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AS THE WORLD SQUIRMS
Friday, February 09, 2007
ARCHIVE
Former U.S.
security adviser says war in Iraq calamity; could lead to Iran war
"If
the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody
involvement in Iraq, and I emphasize what I am about to say, the final
destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with
Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large," said the security
adviser in the Democratic administration of former president Jimmy Carter. National Post - Canada (via
Barry Schweid, The Associated Press) Published: Thursday, February 01, 2007 (Excerpt) WASHINGTON —
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, told Congress the war in Iraq is a calamity and likely to lead to “a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world
of Islam at large.” Testifying before the Senate foreign relations
committee Thursday, Brzezinski skewered U.S.
administration policy as driven by “imperial hubris” and a disaster on historic, strategic and moral
grounds.  The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine: Book
Review: By Stephen Lendman Global
Research, February 7, 2007 (Book Review: Publishers Weekly, via Amazon.com) (Excerpt) The Beginning - Initial Planning for Ethnic
Cleansing In his preface, Pappe writes about the "Red House" in
Tel-Aviv that became headquarters for the Hagana, the dominant Zionist
underground paramilitary militia during the British Mandate period in
Palestine between 1920 and 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. He
details how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, met with leading
Zionists and young Jewish military officers on March 10, 1948 to finalize
plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine that unfolded in the months that
followed including "large-scale (deadly serious)intimidation; laying
siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to
homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and finally, planting
mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from
returning." The final master plan was called Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew) following plans A, B, and C preceding it. It was to be a war
without mercy complying with what Ben-Gurion said in June, 1938 to the Jewish
Agency Executive and never wavering from later: "I am for compulsory transfer;
I do not see anything immoral in it." Plan D became the way to
do it. It included forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of unwanted
Palestinian Arabs in urban and rural areas accompanied by an unknown number
of others mass slaughtered to get it done. The goal was simple and
straightforward - to create an exclusive Jewish state without an Arab
presence by any means including mass-murder. Once
begun, the whole ugly business took six months to complete. It expelled about
800,000 people, killed many others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban
neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. The action was a
clear case of ethnic cleansing that international law today calls a crime
against humanity for which convicted Nazis at Nuremberg were hanged. So far
Israelis have always remained immune from international law even though names
of guilty leaders and those charged with implementing their orders are known
as well as the crimes they committed. They included cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes,
villages and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless
people given no quarter including women and children. The crimes were
suppressed and expunged from official accounts as Israeli historiography
cooked up the myth that Palestinians left voluntarily fearing harm from
invading Arab armies. It was a lie covering up Israeli crimes Palestinians
call the Nakba - the catastrophe or disaster
that's
still a cold, harsh festering unresolved injustice. Even with British armed presence still in charge of law and
order before its Mandate ended, Jewish forces completed the expulsion of about
250,000 Palestinians the Brits did nothing to stop. It continued unabated
because when neighboring Arab states finally intervened, they did so without
conviction. They came belatedly and with only small, ill-equipped forces, no
match for a superior, well-armed Israeli military easily able to prevail as
discussed below.  Cakewalks, Forgeries and
Smoking Guns
The Salvador Option in Beirut
By Trish Schuh Counterpunch.org 2.8.07 (Excerpt) "The
only prospect that holds hope for us is the carving up of Syria... It is our
task to prepare for that prospect. All else is a purposeless waste of
time." Zionist
militant Zeév Jabotinsky, From "We and Turkey" in Di Tribune,
November 30, 1915 "We
should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon,
Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Muslim regime is
artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state
there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan, and
Syria will fall to us." David
Ben-Gurion, From "Ben-Gurion, A Biography" by Michael Ben-Zohar,
May 1948 "It is
obvious that the above military assumptions, and the whole plan too, depend
also on the Arabs continuing to be even more divided than they are now, and
on the lack of any truly mass movement among them... Every kind of inter-Arab
confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the
more important aim of breaking Iraq up into denominations as in Syria and
Lebanon... Syria will fall apart." Oded
Yinon, 1982. From "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East" "Regime
change is, of course, our goal both in Lebanon and Syria. We wrote long ago
that there are three ways to achieve it - the dictator chooses to change; he
falls before his own unhappy people; or if he poses a threat to the outside,
the outside takes him out..." -Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), From strategy paper #474
"Priorities in Lebanon & Syria", March 2, 2005 From mission statement to mission accomplished, the cakewalks
continue. But from Baghdad to Beirut, the forgery looks the same.  Prominent
British Jews call for open debate on Israel
·
Pinter
and Farhi among signatories to open letter, ·
Institutions
accused of not representing Jewish community
(Excerpt)
A group of prominent British Jews will today declare independence
from the country's Jewish establishment, arguing that it puts support for
Israel above the human rights of Palestinians. Independent
Jewish Voices will publish an open letter on the Guardian's Comment is Free website calling for a freer debate about the Middle East within
the Jewish community. Among the more than 130 signatories are Stephen Fry,
Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh, Jenny Diski and Nicole Farhi, as well as leading
academics such as Eric Hobsbawm and Susie Orbach. "We come together in the belief
that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this
country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to
represent the Jewish community as a whole," the letter says.
Jewish leaders in Britain, it argues "put support for the policies of an
occupying power above the human rights of an occupied people" in
conflict with Jewish principles of justice and compassion. More…
“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind.” ~George Orwell~
Mistrial could
be end of Watada case Double-jeopardy prohibition might thwart retrial Thursday, February 8, 2007 By MIKE BARBER SEATTLE
POST-INTELLIGENCER
FORT LEWIS -- The Army court-martial of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada,
which ended in a mistrial Wednesday, may have stranger turns ahead: Prohibitions against
double jeopardy may keep prosecutors from having a second trial, his lawyer
and another legal expert say. The opposition of Watada and his defense team to the mistrial,
declared by the military judge and eventually endorsed by prosecutors after
their case fell apart, opens the door for a double-jeopardy defense, said
John Junker, a University of Washington law professor.
Double jeopardy, which forbids a person from being tried twice
for the same crime, does not apply only after a verdict is rendered, but can
apply after a jury is empaneled and witnesses have been called. "The notion is that you can't just stop in the middle and
say, 'I don't like the way it's going' and start over," Junker said.
"If the defendant objected, it does raise the possibility" of
double jeopardy, Junker said. "That would happen in a civilian court,
and I presume in a military court. That doctrine comes from the
Constitution." 
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