Al-Qaeda Video Supports Hamas, Calls for Sharia in Gaza

By Jeffrey Imm


Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called for Muslims to support Hamas with money, weapons, and information, as well as urging united efforts of mujahedeen after its takeover of Gaza.

A copy of the video can be downloaded here at Laura Mansfield site.

In the 25:17 as-Sahab-produced video released over the Internet to Jihadist web sites today, titled "Forty Years Since the Fall of al-Quds [Jerusalem]", shows a still image of Zawahiri with an audio track. The video begins with a short clip from an October 2001 video of Bin Laden and Zawahiri together. SITE Institute has issued a press release on this video.

Among the Zawahiri statements in the video:

-- Al-Zawahiri urged Hamas to implement Islamic law in Gaza, telling it, "Taking over power is not a goal but a means to implement God's word on earth."
-- "Unite with mujahedeen (holy warriors) in Palestine ... and with all mujahedeen in the world in the face of the upcoming attack where Egyptians and Saudis are expected to play part of it"
-- "Provide them (Hamas) with money, do your best to get it there, break the siege imposed on them by crusaders and Arab leaders traitors"
-- "Facilitate weapons smuggling from neighboring countries."
-- "We can support them by targeting the crusader and Zionist interest wherever we can"

Per SITE Institute translation, "Zawahiri urges support for the Mujahideen in Palestine in the face of additional aggression" and that "Zawahiri anticipates a coming attack on Gaza to rid Hamas of its positions, an attack in which even Egyptians and Saudis will participate, and declares in regard of Hamas: 'a victory of Hamas is a victory of Palestine'. In this speech, Zawahiri sees the greater enemy in Fatah, supported by the West, moving against Hamas, and this act in tandem with Hamas’ movements against Fatah, perceived as a return to jihad, causes a degree of softening. However, he still reminds Hamas that it must hold steadfast to the Shari’a of Allah and not vacillate in this regard, and also unite with other Mujahideen in the face of the coming attack."

Per SITE Institute translation, "Toward the end of his speech he calls for the defeat of the United States, and states: 'Don't believe those who tell you that America is not defeated. To the contrary. America is being defeated now in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, and it will be defeated in Palestine.' "

Resources:

SITE Institute: "Forty Years Since the Fall of al-Quds [Jerusalem]" -- A Speech by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri Produced by as-Sahab Media

Laura Mansfield: New message from Zawahiri: Forty Years Since the Fall of Jerusalem

Laura Mansfield: Zawahiri Video

AP: Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri Calls on Hamas to Implement Islamic Sharai Rule in Gaza


June 25, 2007 08:05 AM Link

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ro...lamestream_.htm June 25, 2007

Tell The Lamestream Media to Cover Cheney MORE, NOW

By Rob Kall

I've always thought Cheney was way out there - the most Voldemort-like official I've run across. But even in my harshest musings about the vice president, I never imagined that he would declare himself not only above the law, not only above the president, but actually his own dark planet - a separate entity from the White House.

Maureen Dowd

Now we have it-- clear evidence that Cheney is again hiding, evading, avoiding the transparency and checks and balances that keep America safe and fair.

Today, the lamestream media are covering the story. But, if they follow the same old M.O., they will be off the story by tomorrow and on to the next kidnapping, the next off the wagon celebrity, the next siamese twins surgery, or an update on Paris, Anna Nicole or Michael Jackson.

Let's try something different. Tell them you want them to cover the Cheney story. Tell them you want them to put investagive journalists on the story-- if they still have any. Tell them that you want to hear about this more than about any of the distrations they usually waste the airwaves on. Tell them failure to do so is failure to do their job to protect democracy.

Tell their advertisers that you don't want to see more Paris Hilton, that you are disappointed in Larry King for giving her airtime.

Make two phone calls. Send two emails. Send two snail mail messages. You ought to be able to do it in ten minutes. Send this on to ten friends.

There are eight members of congress on the Cheney impeachment bill. Call your member of congress. Ask what your representative is doing about all of Cheney's abuses of the constitution. Ask why he doesnt' think the constitution is important enough to protect. Ask him or her to sign on to Kucinich's bill to impeach Cheney. That should take you three to five minutes.



Cheney's arrogant abuse of the constitution, the secrecy in which he's operated has been going on since the first days he was in office. He's gone too far. It's time to call for hearings and investigations. Reps conyers and Waxman should be subpoenaing Cheney current and former staffers to start building pressure. There's no need for a full impeachment. It will never go that far. As soon as Cheney sees the writing on the wall, he'll get a note from his doctor and resign for health reasons. I repeat. Cheney will resign for health reasons as soon as the heat starts to build under him. That's okay. We can prosecute after the 2008 elections are over.

So make the calls, send the emails and letters today. Recruit your friends. This is doable. Keep the stories about Cheney coming. Demand that the lamestream news network break their pattern and do their job.





Authors Bio: Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here. Back

<h3 class="entry-header">Gaza: the interests of Egypt (and others) by Abu Aardvark
</h3> With Egypt about to host a summit in Sharm al-Shaykh with Israel, Jordan, and Mahmoud Abbas, Mohammed Salah, writing in al-Hayat, takes a closer look at Egypt's interests. While Egypt no doubt is worried about instability and violence across its border in Gaza - especially if it will find itself responsible for dealing with it - Salah points out that Mubarak's strategy is likely guided as much by domestic considerations. Since their strong electoral performance in 2005, the government has been waging an unprecedented campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. According to a number of Egyptian analysts, Mubarak wants to exploit Gaza to gain support (at home and, more important to him, abroad) for this crackdown. Placing Hamas under seige in Gaza and placing the Muslim Brotherhood under seige in Gaza are two sides of the same coin, argues Salah. That's an important bit of context for making sense of Egyptian strategy in the Gaza crisis.

It isn't just Egypt, either. A number of Jordanian writers have argued that the government is trying to use Gaza to hurt the electoral prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic Action Front in the Parliamentary elections now scheduled for November. Like in Egypt, the Jordanian regime hopes to discredit the domestic opposition by association with Hamas, while deflecting any international criticism of steps taken to limit their electoral success (no matter how repressive or anti-democratic). Jordan has been harrassing its Islamists too, if not to Egyptian levels, and clearly wants to find ways to limit their electoral success: keeping the old, much disputed electoral law which was designed to limit Islamist gains; media campaigns against Islamists and Hamas; leveraging Jordanian-Palestinian ethnic grievances; and more.

The importance of domestic considerations to both Jordan and Egypt matters quite a lot when looking ahead to the international response to the Palestinian crisis. Both Arab states have a clear domestic political interest in Hamas doing poorly in Gaza and in making Hamas look bad with Arab audiences. This domestic interest in mobilizing anti-Islamist sentiment may even outweigh strategic interests pointing in the other direction. Of course, this attempt to focus attention on Hamas and Gaza could backfire spectacularly if the Arab mood shifts in favor of Hamas - something which many Islamists and other Arab writers expect, and which those regimes no doubt fear. Something to think about as things develop.

Posted on June 24, 2007 at 07:07 AM | Permalink

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power





By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, June 25, 2007

Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney's lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby.

The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. "The CIA guys said, 'We're going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees'" if interrogators confined themselves to treatment allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion of prisoners in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.


Enlarge Photo The vice president's office pushed a policy of robust interrogation that made its way to the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, above, and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. More Cheney photos... Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress -- for Cheney's claims of executive supremacy and for his unyielding defense of what he called "robust interrogation."

But a more careful look at the results suggests that Cheney won far more than he lost. Many of the harsh measures he championed, and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.


RELATED STORY
Presidential Power
Dick Cheney's views on executive supremacy -- like many of his core beliefs about foreign policy and defense -- have held remarkably steady over the years. More » The vice president's unseen victories attest to traits that are often ascribed to him but are hard to demonstrate from the public record: thoroughgoing secrecy, persistence of focus, tactical flexibility in service of fixed aims and close knowledge of the power map of government. On critical decisions for more than six years, Cheney has often controlled the pivot points -- tipping the outcome when he could, engineering stalemate when he could not and reopening debates that rivals thought were resolved.

"Once he's taken a position, I think that's it," said James A. Baker III, who has shared a hunting tent with Cheney more than once and worked with him under three presidents. "He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily effective and adept at exercising power."


'At Any Time and in Any Place'
David S. Addington, Cheney's general counsel, set the new legal agenda in a blunt memorandum shortly after the CIA delegation returned to Langley. Geneva's "strict limits on questioning of enemy prisoners," he wrote on Jan. 25, 2002, hobbled efforts "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists."

No longer was the vice president focused on procedural rights, such as access to lawyers and courts. The subject now was more elemental: How much suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared that future prosecutors, with motives "difficult to predict," might bring criminal charges against interrogators or Bush administration officials.

Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony [Read the act]. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential directive for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to avoid a ban on cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."

How extreme? Yoo was summoned again to the White House in the early spring of 2002. This time the question was urgent. The CIA had captured Abu Zubaida, then believed to be a top al-Qaeda operative, on March 28, 2002. Case officers wanted to know "what the legal limits of interrogation are," Yoo said.

This previously unreported meeting sheds light on the origins of one of the Bush administration's most controversial claims. The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture "prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" and therefore permits many others. [Read the opinion] Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of "torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure ..... or even death."

When news accounts unearthed that opinion nearly two years later, the White House repudiated its contents. Some officials described it as hypothetical, without disclosing that the opinion was written in response to specific questions from the CIA. Administration officials attributed authorship to Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who had come to serve in the Office of Legal Counsel.

But the "torture memo," as it became widely known, was not Yoo's work alone. In an interview, Yoo said that Addington, as well as Gonzales and deputy White House counsel Timothy E. Flanigan, contributed to the analysis.

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line into torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government has prosecuted as a war crime since at least 1901. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

Yoo said for the first time in an interview that he verbally warned lawyers for the president, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it would be a risky policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits. "I always thought that only the CIA should do this, but people at the White House and at DOD felt differently," Yoo said. The migration of those techniques from the CIA to the military, and from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib, aroused worldwide condemnation when abuse by U.S. troops was exposed.

Through is spokeswoman, Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales declined a request for an interview about his time in the White House counsel's office and his interactions with Cheney. The vice president's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, declined to comment on Yoo's recollection.


Enlarge Photo Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice confer in February 2002, around the time that detainee interrogation limits were being discussed. Rice wouldn't learn about the 'torture memo' until June 2004. More Cheney photos... On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post [Read the article]. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

Rice "very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law," the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again. Powell remarked admiringly, as they emerged, that Rice dressed down the president's lawyer "in full Nurse Ratched mode," a reference to the head nurse of the mental hospital in the 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Neither of them took their objections to Cheney, the official said, a much more dangerous course.


'His Client, the Vice President'
In the summer and fall of 2002, some of the Bush administration's leading lawyers began to warn that Cheney and his Pentagon allies had set the government on a path for defeat in court. As the judicial branch took up challenges to the president's assertion of wartime power, Justice Department lawyers increasingly found themselves defending what they believed to be losing positions -- directed by the vice president and his staff. One of the uneasy lawyers was Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson , a conservative stalwart whose wife, Barbara, had died on Sept. 11, 2001 when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Olson shared Cheney's robust view of executive authority, but his job was to win cases. Two that particularly worried him involved U.S. citizens -- Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi -- who had been declared enemy combatants and denied access to lawyers.

Federal courts, Olson argued, would not go along with that. But the CIA and military interrogators opposed any outside contact, fearing relief from the isolation and dependence that they relied upon to break the will of suspected terrorists.

Flanigan said that Addington's personal views leaned more toward Olson than against him, but that Addington beat back the proposal to grant detainees access to lawyers, "because that was the position of his client, the vice president."

Decision time came in a heated meeting in Gonzales's corner office on the West Wing's second floor, according to four officials with direct knowledge, none of whom agreed to be quoted by name about confidential legal deliberations. Olson was backed by associate White House counsel Bradford A. Berenson , a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Berenson told colleagues that the court's swing voter would never accept absolute presidential discretion to declare a U.S. citizen an enemy and lock him up without giving him an opportunity to be represented and heard. Another former Kennedy clerk, White House lawyer Brett Kavanaugh, had made the same argument earlier.

Addington accused Berenson of surrendering executive power on a fool's prophecy about an inscrutable court. Berenson accused Addington of "know-nothingness."

Gonzales listened quietly as the Justice Department and his own staff lined up against Addington. Then he decided in favor of Cheney's lawyer.

John D. Ashcroft, who was attorney general at the time, declined to discuss details of the dispute but said the vice president's views "carried a great deal of weight. He was the E.F. Hutton in the room. When he talked, everybody would listen." Cheney, he said, "compelled people to think carefully about whatever he mentioned."

When a U.S. District Court ruled several months later that Padilla had a right to counsel, Cheney's office insisted on sending Olson's deputy, Paul Clement, on what Justice Department lawyers called "a suicide mission": to tell Judge Michael B. Mukasey that he had erred so grossly that he should retract his decision. Mukasey derided the government's "pinched legalism" and added acidly that his order was "not a suggestion or request."

Cheney's strategy fared worse in the Supreme Court, where two cases arrived for oral argument alongside Padilla's on April 28, 2004.

For months, Olson and his Justice Department colleagues had pleaded for modest shifts that would shore up the government's position. Hamdi, the American, had languished in a Navy brig for two and a half years with out a hearing or a lawyer. Shafiq Rasul, a British citizen at Guantanamo Bay, had been held even longer. Olson could make Cheney's argument that courts had no jurisdiction, but he wanted to "show them that you at least have some system of due process in place" to ensure against wrongful detention, according to a senior Justice Department official who closely followed the debates.

Addington, the vice president's counsel fought and won again. He argued that any declaration of binding rules would restrict the freedom of future presidents and open the door to further lawsuits. On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in the Hamdi case that detainees must have a lawyer and an opportunity to challenge their status as enemy combatants before a "neutral decision maker." The Rasul decision, the same day, held 6 to 3 that Guantanamo Bay is not beyond the reach of federal law.

Eleven days later, Olson stepped down as solicitor general. His deputy succeeded him. What came next was a reminder that it does not pay to cross swords with the vice president.

Ashcroft, with support from Gonzales, proposed a lawyer named Patrick Philbin for deputy solicitor general. Philbin was among the authors of the post-Sept. 11 legal revolution, devising arguments to defend Cheney's military commissions and the denial of habeas corpus rights at Guantanamo Bay. But he had tangled with the vice president's office now and then, objecting to the private legal channel between Addington and Yoo and raising questions about domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Cheney's lawyer passed word that Philbin was an unsatisfactory choice. The attorney general and White House counsel abandoned their candidate.

"OVP plays hardball," said a high-ranking former official who followed the episode, referring to the office of the vice president. "No one would defend Philbin."


'Administration Policy'
Rumsfeld, Cheney's longtime friend and mentor, gathered his senior subordinates at the Pentagon in the summer of 2005. He warned them to steer clear of Senate Republicans John McCain, John W. Warner and Lindsay O. Graham, who were drafting a bill to govern the handling of terrorism suspects.

"Rumsfeld made clear, emphatically, that the vice president had the lead on this issue," said a former Pentagon official with direct knowledge.


Enlarge Photo Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a longtime Cheney mentor, tours Abu Ghraib in May 2004. In 2005, he made it clear that Cheney 'has the lead on this issue,' said a Pentagon official, referring to the treatment of detainees More Cheney photos... Though his fingerprints were not apparent, Cheney had already staked out a categorical position for the president. It came in a last-minute insert to a "statement of administration policy" by the Office of Management and Budget, where Nancy Dorn, Cheney's former chief of legislative affairs, was deputy director. Without normal staff clearance, according to two Bush administration officials, the vice president's lawyer added a paragraph -- just before publication on July 21, 2005 -- to the OMB's authoritative guidance on the 2006 defense spending bill [Read the document].

"The Administration strongly opposes" any amendment to "regulate the detention, treatment or trial of terrorists captured in the war on terror," the statement said. Before most Bush administration officials even became aware that the subject was under White House review, Addington wrote that "the President's senior advisers would recommend that he veto" any such bill.

Among those taken unawares was Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England. More than a year had passed since Bush expressed "deep disgust" over the abuse photographed at Abu Ghraib, and England told aides it was past time to issue clear rules for U.S. troops.

In late August 2005, England called a meeting of nearly three dozen Pentagon officials, including the vice chief and top uniformed lawyer for each military branch. Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, set the agenda.

Waxman said that the president's broadly stated order of Feb. 7, 2002 -- which called for humane treatment, "subject to military necessity" -- had left U.S. forces unsure about how to behave. The Defense Department, he said, should clarify its bedrock legal requirements with a directive incorporating the language of Geneva's Common Article 3 [Read Common Article 3]. That was exactly the language -- prohibiting cruel, violent, humiliating and degrading treatment -- that Cheney had spent three years expunging from U.S. policy.

"Every vice chief came out strongly in favor, as did every JAG," or judge advocate general, recalled Mora, who was Navy general counsel at the time.

William J. Haynes II, a close friend of Addington's who served as Rumsfeld's general counsel, was one of two holdouts in the room. The other was Stephen A. Cambone, Rumsfeld's undersecretary for intelligence.

Waxman, believing his opponents isolated, circulated a draft of DOD Directive 2310. Within a few days, Addington and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, invited Waxman for a visit.

According to Mora, Waxman returned from the meeting with the message that his draft was "unacceptable to the vice president's office." Another defense official, who made notes of Waxman's report, said Cheney's lawyer ridiculed the vagueness of the Geneva ban on "outrages upon personal dignity," saying it would leave U.S. troops timid in the face of unpredictable legal risk. When Waxman replied that the official White House policy was far more opaque, according to the report, Addington accused him of trying to replace the president's decision with his own.

"The impact of that meeting is that Directive 2310 died," Mora said.


'Total Indifference to Public Opinion'
Over the next 12 months, Congress and the Supreme Court imposed many of the restrictions that Cheney had squelched.

"The irony with the Cheney crowd pushing the envelope on presidential power is that the president has now ended up with lesser powers than he would have had if they had made less extravagant, monarchical claims," said Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.

Flanigan, a founding member of that crowd, said he still believes that Addington and Yoo were right in their "application of generally accepted constitutional principles." But he acknowledged that many battles ended badly. "The Supreme Court," Flanigan said, "decided to change the rules."

Even so, Cheney's losses were not always as they appeared.

On Oct. 5, 2005, the Senate voted 90 to 9 in favor of McCain's Detainee Treatment Act, which included the Geneva language [Read the bill]. It was, by any measure, a rebuke to Cheney. Bush signed the bill into law. "Well, I don't win all the arguments," Cheney told the Wall Street Journal.

Yet he and Addington found a roundabout path to the exceptions they sought for the CIA, as allies in Congress made little-noticed adjustments to the bill.

The final measure confined only the Defense Department to the list of interrogation techniques specified in a new Army field manual. No techniques were specified for CIA officers, who were forbidden only in general terms to employ "cruel" or "inhuman" methods. Crucially, the new law said those words would be interpreted in light of U.S. constitutional law. That made a big difference to Cheney.

The Supreme Court has defined cruelty as an act that "shocks the conscience" under the circumstances. Addington suggested, according to another government lawyer, that harsh methods would be far less shocking under circumstances involving a mass-casualty terrorist threat. Cheney may have alluded to that advice in an interview with ABC's "Nightline" on Dec. 18, 2005, saying that "what shocks the conscience" is to some extent "in the eye of the beholder."

Eager to put detainee scandals behind them, Bush's advisers spent days composing a statement in which the president would declare support for the veto-proof bill on detainee treatment. Hours before Bush signed it into law on Dec. 30, 2005, Cheney's lawyer intercepted the accompanying statement "and just literally takes his red pen all the way through it," according to an official with firsthand knowledge.

Addington substituted a single sentence. Bush, he wrote, would interpret the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief."

Cheney's office had used that technique often. Like his boss, Addington disdained what he called "interagency treaties," one official said. He had no qualms about discarding language "agreed between Cabinet secretaries," the official said.

Top officials from the CIA, and the Justice, State and Defense departments unanimously opposed the substitution, according to two officials. John B. Bellinger III, the ranking national security lawyer at the White House, warned that Congress would view Addington's statement as a "stick in the eye" after weeks of consensus-building by national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

None of that mattered. With Cheney's weight behind it, White House counsel Harriet E. Miers sent Addington's version to Bush for his signature.

"The only person in Washington who cares less about his public image than David Addington is Dick Cheney," said a former White House ally. "What both of them miss is that ..... in times of war, a prerequisite for success is people having confidence in their leadership. This is the great failure of the administration -- a complete and total indifference to public opinion."


'Almost Everything' Cheney Wanted
On June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court struck its sharpest blow to the house that Cheney built, ruling 5 to 3 that the president had no lawful power to try alleged terrorists in military commissions [Read the opinion]. The tribunal order that Cheney brought to Bush's private dining room, and the game plan Cheney's lawyer wrote to defend it, fetched condemnation on disparate legal grounds. The majority relied, as Addington's critics foresaw, on Justice Kennedy's vote.

Not only did the court leave the president beholden to Congress for the authority to charge and punish terrorists, but it rejected a claim of implicit legislative consent that Bush was using elsewhere to justify electronic surveillance without a warrant. And not only did it find that Geneva's Common Article 3 protects "unlawful enemy combatants," but it also said that those protections -- including humane treatment and the right to a trial by "a regularly constituted court" -- were enforceable by federal judges in the United States.

The court's decision, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, was widely seen as a calamity for Cheney's war plan against al-Qaeda. As the Bush administration formed its response, the vice president's position appeared to decline further still.

White House strategists agreed that they had to submit legislation to undo the damage of the Hamdan case. Cheney and Addington, according to a former official with firsthand knowledge, favored a one-page bill. Their proposal would simply have stated that the Geneva Conventions confer no right of access to U.S. courts, stripped U.S. courts of jurisdiction over foreign nationals declared to be enemy combatants and affirmed the president's authority to create military commissions exactly as he had already done. Bush chose to spend the fall of 2006 negotiating a much more complex bill that became the Military Commissions Act.

The White House proposal, said Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff, "did not come out exactly as the vice president would have wanted."

In another reversal for Cheney, Bush acknowledged publicly on Sept. 6 that the CIA maintained secret prisons overseas for senior al-Qaeda detainees, a subject on which he had held his silence since The Post disclosed them late in 2005. The president announced that he had emptied the "black sites" and transferred their prisoners to Guantanamo Bay to be tried.

The same week, almost exactly a year after the vice president's office shelved Waxman's Pentagon plan, Waxman's successor dusted it off. DOD Directive 2310.01E, the Department of Defense Detainee Program, included the verbatim text of Geneva's Common Article 3 and described it, as Waxman had, as "a minimum standard for the care and treatment of all detainees." [Read the directive] The new Army field manual, published with the directive, said that interrogators were forbidden to employ a long list of techniques that had been used against suspected terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001 -- including stripping, hooding, inflicting pain and forcing the performance of sex acts.

For all the apparent setbacks, close observers said, Cheney has preserved his top-priority tools in the "war on terror." After a private meeting with Cheney, one of them said, Bush decided not to promise that there would be no more black sites -- and seven months later, the White House acknowledged that secret detention had resumed.

The Military Commissions Act, passed by strong majorities of the Senate and House on Sept. 28 and 29, 2006, gave "the office of the vice president almost everything it wanted," said Yoo, who maintained his contact with Addington after returning to a tenured position at Berkeley.

The new law withstood its first Supreme Court challenge on April 2. It exempts CIA case officers and other government employees from prosecution for past war crimes or torture. Once again, an apparently technical provision held great importance to Cheney and his allies.

Without repealing the War Crimes Act, which imposes criminal penalties for grave breaches of Geneva's humane-treatment standards, Congress said the president, not the Supreme Court, has final authority to decide what the standards mean -- and whether they even apply.


'I'd Like to Close Guantanamo'
Air Force Two touched down in Sydney this past Feb. 24. Cheney had come to discuss Iraq. Prime Minister John Howard brought the conversation around to an Australian citizen who had unexpectedly become a political threat.

Under pressure at home, Howard said he told Cheney that there must be a trial "with no further delay" for David Hicks, 31, who was beginning his sixth year at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay. Five days later, Hicks was indicted as a war criminal. On March 26, he pleaded guilty to providing "material support" for terrorism.

At every stage since his capture, as he changed taxis at the Afghan-Pakistan border, Hicks had crossed a legal landscape that Cheney did more than anyone to reshape. He was Detainee 002 at Guantanamo Bay, arriving on opening day at an asserted no man's land beyond the reach of sovereign law. Interrogators questioned him under guidelines that gave legal cover to the infliction of pain and fear -- and, according to an affidavit filed by British lawyer Steven Grosz, Hicks was subjected to beatings, sodomy with a foreign object, sensory deprivation, disorienting drugs and prolonged shackling in painful positions.


Enlarge Photo Ankle cuffs are seen locked to the floor of an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay. The new legal framework for interrogations was designed to leave room for cruelty. More Cheney photos... The U.S. government denied those claims, and before accepting Hicks's guilty plea it required him to affirm that he had "never been illegally treated." But the tribunal's rules, written under principles Cheney advanced, would have allowed the Australian's conviction with evidence obtained entirely by "cruel, inhuman or degrading" techniques.

Shortly after Cheney returned from Australia, the Hicks case died with a whimper. The U.S. government abruptly shifted its stance in plea negotiations, dropping the sentence it offered from 20 years in prison to nine months if Hicks would say that he was guilty.

Only the dramatic shift to lenience, said Joshua Dratel, one of three defense lawyers, resolved the case in time to return Hicks to Australia before Howard faces reelection late this year. The deal, negotiated without the knowledge of the chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, was supervised by Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority over military commissions. Crawford received her three previous government jobs from then-Defense Secretary Cheney -- she was appointed as his special adviser, Pentagon inspector general and then judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Yet the tactical retreat on Hicks, according to Bush administration officials, diverted attention from the continuity of U.S. policy on detainees.

A year after Bush announced at a news conference that "I'd like to close Guantanamo," the camp remains open and has been expanded. Senior officials said Cheney, with few allies left, has turned back strong efforts -- by Rice, England, new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson, among others -- to give the president what he said he wants.

Cheney and his aides "didn't circumvent the process," one participant said. "They were just very effective in using it."


'This is a Dangerous World'
More than a year after Congress passed McCain-sponsored restrictions on the questioning of suspected terrorists, the Bush administration is still debating how far the CIA's interrogators may go in their effort to break down resistant detainees. Two officials said the vice president has deadlocked the debate.

Bush said last September that he would "work with" Congress to review "an alternative set of procedures" for "tough" -- but, he said, lawful -- interrogation. He did not promise to submit legislation or to report particulars to any oversight committee, and he has not done so.

Two questions remain, officials said. One involves techniques to be authorized now. The other is whether any technique should be explicitly forbidden.

According to participants in the debate, the vice president stands by the view that Bush need not honor any of the new judicial and legislative restrictions. His lawyer, they said, has recently restated Cheney's argument that when courts and Congress "purport to" limit the commander in chief's warmaking authority, he has the constitutional prerogative to disregard them.

If Cheney advocates a return to waterboarding, they said, they have not heard him say so. But his office has fought fiercely against an executive order or CIA directive that would make the technique illegal.

"That's just the vice president," said Gerson, the former speechwriter, referring to Cheney's October remark that "a dunk in the water" for terrorists -- a radio interviewer's term -- is "a no-brainer for me."

Gerson added: "It's principled. He's deeply conscious that this is a dangerous world, and he wants this president and future presidents to be able to deal with that. He feels very strongly about these things, and it's his great virtue and his weakness."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_br...war_and_arm.htm

June 25, 2007

NEW COLD WAR AND ARMS RACE UNDERWAY

By Bruce K. Gagnon

The news in recent days has been full of the controversy about U.S. plans to deploy "missile defense" interceptors and radar facilities in Eastern Europe. Russia has responded by expressing fears that the U.S. military and NATO are attempting to surround and control her. Russia has made counter suggestions saying that if the U.S. really wanted to protect itself and Europe from future Iranian missiles, then placing such facilities would be more practical in Azerbaijan. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quickly ruled that out as an option saying, "One does not choose sites for missile defense out of the blue."

Russian President Vladimir Putin makes the case that since 9-11 the U.S. has established military bases in Central Asia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and has been expanding NATO into Eastern Europe with bases in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and is now attempting to create more bases in the Ukraine and Georgia. Russia is starting to feel surrounded. This is something that could never have happened during the Cold War - in fact if the U.S. had tried it would have likely caused a nuclear exchange. When the former Soviet Union attempted to put nuclear missiles into Cuba in 1962 - the U.S.'s sphere of influence - nuclear war was barely averted.

Participants at the May 5 International Conference against the Militarization of Europe in Prague issued a declaration opposing U.S. missile defense deployments saying, "We voice our protest against the plans of the Bush administration to install a 'national missile defense system' for the U.S. on the territory of the Czech Republic and Poland. Most people in the Czech Republic and Poland, as well as in the rest of Europe, reject plans to host this system. We reject the official reasons given for the NMD project as mere pretexts. The realisation of the U.S. plan will not lead to enhanced security. On the contrary - it will lead to new dangers and insecurities.
Although it is described as 'defensive', in reality it will allow the United States to attack other countries without fear of retaliation. It will also put 'host' countries on the front line in future U.S. wars."

One of the first things the Bush administration did upon taking office was withdraw the U.S. from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia. This treaty banned the testing and deployment of so-called "missile defense" systems. Since that U.S. withdrawal, Bush has aggressively moved to fund and deploy the technologies that will give the U.S. first-strike capability of any other nuclear power. As we witnessed with the 2003 U.S. preemptive attack on Iraq, first-strike is now the official military doctrine of the U.S.

Putin recognizes this new twist when he recently said, "Once the missile defense system is put in place it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the U.S. It will be an integral part of the U.S. nuclear capability....An arms race is unfolding. Was it we who withdrew from the ABM Treaty? We already told [Bush] two years ago, don't do this, you don't need to do this. What are you doing? You are destroying the system of international security....Of course, we have to respond to it."

Putin is obviously referring to current Bush plans to deploy "missile defense" interceptors in Poland and a high-tech Star Wars radar facility in the Czech Republic. The Bush team says these facilities are intended to protect against Iranian missiles but all one has to do is look at a map of the region and see that the real target is Russia.

Following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the economy of Russia fell apart and the standard of living dropped substantially. But in recent years, due in large part to oil exploration inside Russia which now surpasses the daily oil output of Saudi Arabia, Russia's economy is growing again and the standard of living improving. Russia has become the world's largest producer of natural gas.

Russia has announced that four of its largest oil fields will not be open to foreign development and its national treasury has begun to convert Russia's dollar reserves into gold and rubles. None of these steps has been well received in the banking centers of Washington or London.

As fossil fuels become scarce worldwide, the U.S. and British banking and oil corporation elites have developed an international strategy to take control of remaining supplies. This is manifest in the present U.S. and UK occupation of Iraq and U.S. permanent bases in Central Asia - a key region for pipelines to move Caspian Sea resources south for shipment in the Asian-Pacific region.

But Russia and China do not accept the notion of the U.S. becoming the "master" of the planet. Already the U.S. Space Command has declared that it will be the master of space and will develop the offensive space weapons technologies to "deny" other countries access to space. Pentagon operatives have said that international treaties will restrict the U.S. ability to take unilateral and preemptive military action globally.

The U.S. secret military budget, the "black budget", is now estimated to be about $60 billion per year and is mostly funding high-tech space weapons. Even Congress is not provided information on how the Pentagon is spending these funds. A reporter at the weapons industry publication, Jane's Defense Weekly, did a research project on the secret budget architecture and suggests it came to the U.S. by Nazi scientists brought to the U.S. after World War II under the classified "Operation Paperclip."

On May 31 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the U.S. favors a protracted troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea. Gates told reporters that he is thinking of "a mutual agreement" with Iraq in which "some force of Americans . . . is present for a protracted period of time, but in ways that are protective of the sovereignty of the host government." Gates said such a long-term U.S. presence would assure allies in the Middle East that the U.S. will not withdraw from Iraq as it did from Vietnam, "lock, stock and barrel."

Highly respected former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted in April as saying that deployment of U.S. missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic is an attempt by the U.S. to control Europe. "It is all about influence and domination in Europe," Gorbachev said. Asked how Russia could respond to these plans, he only said: "Time will show."


One Russian political analyst puts it more directly. ''Hitler was striving for global domination, and the United States is striving for global domination now,'' Sergei Markov, head of the Moscow-based Institute for Political Research recently told The Associated Press.

''Hitler thought he was above the League of Nations, and the United States thinks it is above the United Nations. Their action is similar... only the United States now is claiming global exclusiveness,'' Markov said.





Authors Website: http://www.space4peace.org

Authors Bio: Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
http://space4peace.blogspot.com Back

New Mexico's Nuclear Governor

The Grooming of Bill Richardson
By BOB ANDERSON

New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson has a long way to go before he can call himself a peace candidate as he has been doing in his presidential campaign in the press and out east. He can't do that back in his home state, not on peace nor on a range of other issues.

Ben Luce, the former head of New Mexico Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy said this week in a series of interviews that the governor is more in the pocket of the energy corporations than his image machine presents. Luce, a ten year activist on environmental issues and a former insider in the Richardson camp spoke out to warn voters that Richardson had crafted policies in favor of energy corporations while claiming they were much different. He said Richardson's laws make him look good as a presidential candidate but don't do much else (Albuquerque Journal, 6-20-07).

On war and peace many of us in the grassroots anti-war movement know the governor is in the pocket of the military industrial complex, just as he sides with the energy industry on many pieces of legislation. He would have unknowing voters believe he was a big voice in the movement for social and economic justice when he is not. Richardson claims to be for human rights too but yielded his veto pen to prevent elimination of the death penalty in our last legislative session.

Richardson may criticize other Democratic Party presidential contenders for their past actions and votes on the war in Iraq but his record is much the same, not different enough to warrant notice. This is important because when a voter evaluates a public official for truth it is the experience and past record of the candidate that tells us a lot about future possible actions. Richardson's man selling point is his experience in public service. If Richardson applied his yardstick to himself he would come up short and working more for the private sector than the public.

More and more New Mexicans are coming back dead from Bush's wars in the middle east, especially Iraq where a lot of New Mexico citizens serve as guard and reserve troops. So, what has the governor done in his role as chief executive to stop this killing? Nothing really. The governor actually made it more likely our state citizens would be willing to go war by getting a hefty state death-in-combat supplement passed for those who get killed. This is his idea of bring the troops home.

The governor, a creative man could have come up with some new use of his executive power to stop the guard deployment right here and saved their lives. He could have even stood with the concerned public in front of the buses full of soldiers departing to the war as we have done several times over the years he has been in office.

He has not stood with ANY of the large anti-war demonstrations in the state over the past four years. He has not even sent a wave to the anti-war folks at key times of large gatherings, of which there have been many in Albuquerque, the main city of our state. He has been seen at many meetings of the war profiteers here though. Our state is full of war profiteers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop, Boeing, Honeywell, etc. The governor is always being seen in the newspapers as having been at some ribbon cutting or function put on by the people who profit from war.

In 2003, fifteen million people demonstrated around the world against the start of the war against Iraq, saying it was a hoax. Five thousand stood in Santa Fe at the governor's office and was he there? No, and he could not then hear the massive voice of the people. Now he claims to be a leader in our movement.

The governor did not even send a solidarity message or anything to the crowd then or anytime later because he was supporting the war hawks but was afraid to speak out. How could we expect him to provide visionary leadership in the future on war and peace issues when he has no track record of that in the past in his home state?

We in the anti-war movement have marched and protested since before the war started in 2003 and the governor (like our city councilman Martin Heinrich who has jumped on the bandwagon to run for Congress as an anti-war leader) has been missing in action on this crucial front of struggle every single time.

We did see the governor break all kinds of land speed records to get over to Clovis, NM last year to stand with the Republicans who were complaining of the BRAC plan to close the obsolete Cold War Cannon AFB war base. As a result of bi-partisan high level lobbying it was kept open and turned into something even worse. The base is now to become a cover war training base for future wars in the fake war on terrorism.

This week a House committee has made major funding cuts for the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos National Lab, our premier nuclear holocaust factory, and the governor is again calling to keep it open and growing (Albuquerque Journal, 6-16-07). In his speeches outside the state he has said he is for diversifying and not producing any new nuclear weapons, which sounds good, but here he says and works for the opposite. When he was head of the Department of Energy under the Clinton administration, at a time when he had some role of importance he never made any great changes. His tenure is marked by the racist scapegoating of Wen Ho Lee for a set of research labs drifting into a loss of mission.

The labs are a large government public works project for many high paid scientists and technicians who could not otherwise make a living. The governor always has their job interests in mind when he makes statements here in his state.

Here in Albuquerque, home to the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons the governor has never replied to repeated requests to make a statement about the great danger these weapons pose to our community of over 600,000 people. If he had any real message to give he could have pointed out in 2003 before President Bush launched the big war that Albuquerque had 2,000 WMDs here and Iraq had none. It would have been a welcome gesture to have said let's talk of dismantling our WMDs and you do the same.

You would think as head of the Dept. of Energy and all that research he had privy to on nuclear issues he would have known that of the obvious nuclear weapons dump in Albuquerque.

Albuquerque is the third largest nuclear power in the world. He missed that little fact because he was busy cheerleading for the war for control of the middle east. His real problem with the war is that it has become messy and has gone on too long, longer than WW II for us.

Our governor has said nothing about the Department of Defense's establishment of a major nuclear war planning center here at Kirtland AFB, in the center of Albuquerque, which is likely to make us another target in any global conflict era.

Nor has he questioned the most intensive industrial project in human history, much of it going on here in our state: the arms race in space. A real time Star Wars is being developed at a local military base, Kirtland AFB with help from our state universities. University faculty get big lucrative contracts to create the new weapons technologies for space war which is in violation of many treaties on space.

The university keeps some of the war profiteering money for overhead and all keep quiet. Richardson hand picked the CEO of the key university who in turn drove out critics of this large new Manhattan Project. In turn he was fired for his own malfeasance, costing the state taxpayers over a million in contract buy-outs.

Last fall (Sep. 29, 2007) Lockheed Martin held a symposium at the University of New Mexico to promote the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, which would be a violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and very costly to the nation. The one sided discussion was attended by many grassroots activists whom the university threw out of the meeting for speaking out against the RRW program and the privatization of the public university for war profits. The governor could have used an event like this to announce his position on the RRW and war profiteering if he had really any serious intention here in the weapons Mecca of the world. Did he speak out as the newspapers carried articles and discussions on the arrest at the meeting and debate that followed? No.

Also, at the same military base in Albuquerque he has not spoken out about the intentions of the new covert program such as the radical technology tilt-rotor Osprey. The CV-22 is an aircraft designed for covert insertion of assassins into other countries. This is a program that will only cause us more grief as a nation. We don't need hidden and secret war machines anyway.

In his home city of Santa Fe local citizens have organized and called for his support to stop the military from placing a squadron of Blackhawk helicopters in the placid, peaceful town. Where has Richardson been on this issue? Like all the other times of grassroots struggle with the military industrial complex he has been silent and working behind the scenes to assist the other side.

Near Ft. Carson, Colorado where residents are opposed to closing an Army base he said he would take care of the Base Realignment and Closing process (Albuquerque Journal, 6-18-07). With Richardson as president we would have more of a war based economy than what we have now. Richardson has a message of hope and hype for all audiences. A sane person would have to wonder who he really is. Richardson is in the mold of his mentor, Bill Clinton, a New Democrat, one who talks values associated with the New Deal era of FDR but one who practices the neo-conservative economic and military polices of New Gingrich. Richardson is a neo-liberalist, a supporter of global interventions and expansion.

Richardson claims to be an enlightened leader with skills in international affairs and events. But it must be remembered he was dumb enough to go along with the Bush administration hoax of an Iraqi WMD threat. Why? He really agreed with the goal to support regime change in other countries, and has cheered on the Trojan Horse war on terrorism without missing a beat. Homeland Security has a large presence in our state thanks to his administration and the large war industry here.

As an experienced U.N. diplomat for our country, as he repeatedly reminds listeners, one would have expected enlightened dissent then, and a vision not so centered around war profiteers. And this is his same approach to health care. While our state is at the bottom of health care access lists for poor people his name was just painted on a huge ugly $300 million elite cancer treatment center here at the university hospital complex. His name will be up there in large font after he has long gone and the poor died from lack of treatment.

As this new center was being built over the last thee years, across the street hospital rank and file workers have been falling further and further behind in wages. Just last week they had to hold a picket as negotiators for the university tried to drive down again their demands for a living wage. Some workers have been there for 20 years and barley make a substandard wage. This is going on all the while Billy Sparks one of his spin doctors had a special job created at the same hospital to the tune of nearly $150,000. Richardson claims he has done a lot for labor and the poor here but don't believe it. Richardson is in the pockets of the insurance corporations not working for the workers. He has opposed universal access to health care for our state's poor time and again as just not feasible but he can year after year find tax cuts and roll backs for the corporate elite and global rich who reside in our state.

It is more likely the governor would still be for the war in Iraq if he saw it was a winner. His position on Iraq is basically the same as that of the Cato Institute's Ethical Realism policy (same as the Baker Commission plan, talk and divide the country as we fight at the same time).

Richardson, like Henry Kissinger his former consulting business partner (see Albuquerque Journal, Nov. 7, 05), and Rep. Heather Wilson all would like to see Iraq broken up into three sub regions for better management by an outside superpower. This ethnic cleansing would be managed by a puppet government and backed up by an outside coalition of "peace" troops from other countries, or NATO or the U.N.

This is old fashion colonialism in the post-colonial era dressed up for the unwise as progressive politics. Richardson has been heard to now say he would get U.S. troops out of Iraq but his real intentions is like that of the neo-cons. He is not about to give up on the oil resources in the region. He would just do it in a more sophisticated manner. Richardson we must not forget was quietly paid nearly half-million dollars for being a trophy on the board of directors for Diamond Shamrock Oil Company (in Texas, now renamed Valero) until it became an embarrassment to his presidential image. In this mold he is more like Bush and Cheney than most people know.

Richardson is still in support of the larger goal of U.S. manifest destiny, of extending hegemony over Iran and other countries. A political cartoon appeared in the local paper shows him, holding a flag (as other presidential candidates held various types of flags to get noticed, Albuquerque Journal, 6-20-07) saying "my flag is whiter." He is ok with interventions for regime change, just as are Bush and Cheney, as his comment on Iran makes clear.

On Iran Richardson has said he would use diplomacy first which means he would keep open the use of war machines if he felt it necessary. Noticeably absent from his message, especially as a former U.N ambassador is language to support the basic right of self determination and sovereignty for Iran, even if their people want a different leader or policy. Richardson is about how to make Iran bow to the empire not empowering national independence or a global community of equals.

On immigration as a border state governor he has appeared concerned but has not hesitated to help Bush militarize the border to appease the right wingers. Poor people now see more guns and armies on his soil as they try to find jobs. Thanks Bill.

One of the largest immigration detention centers, overcrowded to the max exists in downtown Albuquerque and he has said nothing. Protests have been held to get humane treatment for these people being held with out any legal rights. With his expertise at photo ops and getting hostages released it would be a great mission for him to undertake right here in his home state to do the same.

On his watch we could probably expect a much more brutal war of shock and awe against Iran than what Bush and company have unleashed against Iraq.

The governor still promotes the genocidal lie that Palestine was a desert vacant of people when Israel brought democracy to the region. He has said Israel, not the struggle for justice by Palestinians is our key ally in the middle east. As late as April of this year he was saying our relationship with this racist settler state is a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the region (Albuquerque Journal, April 26, 2007).

This is a policy for more disaster, a position that will just exacerbate attacks on our country. He has offered no strategic critique of the failed U.S. policy of intervention, attacks on the many movements for Arab moderations and liberalization over the past 60 years in the region. While high school students learn of important events like the Sykes-Picot Treaty and the Kermit Roosevelt CIA coup in Iran Richardson offers just more of the same with a new twist. Richardson tries to play his diplomacy photo op image style of politics as a solution when the situation requires realistic proposals. Some of our high school students could offer a better foreign policy analysis and program than he does.

Richardson is just more of the same old thing dressed up for the grassroots revolt taking place across the country this election season to be misled by. The world is seeking vision and leaders that supports a world different than what we have had in the past. Richardson is late to the game and not a serious alternative.

What we need now is for some honest voices in the labor movement, health care and education movements to speak out like Ben Luce and tell the truth behind Richardson's statements on how he has done so little for the working people of the state.

It is more accurate when he hear Forbes magazine, a capitalist tool, and the local chamber of commerce's statements that they love him because he has made our state so favorable for the business community.

The corporate elite from large energy companies, to private aviation jet manufacturers, to expensive mattress firms, to space tourists promoters and entertainment moguls have had a run at New Mexico, much like the global elite do elsewhere when exploiting a colony with a weak political structure. Richardson has gone so far as to hand them hefty capital investments of public money for risky business ventures. Hundreds of millions from the state's permanent and retirement funds have been diverted to assist the global rich by him. I am sure they will help him in his run for another office. This scheme must be something he learned while manager of Henry Kissinger's consulting firm for large corporations which offers policies on how to plunder poor counties in the global economy.

Under Richardson's watch Intel, the wealthiest and largest computer chip manufacture with a large non-union shop here was awarded a staggering $16 billion tax refund. This went down in a town where the plant is strategically located that can't raise enough money to build all the high schools needed for the local children of its workers.

Richardson was again silent while this mega rip off of the state took place and corporations offered more charity to help the high schools.

Two other high schools in Albuquerque just had to turn to a private charity to find funds to operate in-school health clinics, which sever mainly poor families. The unmet infrastructure needs for New Mexico's poverty population has grown by leaps and bounds under Richardson's tenure but at the same time a high tech infrastructure for space militarization, high tech weapons research and global war has grown with the assistance of the governor.

At the rate at which Richardson is racing to get out in front of the growing, global peace movement we might expect him to soon say he was helping Bob Dylan write anti-war lyrics, when in reality he was in prep school being groomed for leadership of a poor state that he could use to launch a large political career.

Bob Anderson can be reached at: citizen@comcast.net

Brothers-in-Arms

The Triumph of US/Israeli Policy in Palestine
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

Contrary to the many claims that the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip represents the failure of US and Israeli policies in Palestine, the violent civil infighting that has dominated the Gaza Strip over much of the last year and a half and that led directly to the Hamas coup of June 2007, marks yet another major foreign policy victory for the occupiers. Hamas will never be allowed to remain in power in Gaza so we must fear for the future of that tiny, desperately overcrowded strip of land and its 1.4 million inhabitants; additionally, Abbas ­in order to maintain his role as "Good Guy"- will have to accede to the dictates of Israel and the United States or suffer the same fate as his predecessor, Yassir Arafat.

Western nations are standing by in silence as the deadly siege of Gaza and the dismemberment of the West Bank continue unabated. What we are witnessing in full view each day are unprecedented steps taken by the world's only superpower and its favorite client state, Israel, to ensure the death of a nation. While friction between the two key political factions in the occupied Palestinian territories has long undermined the smooth functioning of internal affairs, it was the direct, cynical involvement of US and Israeli policy-makers in these affairs that guaranteed the breakdown of internal stability and paved the way for the Hamas "coup" in Gaza.

Media reports have been careful to leave out important facts leading up to the coup such as that Hamas was the legitimate, democratically elected ruling party in the Palestinian territories following the January 2006 Palestine Legislative Council elections; that it was the US-Israeli dismissal of those election results that fueled the civil infighting between Hamas and Fatah; that obvious US backing of Fatah against Hamas helped create popular mistrust of Fatah increasing Hamas' popularity in Gaza and leading directly to Hamas' takeover of the Fatah military apparatus in the Gaza Strip. In other words, there were real and understandable reasons for the coup. But in the end, Hamas' seizure of the power it should have had in the first place ends up serving the interests not only of Mahmoud Abbas and the warlord Muhammad Dahlan. It also provides the perfect opportunity for US-Israeli policy in the region to move forward with even fewer objections, if that is possible to imagine, than have heretofore been made. Who will stand up for a "terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of Israel"? The line has been beaten into our heads with every mention of the word "Hamas" for years. We should not expect a change in the behavior of the American public or of other western audiences until, when Israel is mentioned, we immediately say to ourselves, "a terrorist state that seeks the destruction of Palestine." Seeks and is succeeding in it.


II.

Watching the barbarous killing between brothers in Gaza, a power struggle between rival factions seething in frenzy like the great prison in which they thrive, Israeli and American political analysts can rest their cases with confidence. Across the spectrum of debate, these experts can expect vindication by the media juries who, in sanctimonious indignation at the brutality meted out by partisans of Fatah or Hamas, have assembled all the "evidence" they need to justify our righteous war against Muslim-Arab terrorists and their internecine blood feuds.

That the US has temporarily chosen a weak, compliant leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and the power thirsty warlord, Muhammad Dahlan, to back during the bitter strife between key Palestinian factions testifies not to a belief that one side is trustworthy and deserves our support, but rather to the ease with which the Americans and their clients pick and choose their pawns in their bitter regional cockfights. Today's statesmen were yesterday terrorists, their titles dependent on the needs of the superpower and its clients: yesterday Fatah was on the US State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations and its leader, Yassir Arafat, was a declared "terrorist," "irrelevant," and exiled in his presidential compound in Ramallah until his mysterious death. Fatah's military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is still listed as a foreign terrorist organization. Neither of these factors apparently bothers the current leadership which understands that power and prestige are most easily acquired and unchallenged when bequeathed from above.

Truth be told, the Abbas/Dahlan alliance elicits far greater contempt in the eyes of the masters than the more independent and genuine resistance faction headed by Hamas. The numerous meetings and photo-ops between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas, and US President George Bush and Abbas, are little more than tactical stunts to make it look as though genuine negotiations are taking place. In fact, Abbas has been repeatedly by-passed and shunned when Israeli and US negotiators make the real policy decisions; decisions that remain one-sided and dismissive of any demands-other than those that are entirely self-serving-that Abbas and his entourage have made. The arms and funding channeled through Abbas' Fatah (for his clique represents only one of the many spin-off Fatahs that emerged during the second Intifada) signify little more than the conduit through which US-Israeli policies can be secured. For all the claims about US backing of Fatah, neither Abbas nor Dahlan have yet to benefit on the ground from this "support". Indeed, the ease with which Hamas was able to wrest control of Gaza indicates just how little US support for Fatah was worth there. Nevertheless, the same pipeline of support for "Fatah" has done a great deal to bolster perceived US and Israeli national security interests in the same region.



III.

Once again the pictures on our television screens in our newspapers are intended to suffice for missing substance; the context of empire is invisible or deliberately obscured ­in Palestine as in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. If the takeover of Gaza by Hamas was unanticipated, its success was a gift of immeasurable value to the overlords; a welcome but unforeseen consequence of fueling divisions among a weakened and oppressed people, undermining any steps toward positive change. Abbas and his underlings have foolishly offered up Palestine cut in two to the occupation regime that worked so hard to end the charade of a single Palestine to begin with. This was a coup for Israel in its on-going quest for regional hegemony, and a triumph for America's "War on Terror." For all the talk about a one-, two- or bi-national state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the reality is that no state solution for Palestine is on the near or distant horizon. Palestine is a series of disconnected pieces whose division into still smaller parts continues month after month.

Those fretting about a "Hamastan" in the Gaza Strip ought to be worried not about its viability or longevity or about whether or not Islamic law and social mores will be imposed. Hamas' presence in Gaza will be but a short-lived, transitory phenomenon entirely at the mercy of the US-backed Israeli military which has not left Gaza alone for a single day since Hamas' coming to power despite a yearlong ceasefire called by its leaders and scrupulously observed. Those concerned about a Hamas-controlled Gaza ought instead to be wondering how they are going to justify Hamas' destruction within the Strip and all the suffering, chaos and death that will ensue over the shameful silence of the international community.



IV.

Claims that Hamas' "victory" in the Gaza Strip is a sign that the Bush Doctrine in Palestine has failed are misguided. While no one can foresee all of the events that might take place in a region as volatile as the Middle East, Hamas' takeover in Gaza will ultimately benefit Israel and the United States. It will benefit Israel by giving it a free hand to destroy Hamas, permanently sever the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, and re-"negotiate" with its newly appointed "partners" the remaining islands of economically unviable territory that will soon be entirely encircled by a concrete and barbed-wire wall, cut off from their supplies of water and fertile land, and separated internally by "Arab-free" roads. It will benefit Israel and the United States by assuring another compliant puppet regime adjacent to Jordan, friendly to Egypt and Saudi Arabia and hostile to Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, even as the fault lines harden. It has already benefited both Israel and the United States by reassuring them that their tactics for undermining indigenous experiments in democracy have once again proven effective; that the people who have dared to defy those tactics learn quickly how painful it is to advocate or practice popular sovereignty and the rule of law.

Mahmoud Abbas has already learned how well complicity and collaboration are rewarded. Having dismissed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, dissolved the national unity government, declared a new, 'legitimate' government under his rule and appointed his friends to work beside him, he recently stepped into the limelight with an address on Palestine TV, broadcast in the US on C-SPAN, by announcing how he would further "enhance democracy." This would begin by no longer speaking to "murderers," by which he meant Hamas.

Clearly, his membership application into the club of the Good Guys has been, for the time being, approved.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the board of the Israeli Coalition against House Demolitions-USA branch, founder of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and a freelance journalist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net

42 House Democrats Back U.S. Terror Academy

Democrats and the School of the Americas
By DAN BACHER

Two San Joaquin Valley Representatives, Dennis Cardoza of Merced and Jim Costa of Fresno, were among 42 Democrats that voted to keep the world's foremost torture school, the School of the Americas, open during a House vote on June 21. The vote was 203 yes, 214 no, 1 voting "present" and 19 not voting.

Cardova, Costa and 40 other Democrats voted no on the McGovern/Lewis Amendment that would have finally cut off funding to the School of Americas (SOA), now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Only 6 more votes were needed to pass it--but these Democrats shamefully chose to join Republican Representatives in voting for the school, whose graduates have been responsible for genocide, assassinations, torture and other human rights violations throughout Latin America for decades.

California representatives Loretta Sanchez and Grace Napolitano, along with Charles Rangel of New York, are listed among the Democrats who chose not to vote. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not found on any list, not even present.)

SOA Watch, a human rights advocacy group founded in 1990 by Maryknoll Priest Father Roy Bourgeois to close the "School of Death," was disappointed by the vote. However, SOA Watch vowed to continue its efforts in Congress until the school, located in Fort Benning, Georgia, is shut down.

"The grassroots mobilizing effort was tremendous: Tens of thousands of emails, faxes and calls flooded the halls of Congress over the past three days," said Joao Da Silva, SOA Watch spokesman, after the vote at 11:52 p.m. on Thursday. "Students, clergy, union members and veterans traveled to DC and visited with hundreds of Congressional offices to communicate clearly that there is no room for institutions like the SOA/WHINSEC in our future. Despite this, 214 Members of Congress missed the chance to stand up for human rights, justice and democracy, and voted to keep the funding for the SOA/WHINSEC flowing."

The WHINSEC "PR machine" and high-ranking Pentagon officials used taxpayer money to put a lot of pressure on Members of Congress. However, Da Silva said this is no excuse for Representatives to not be accountable to their constituents.

"There were Representatives this week that committed to vote to cut funding for the SOA/WHINSEC, and then shifted their vote," said Da Silva. "Those people need hear from all of us, loudly and in public."

Da Silva emphasized, "While we did not get enough Members of Congress to vote with us, it was clear to us and our supporters in the House that we have tremendous power when we mobilize together. We gained the support of new Republicans and new members of Congress. The margin of SOA/ WHINSEC survival is rapidly dwindling, and this week due to grassroots pressure, we added several new cosponsors to HR 1707 bringing our total to 111. We have gained a lot of ground in Congress and our goal of closing this School of the Death is coming closer and closer."

The vote, although it failed by 6 votes, still came closer to ending the school's funding than last June's vote, when the amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill by Jim McGovern (D-MA) calling for school's closure failed by a 15 vote margin.