Shenali Waduge

What Western media avoids to do is reveal the role of multinational mining corporations from North America and Europe fueling conflicts. Many are not aware that global leaders have personal stakes in these global conglomerates – George Bush is a Board director of Barrick Gold Corporation

When the US bombed Yugoslavia including the Chinese embassy and other embassies what did the UN do? Does the UN not know that the UN Security Council members possess the largest arsenal of weapons? Did the UN not accept the WMD version of the US and has the UN even apologised for the damage they have done to Iraq and its people since the 1990s

If we are to assume that very little help in terms of "honest" decision making, non-permanent members of the council need to start building unity amongst themselves or a break in the US and EU relations forcing France, Russia and China to resist the US and British pressures.

Replacing colonialism today is neo-colonialism and its offspring economic liberalism. Facilitating modern forms of "interventions" upon sovereign nations is the United Nations (UN) whose laws, protocols, conventions etc have been designed to legalise and necessitate these actions. To execute these programmes are terminologies like "responsibility to protect" 'human rights", "press freedom" and even "terrorism" which all eventually leads to approval for foreign presence and eventually enable these states to have their country "looted" of its natural resources. Further strangulating these nations are internationally "approved" institutes like the World Bank, IMF with their "structural adjustment programmes" wherein countries are made to compromise and open up their markets wherein western nations suck out countries of its riches. Ideally, suited are puppet governments to advance western interests but in countries where leaders have shown astuteness or signs of bravado to stand against western dictates, their weak areas are targeted and this is where Sri Lankan citizenry must be alert to ensure that the country’s leaders do not stray nor allow the country to be compromised. All facets of neo-colonial activity is what prevails in modern trade, international laws and diplomacies.

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Ian Williams Goddard

"Thought patterns that enslave the individual cannot be seen by the eye. Only careful logical analysis can expose them, but for those entrained to think illogically -- to obey without question -- these thought patterns remain invisible. A society is bound by no chain stronger than the skillfully forged chain of flawed thought that molds the beliefs of each person to fit predictably into the master plan."

The road to human freedom questions authority, the road to serfdom obeys authority without question. Dropping any pretense of independent investigation, the major media obey and relay the word of governmental authorities without question. The road the major media would lead us upon is quite clear.

Obeying the word of authority without question, an Associated Press article [1] questions “rumors” that could implicate authorities in the explosion of TWA flight 800, which killed 230 people ( early reports stated that the Navy was conducting off-shore maneuvers below the plane at the time of the explosion; more than 100 witnesses, including two pilots in another plane, said the plane was hit by a missile-like object ascending from the ocean [2].

The AP article states:

One persistent rumor is that a U.S. warship or
aircraft downed the jet with an errant missile
and the government is covering it up. The invest-
igation has not turned up anything to support
this, said Rear Adm. Edward Kristensen, head
of the Navy salvage operation off Long Island.

Since the Navy said there was no evidence that the Navy may have killed 230 people, it therefore follows that the Navy must be innocent. The reports of Navy maneuvers, the 100+ eyewitnesses, the sequence of explosions consistent with a missile hit, the radar reading of an approaching object, the traces of an explosive used in surface-to-air missiles,... all this evidence is magically swept away by the almighty word of a potentially guilty government official. This level of journalistic inquiry is a transparent farce.

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Jeff Gates

It’s impossible to know what goes on in the Oval Office. All the public sees is photo-ops and scripted comments. Was Barack Obama’s adoration of the Israeli Prime Minister meant as a subtle manipulation? Was this “keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”

If so, that would be good news for the U.S. provided he grasps that he’s been played for a fool — with the help of his top advisers. His political career is a product of the Chicago Outfit, including his presidency. Can he rise above that? I need to believe that he can.

What we witnessed this week at the White House was words of praise for the leader of a government that has strategically deceived the U.S. for more than six decades. Yet President Obama assured us that he now “trusts” a spokesman for Israel’s ultra-right Likud Party.

Was this presidential subtlety? Perhaps Obama praised “Bibi” Netanyahu a bit too much? Isn’t that what a commander-in-chief would say if he was trying to lull an Israeli leader into a false sense of security so he would misstep?

It’s not like Obama could just blurt out: “Hey Bibi, here’s the new deal. We’re going to endorse the one state solution, declare Jerusalem a cultural heritage site under U.N. protection, recover for Palestinians their occupied land and safeguard them with 30,000 troops that we’re airlifting in from Afghanistan. Oh, and we’re going to secure your nuclear arsenal—tomorrow.”

That may be too rational for such an emotional issue. After all, Americans have yet to sort facts from fiction when it involves “the promised land,” the Exodus mythology and the heroic saga of the long-suffering “Israelites” in search of a “homeland.”

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Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood exposes the contradictions, hypocrisy and un-Christian essence of a “Christian” Zionist body known as “the Church’s Ministry among Jewish People”, which despite being an apologist for Israeli crimes against Palestinian Christians and Muslims, is an official ministry of the Church of England – in effect its official Zionist wing.

Ever heard of the CMJ (the Church's Ministry among Jewish People)?

Neither had I until I saw a parish magazine recently announcing a talk by the CMJ's director of advocacy to a local Church of England study group about "God's purpose for the Jewish people and Great Britain's involvement in the formation of modern Israel".

Apparently, the CMJ has a proud 200-year history and is a worldwide ministry sharing with Jewish people its belief that not only is Jesus the Saviour of the world, but he is the Jewish Messiah. CMJ is "propelled by devotion to God and the fulfillment of His promises to His people Israel", and it feels a need to provide in-depth teaching on the Jewish roots of the Christian faith.

CMJ’s USA website talks of “the spiritual rebirth of the Jewish people and the education of the Christian church in its call to take the Gospel to ‘the Jew first’.”

And in its statement of faith the CMJ says Christians have “a special responsibility to love, defend and share the Gospel with God's historic, chosen people, the Jews”.

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Arthur Silber

Introduction: A Valuable Opportunity

In one of those happy accidents occasionally encountered during the examination of complex issues over a period of years, a new article provides me a remarkable opportunity. The article offers a distilled example of certain analytic failures I've discussed a number of times. But that is only on the first and most superficial level of consideration.

Below the surface, the article reveals the operation of mechanisms of denial that I've also examined in the past. These mechanisms can be detected in the commentary offered by almost every contemporary writer, among well-known and prominent writers and also in the remarks of relatively obscure bloggers.

An extended analysis of these issues will allow me to trace the ways in which the mechanisms of denial work, and how these mechanisms result in the more obvious analytic failures. In addition to reviewing some observations I've already made and showing, in connection with a new and unusually revealing example, how they operate, I will provide additional information I've long planned to write about.

The article to which I refer may represent a surprising choice to many people, even to some regular readers here. It's by Andrew Bacevich: "Non-Believer." Bacevich is commonly regarded as a strong critic of America's aggressively interventionist foreign policy. Not surprisingly, his new piece has already been widely linked by many of those who are "antiwar," usually with enthusiastic approval for his views. I myself have linked Bacevich's writing on several past occasions. While preparing these new posts of mine, and in reviewing some of Bacevich's earlier essays (including a few I hadn't read before), I realized that I was in error in praising Bacevich to the extent I did. But then, my own understanding of these issues has increased considerably in the last several years.

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Chase Madar

President Obama may lack the nerve to stare down Liz Cheney or Bibi Netanyahu, but no one can deny that our commander in chief has the guts to take on a child soldier. Come August, a military commission in Guantánamo will try Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002, when he was just 15 years old. This will be only the third Gitmo trial and the Obama administration’s first, and there won’t be anything kinder and gentler about it.

But give our government credit for breaking new ground: no nation has tried a child soldier for war crimes since World War II, and the decision to prosecute Khadr has drawn protests from UNICEF, headed by a former U.S. national security adviser, as well as every major human-rights group. The audacity doesn’t stop there: charges against Khadr include “murder in violation of the rules of war,” a newly minted war crime novel to the history of armed conflict. Battlefield deaths do not usually result in murder trials for prisoners of war. But according to the Department of Defense, Omar Khadr is no POW. He’s a non-uniformed, “unprivileged belligerent.” In the euphemistic lingo of Gitmo, Khadr is not even a prisoner, just a “detainee” who has been awaiting trial for the past eight years.

This kind of court action would have made great copy under Cheney and Bush, noisome proof of their barbarity. Now everyone except the Right’s usual panic-merchants is sick of Guantánamo and wishes it had closed, as Obama promised, by the end of 2009. But that deadline has passed, and Gitmo will surely be open next year too. Several reporters told me they had to beg their editors to be sent down to cover the Khadr story.

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Stephen Lendman

Jewish squatters take over a home in east Jerusalem. Its Palestinian
owners were evicted.

The UN General Assembly's 1947 Resolution 181 internationalized Jerusalem as a separate body (a corpus separatum), administered by a UN Trustee Council, a policy still binding but not followed. Nor have other resolutions or international law provisions Israel rejects, ones interfering with its military occupation, affecting E. Jerusalem Palestinians repressively since June 1967, more still after passage of the July 30, 1980 Basic Law, declaring "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel."

Yet on June 30, 1980, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 476 (America abstaining), declaring "all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant (Fourth Geneva) violation."

Following Israel's non-compliance, the SC unanimously passed Resolution 478 (America again abstaining), "censur[ing Israel] in the strongest term" for enacting the Jerusalem Basic Law, calling it a violation of international law, saying the Council doesn't recognize it, and telling member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city.

The Security Council and General Assembly reaffirmed their positions that East Jerusalem is occupied territory, that expropriating its land is illegal, and that all Israeli legislative and administrative measures, altering the city's character and status, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith. To this day, Israel never complied, continuing its relentless policies of land seizures, home demolitions, and dispossessions, flagrantly flouting its obligations under international law.

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Khalid Amayreh

In 1978, the famous American Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal wrote his masterpiece book “the Zionist connection: what price peace?”, in which he described in great detail the Jewish-Zionist stranglehold on the American media, especially the so-called agenda-setters.

Lilienthal, who died two years ago, knew what he was talking about. He explained that the Zionist cabal controlling the American media had only one mantra to invoke, one cause to serve, and one goal to achieve, namely Israel. Every other consideration, whether professional ethics or simple honesty, was subject to Zionist expediency.

Lilienthal used strong terms to describe the Zionist-Jewish octopus plaguing the American media discourse. I have no doubt that he would have cited the sacking by CNN this week of its senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, as a classical and scandalous example of how the American media is decidedly at Israel’s beck and call.

Nasr was sacked after she published a twitter message saying that she respected the Shiite cleric the Grand Ayatollah Muhammed Hussein Fadlullah, who died on Sunday.

She reportedly wrote in her twitter message “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlullah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

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Bishop Donald Corder

Throughout most of history empires were built largely through military force or the threat of it. But, at the end of World War II , the emergence of the Soviet Union, and the specter of nuclear holocaust, the military option in and of itself became just too risky. The decisive moment occurred in 1951, when Iran rebelled against a British oil company that was exploiting Iranian natural resources and its people. The forerunner of British Petroleum, today’s BP. In response the highly popular, democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized all Iranian petroleum assets. And an outraged England sought help of her World War II ally, the United States.

Instead of sending in the Marines, therefore, Washington dispatched CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. With a sinister precision he performed brilliantly in winning over the people through payoffs and threats of key centers of influence. He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh was both unpopular and inept. In the end, Mossadegh went down, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The pro-American Mohammad Reza Shah became the unchallenged dictator. Kermit Roosevelt had successfully reshaped Middle East history even as it rendered obsolete all the old strategies for empire building.

In its dream of global empire (as envisioned by men like president Johnson and Nixon), it would have to employ strategies modeled on Roosevelt’s Iranian example. A new type of revolutionary ploy was also witnessed: the empowerment of international corporations and of multinational organization as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Who, were primarily funded through the United States and sister empire builders in Europe. A symbiotic relationship developed between governments, corporations, and multinational organizations invaded and defined the global capitalist stage where capital of a dominant class prepared the designs to subjugate the planet and its resources to US interests.

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Joharah Baker

Almost every subject can be argued two ways, especially when the subject at hand is as controversial as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. No matter how unjust the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip is, there will always be those biased souls that justify it with the “Hamas terrorists” argument and the hackneyed Israeli pretext of state security. However, one subject, which cannot possibly have a flip side to it, is the torture of children. Only a deranged and perverted mind could justify that. Oh, and of course, Israel’s security establishment.

On May 18, Defense for Children International released a press statement in which it said it had filed a complaint with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in which it documented the cases of 14 Palestinian children who were either sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault by Israeli interrogators, soldiers or police last year. Throughout 2009, DCI’s Palestine chapter reviewed over 100 affidavits from Palestinian minors between the ages of 12 to 16 who gave sworn testimonies of their torture and sexual assault at the hands of Israeli soldiers or interrogators.

To read some of these affidavits is shocking. Israeli interrogators bind boys as young as 13 to chairs, sometimes handcuffed, and squeeze their testicles until the child admits to throwing stones. In other sworn affidavits, all of which were taken immediately after the boys were released, the minors recount how Israeli soldiers or interrogators slap them, kick them, call their mothers whores and threaten to rape them. “He started beating me all over my body and once again he grabbed my testicles and started pressing hard. ‘I won’t let go of your testicles unless you confess,’ he said to me. I felt so much pain and kept shouting. I had no other choice but to confess to throwing stones,” said one 15-year old boy in his testimony to DCI.

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Khalid Amayreh

Last week, 338 members of the US House of Representatives signed a petition calling on President Obama to veto any resolution by the United Nations denouncing the murderous Israeli raid on the Gaza freedom Flotilla on 31 May, in which 9 Turkish peace activists were brutally but needlessly killed.

“We urge you to continue to use US influence and, if necessary veto power, to prevent any biased or one-sided resolutions from passing.” The petition, sponsored by Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gary Peters (D-M) viewed the naked Israeli assault, which occurred in international waters, as an act of self-defense. “We believe that it is in the national security interests of the United States to unequivocally reiterate that the US stands behind its longtime fried and ally.”

A similar letter signed by 87 US senators was also sent to President Obama, urging him to uphold Israeli interests irrespective of any other consideration.

In fact, the two letters stopped short of demanding that the US back Israel right or wrong, even if that proves detrimental to American national interests, including national security.

In the final analysis, we are talking about a breed of unprincipled politicians who would have us believe that Israel makes no mistakes, does no wrongs, and commits no crimes.

This is an optimal embodiment of political whoredom in America. Nothing else can sufficiently describe the moral blindness plaguing the US government as a result of this rampant manipulation of American politics.

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Chris Marsden

"In an extraordinary Freudian slip, Obama also told reporters, “We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it’s in, and the threats that are leveled against us—against it, that Israel has unique security requirements. It’s got to be able to respond to threats or any combination of threats in the region. And that’s why we remain unwavering in our commitment to Israel’s security.” [Emphasis added]"

President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a man who “wants peace” and is “willing to take risks for peace.”

He did so following a White House meeting five weeks after the May 31 raid on the Mavi Marmara Gaza aid convoy, in which Israeli forces murdered eight Turkish activists and a dual Turkish-US national. The White House meeting was also on the eve of another round of Israeli settlement expansion on the West Bank.

On the day of the meeting, a report by the human rights group B’Tselem said that Jewish settlements with 300,000 people now control more than 42 percent of all land in the West Bank, including 21 percent of all privately owned Palestinian land.

In March, Obama had made a point of refusing to hold a press conference with Netanyahu after Israel announced the building of 1,600 more Jewish homes while Vice President Joseph Biden was visiting Jerusalem. A “partial freeze” on further building runs out in September, and Israel has made clear it intends further construction.

Netanyahu has also refused to extend an apology to Turkey for the Mavi Marmara raid, and has rejected any international inquiry. With Washington’s support, Israel is holding its own inquiry, headed by a retired Israeli Supreme Court justice. The Israeli investigative committee does not even rise to the level of a state commission of inquiry.

Despite tensions that led to a temporary souring of US-Israel relations, Obama has again made clear the essential continuity of Middle East policy with the Republican Bush administration and underscored the bi-partisan character of US support for Israel. Obama described the relationship between the US and Israel as “unbreakable” and enduring. “It encompasses our national security interests, our strategic interests,” he said, and has “grown closer and closer as time goes on.”

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Stephen Lendman

In his 1966 book, "How the World Really Works," Alan B. Jones included a chapter on the "Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace," later published in 1967 by The Dial Press. It became a bestseller, then disappeared. Now few copies are available, but when circulating in the 1960s, it was reported that concerned Johnson administration officials ordered global US embassies to downplay it, saying it had nothing to do with policy. Later accounts doubted the material's authenticity, suggesting it was a hoax. True or false, its findings are reviewed below because they accurately reflect longstanding US policy.

Prepared by unnamed 15-man "Special Study Group, (SSG)" they were commissioned "by some governmental entity which wished to remain unknown" because of the sensitive nature of its assignment, completed after two and a half years work, from August 1963 - March 1966, at a secret Iron Mountain, New York "underground nuclear hideout."

First surfacing in 1961, the idea originated during the Kennedy administration, senior officials Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and others, knowing there was no serious plan for peace at a time the president wanted to end the Cold War. An SSG member only identified as "John Doe" revealed it.

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Blake Sifton

Though their actions invoke less dramatic imagery than the interrogators and prison guards who tortured and humiliated Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, equally guilty are the legions of professionals who facilitated the abuse.

Although the principal maxim of medical ethics is “First do no harm,” psychologists and doctors working for the military and CIA actively assisted in the torture of human beings. Psychologists helped fine-tune techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, and doctors often monitored harsh interrogations, intervening when necessary to keep struggling prisoners alive and alert so the questioning could continue.

How could medical professionals demonstrate such little empathy in the presence of human suffering?

“People are capable of incredible cruelty. It’s increased in circumstances where there aren’t clear rules and boundaries,” says psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Soldz. “We dehumanized the enemy after 9/11. We did it as a culture and the military did it spectacularly well. Like many others, military doctors felt a duty to serve their country.”

In 2007 Dr. Soldz urged the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in the interrogation of terror suspects.

“Professional ethics are always weak,” he says. “We have wonderful statements by professional associations about what the ethics are, but many people don’t internalize them.”

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Alex Deane
Big Brother Watch

Photography is NOT A CRIME. We are not terrorists.

Yet more abuse of photographers in a public place.

As I have written before about the police and demonstrations, and specifically about photography, one of the worst repercussions of the anti-terror legislation is the blanket powers officers wrongly think it gives them to hassle people when they fancy it. A minor named Jules Mattsson was taking photographs of a parade in Romford recently. The result is quite extraordinary.

Confronted by the police for doing precisely nothing wrong, this young man admirably stood up for himself and maintained, rightly, that he was entitled to take pictures in a public place. The police, as they have done so often in these cases, bullied and hectored him under imaginary "powers". Listen to the footage - their behaviour is quite astonishing.

An officer bluntly asserts that it is an offence to take pictures of children. Wrong. Then he is told by an officer called "John Fisher" that it is a "criminal offence" to take pictures of police officers and police staff. Entirely wrong. He is shouted at and bullied and told that he is being treated like this because he is an "agitator". He is told, nonsensically, that he is being moved on "for his own safety" because he would be trampled by the parade if he stayed where he was - despite the fact that it is clear from the recording that he is standing there solely because an officer has hold of him!

The journalist asks again and again the law under which he is being detained, held, questioned - a question to which an answer is of course a basic right when being detained, held, questioned by the police. He never gets one.

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Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza City, Gaza July 4, 2010

Palestinian fisherman on the shore in Gaza City. A Lebanese ship
was stopped by the Israeli navy and is being escorted into port.

[Many thanks to the anonymous commenter who posted this in response to my plea for information on the current state of the Gaza Blockade. They didn't post a link, so it is reproduced here in full. As I suspected, there has been no real change in the Israeli strangulation of Gaza. -Craig Murray]

Ketchup, mayonnaise, thread and needles are the items that were included last week by Israel on the list of those few goods now allowed into Gaza. Farming tools, spare parts for cars, toys and make-up were added to the list on Tuesday, items we watched being carried into the Strip loaded onto 130 trucks.

Taking into account the decision of the Israeli government to "loosen" the siege of Gaza by allowing the entry of more goods, B'Tselem, the Israeli organisation for human rights commented: "This is a first, tiny step towards the right direction, the direction which'll bring Israeli policy in line with its obligations."

A veritable microscopic step, considering that before the start of the siege, more than ten thousand trucks a month would drive through the Karni pass alone, and even then, these deliveries were miles away from the 500 truckfuls of goods a day (15,000 trucks a month), the minimum decreed by the United Nations to cover the basic needs of one and a half million people.

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B'Tselem

July 2010, Comprehensive report: The cloak of legality that Israel has sought to give to the settlement enterprise is aimed at covering the ongoing theft of West Bank land, thereby removing the basic values of legality and justice from Israel’s system of law enforcement in the West Bank. The report exposes the system Israel has adopted as a tool to advance political objectives, enabling the systematic infringement of the Palestinians’ human rights.

Some half a million Israelis are now living over the Green Line: more than 300,000 in 121 settlements and about one hundred outposts, which control 42 percent of the land area of the West Bank, and the rest in twelve neighborhoods that Israel established on land it annexed to the Jerusalem Municipality. The report analyzes the means employed by Israel to gain control of land for building the settlements. In preparing the report, B'Tselem relied on official state data and documents, among them Attorney Talia Sasson’s report on the outposts, the database produced by Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel, reports of the state comptroller, and maps of the Civil Administration.

The settlement enterprise has been characterized, since its inception, by an instrumental, cynical, and even criminal approach to international law, local legislation, Israeli military orders, and Israeli law, which has enabled the continuous pilfering of land from Palestinians in the West Bank.

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Stephen Lendman

The Middle East Monitor (MEMO) covers significant regional issues and events through its weekly newspaper and reports like Samira Quraishy's September 2009 Briefing Paper titled, "The Judaization of Jerusalem," discussing Israel's "escalating campaign of land seizures, house demolitions and eviction(s) of Palestinians."

Israeli scholars agree, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Professor Oren Yiftachel, in a 1999 paper titled "Ethnocracy: the Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine," saying Israel is an ethnocratic regime "enhanc(ing) a rule by, and for, a specific ethnos, and a dominance of ethnicity over citizenship (by) facilitat(ing) the expansion of one ethnic group over contested territory or polity." It evolved around "the central Zionist (uni-ethnic) project of Judaizing and de-Arabising Israel/Palestine, (and as a consequence undermining) equal citizenship and popular sovereignty," reserving it solely for Jews, exposing the myth of a democratic nation.

Hebrew University Professor Moshe Ma'oz, Ankara's Bilkent University Professor Jeremy Salt, Professor Norman Finkelstein, Professor James Petras, and many other scholars agree that Israel pursued this policy since 1967, planning it decades earlier, based on the Zionist notion of dispossessing Arabs to make greater Israel an exclusive Jewish state.

Jerusalem is its epicenter, a religiously important city for Christians, Muslims and Jews, today the scene of epic injustice and discrimination of its Palestinian residents.

For Zionists, the city is politically important, as its historic capital, national and religious center, as well as the symbol of Judaism's revival and prominence. For Christians, it's where Jesus lived and died, and for Muslims it's their third holiest site (the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque) after Mecca's Sacred Mosque and the Mosque of the Prophet in Madina.

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Sherwood Ross

American doctors in the Middle East routinely approved the torture of captured suspects and denied them critical medications such as insulin, sometimes with lethal consequences, according to a documented report published in the "Utne Reader."

In Dec., 2002, Defense Secy. Donald Rumsfeld issued a directive allowing interrogators to withhold medical care in nonemergency situations so that "men with injuries including gunshot wounds were denied treatment as a way to make them talk," writes author Justine Sharrock. Although the directive was soon revoked, "the practice continued," she said.

Interrogations conducted at the infamous Abu Ghraib correctional facility in Baghdad had to be preapproved by a physician and psychiatrist, and the CIA got like orders for the punishments it inflicted at its sites.

Sharrock quotes medic Andrew Duffy of the 134th medical company of the Iowa National Guard who told her the attitude of Abu Ghraib’s medical officers toward prisoners was "screw these guys" and who said he was ridiculed for trying to save one man’s life using CPR.

Long after the world-shaking Abu Ghraib photos were published in 2004 and the Pentagon vowed to stop abusing prisoners, "men were still being strapped into restraint chairs and left in the sun for hours or locked in cells too small to lie down in," Sharrock writes. "The medics regularly found prisoners dehydrated, wrists bloody from overtight handcuffs, ankles swollen from forced standing, joints dislocated from stress positions." (Abu Ghraib’s former commandant Gen. Janis Karpinski once estimated 90% of the prisoners were innocent.)

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Jeff Gates

With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the White House July 6th, it’s time to recall how Tel Aviv deceived Washington throughout the entirety of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

U.S. military leaders will be watching this meeting very closely, as will the veterans community.

For me, confirmation of Israel’s strategic duplicity came in a meeting with Harry McPherson who served as counsel and speechwriter for Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ entered the Senate in 1948 with Louisiana Senator Russell Long for whom I served as counsel and speechwriter.

At his law offices in Washington, Harry described his arrival in Tel Aviv the night that the 1967 War began. That war typifies the consistency of this ongoing deceit.

He flew in the night before from Vietnam through Hong Kong. He knew on arrival that something was amiss because the airport lights were off. He checked into his hotel and was awakened early on June 5th by Wally Barbour, the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

A pear-shaped diplomat with a penchant for yellowing Palm Beach suits, Barbour called to tell Harry that the war had just broken out—to which he replied, “But I just come from the war.”

Barbour picked him up at the hotel and they hurried to the foreign ministry for a brief meeting before conferring with the Israeli chief of military intelligence. In response to their repeated question, “Did the Egyptians attack?” McPherson and Barbour received only evasive answers. As air raid sirens wailed, McPherson recalls in A Political Education:

Barbour suggested that we might continue the discussion in the underground bunker. The general studied his watch. “No, that won’t be necessary. We can stay here.” Barbour and I looked at each other. If it wasn’t necessary, the Egyptian air force had been destroyed. That could only have happened so quickly if it had been surprised on the ground. We did not need to ask for confirmation, but left at once to cable the news to Washington.

Israel was neither under attack nor under threat of attack as its leadership has since conceded. Air raid sirens were just props in the stagecraft of waging war by way of deception.

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