the CIA. A detailed list of the original names and positions of the persons involved plus their relocation information. Has three U.S. Army and one FBI report on the subject.

1017 BH            A small list (54 pages) of American business entities with “significant” connections to the CIA. Each business is listed along with relevant information on its owners/operators, previous and on going contacts with the CIA’s Robert Crowley, also a list of national advertising agencies with similar information. Much information about suppressed news stories and planted stories. *

(cont…)

Declassified Senate Investigation Files Reveal Clandestine Israeli PR Campaign in America

August 18, 2010

PRNewswire-USNewswire/

 

             WASHINGTON, — Declassified files from a Senate investigation into Israeli-funded covert public relations and lobbying activity in the United States were released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on July 23rd, 2010.  The subpoenaed documents reveal Israel’s clandestine programs for “cultivation of editors,” the “stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines” as well as U.S. reporting about sensitive subjects such as the Dimona nuclear weapons facility.

             Documents are now available for download from http://IRmep.org/ila/azc include:

            Dimona (excerpt): “The nuclear reactor story inspired comment from many sources; editorial writers, columnists, science writers and cartoonists.  Most of the press seemed finally to accept the thesis that the reactor was being built for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.” http://www.irmep.org/11-121960AZC.pdf

            Content placement and promotion (excerpt): “The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country.  We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories… Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America…Our Committee is now planning articles for the women’s magazines for the trade and business publications.” http://www.irmep.org/09101961AZC.pdf

             Pressure campaigns (excerpt): “It can be said that the press of the nation…has by and large shown sympathy and understanding of Israel’s position.  There are, of course, exceptions, notably the Scripps-Howard chain where we still need to achieve a ‘break-through,’ the Pulliam chain (where some progress has been made) and some locally-owned papers.” http://www.irmep.org/11-121960AZC.pdf  

             Magazine Committee achievements (excerpt): “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines….” http://www.IRmep.org/10301962_AZC.pdf  

             According to Grant F. Smith, director of IRmep, “It is frightening how easily some in the American news media surrendered to a foreign public relations campaign that spent the 2010 equivalent of $36 million over two years. Time has proven most of the planted content to be misleading, if not dangerous.  These historical documents hold many important lessons for Americans who have long needed—but rarely received—straight reporting on key Middle East issues.”

            The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper.  It retains 1%-3% of the most important documents of business conducted by the United States Federal government.  The Israel Lobby Archive, http://IRmep.org/ila is a unit of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington.

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[1]  A.J.P. Taylor   March 25 1906 – September 7, 1990 was a renowned English historian of the 20th century. Taylor’s work, ‘The Origins of the Second World War’  conflicted with the official American and British scenarios but is considered by reliable historians as a landmark work on the subject.