According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Steven J. Rosen will be allowed to move ahead with his civil defamation lawsuit against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Rosen and fellow AIPAC employee Keith Weissman were indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act in 2005 along with Department of Defense Employee Col. Lawrence Franklin for passing classified national defense informaiton. Franklin pled guilty, but Rosen and Weissman’s case never went to trial — US attorneys gave up (PDF) after the presiding judge made a successful prosecution unlikely.
An Israeli columnist issues a scathing indictment of Israel and calls on the U.S. to apply pressure.
The latest Haaretz column by the outstanding and courageous Israeli columnist, Gideon Levy, is entitled “America, Stop Sucking Up to Israel,” and it highlights one of the most bizarre political facts: criticism of Israeli actions is far more tolerated and permitted in Israeli political discourse than it is in America’s. It’s simply inconceivable that any establishment journalist or national politician would ever echo Levy’s scathing indictments of Israel’s conduct and his calls for the U.S. to apply serious pressure and even threats to coerce changes in Israeli behavior. After describing the increasingly conciliatory actions towards Israel by the Obama administration in exchange for nothing but obstinance, Levy writes:
The nature and extent of Israeli spying in the U.S. is not a subject you’ll see the “mainstream” media very often touch with so much as a 10-foot pole, but when it does the results can be ominously disturbing….
A silent battle has been raging right under our noses, a fierce underground struggle pitting the U.S. against one of its closest allies. For all its newsworthiness, the media has barely noticed the story – except when it surfaces, briefly, like a giant fin jutting above the waves. The aggressor in this war is the state of Israel, with the U.S., its sponsor and protector, playing defense. This is the dark side of the “special relationship” – a battle of spy vs. spy.
Web Note: Shame on J Street. I began linking to them several weeks ago after hearing about their organization on a podcast. They are pro-Palestine, pro-Israel and pro-Peace. I thought finally, an honest alternative to AIPAC! But alas, at the first sign of pressure from the NeoConazis they buckle and boot these poets off their program. Why would anyone want to support a watered-down AIPAC?
Our spooks stopped Bush from bombing Iran, but can they stop Obama?
In 2007, just as the Bush administration was hyping the alleged “threat” from Iran’s ostensible nuclear ambitions – and facing renewed pressure from the Israel lobby to go after Tehran – the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate that punctured the War Party’s balloon. The NIE, which represents the considered opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, averred that we knew with “high confidence” Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and not restarted it.
Why does no one want to look into Sibel’s accusations? I would guess that it is partly because her tale involves Washington’s most powerful foreign policy lobby, that of Israel, and also the less powerful but undeniably important lobby of Turkey.
Sibel Edmonds, the FBI Turkish translator turned whistleblower, is the most gagged person in the history of the United States. The Justice Department under George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft twice silenced her using the rarely employed state secrets privilege. The government and the mainstream media have presented a united front against her, calling her a “kook” and a liar, even though the gag order in itself confirmed that she had a tale to tell about massive government corruption that was all too credible and would embarrass Democrat and Republican alike.
Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old Turkish-American, was hired as a translator by the FBI shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 because of her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages. She was fired less than a year later in March 2002 for reporting shoddy work and security breaches to her supervisors that could have prevented those attacks.
Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.
Who’s really behind that “bipartisan” call to attack Iran?
As the war drums start beating in Washington over the Iranian nuclear “crisis,” Bloomberg reports the following:
“The U.S. should begin preparing crippling sanctions on Iran and publicly make clear that a military strike is possible should the Iranian government press ahead with its nuclear effort, a bipartisan policy group said. ‘If biting sanctions do not persuade the Islamic Republic to demonstrate sincerity in negotiations and give up its enrichment activities, the White House will have to begin serious consideration of the option of a U.S.-led military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities,’ said the study from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.”
Many congressmen undoubtedly display knee-jerk support for Israel either because it is career enhancing or because they are afraid not to. Those who truly believe that Israel’s interests are of paramount importance and that the United States ought to go to war on its behalf should perhaps find another line of work…
“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.” ~ R.L. Bushman
“Rapidly you are dividing into two classes – extreme rich and extreme poor.” ~ “Brutus”
Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the US is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.
“I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews lives in Jerusalem.”
Thus did Israeli government press director Daniel Seamen caustically dismiss President Obama’s opposition to Israel’s right to “natural growth” of its settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and on the West Bank.
Though Obama’s address in Cairo broke no new ground, it confirmed to the world that a new day has arrived and a sea change has taken place. The Israel-centric Middle East policy of George W. Bush is dead. And with the policy change has come rhetorical change.
On Sept. 20, 2002, as the War Party was beating the drum for preventive war on Iraq, lest we wake up to “a mushroom cloud over an American city,” The Wall Street Journal introduced an eminent voice to confirm that, yes, Saddam was driving straight for an atomic bomb.
“This is a dictator who is … feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons,” wrote Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel.
During Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, his interpreter and I, free for a few hours, conscripted a driver to take us on a tour of Beijing. Somewhere in my files are photos from that day we toured the grim city of Chairman Mao in the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The interpreter: Charles Freeman — the same Charles Freeman Adm. Dennis Blair chose to chair the National Intelligence Council that prepares National Intelligence Estimates on critical national security issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.
“Real men go to Tehran!” brayed the neoconservatives, after the success of their propaganda campaign to have America march on Baghdad and into an unnecessary war that has forfeited all the fruits of our Cold War victory.
Now they are back, in pursuit of what has always been their great goal: an American war on Iran. It would be a mistake to believe they and their collaborators cannot succeed a second time. Consider:
On being chosen by Israel’s President Shimon Peres to form the new regime, Likud’s “Bibi” Netanyahu declared, “Iran is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon and constitutes the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence.”
“Where there is no solution, there is no problem,” geostrategist James Burnham once wryly observed.
Ex-Sen. George Mitchell, the latest U.S. negotiator to take up the Palestine portfolio, may discover what it was that Burnham meant.
For Israel’s three-week war on Gaza, where Palestinians died at a rate of 100 to one to Israelis, appears to have been, like Israel’s wars in Lebanon, another Pyrrhic victory for the Jewish state.
In 1982, after an attempted assassination of their ambassador in London, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon drove through Lebanon to Beirut, shelling the city for weeks until Arafat agreed to pull out the PLO and depart for Tunisia.
This is the MSNBC clip that has AIPAC and Michael Savage on another rampage against Pat Buchanan. View it, then listen to Savage as he spins Buchanan’s comments.
Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage….
Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin?
Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.
In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain’s operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech.
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Steven J. Rosen will be allowed to move ahead with his civil defamation lawsuit against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Rosen and fellow AIPAC employee Keith Weissman were indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act in 2005 along with Department of Defense Employee Col. Lawrence Franklin for passing classified national defense informaiton. Franklin pled guilty, but Rosen and Weissman’s case never went to trial — US attorneys gave up (PDF) after the presiding judge made a successful prosecution unlikely.
An Israeli columnist issues a scathing indictment of Israel and calls on the U.S. to apply pressure.
The nature and extent of Israeli spying in the U.S. is not a subject you’ll see the “mainstream” media very often touch with so much as a 10-foot pole, but when it does the results can be ominously disturbing….
Web Note: Shame on J Street. I began linking to them several weeks ago after hearing about their organization on a podcast. They are pro-Palestine, pro-Israel and pro-Peace. I thought finally, an honest alternative to AIPAC! But alas, at the first sign of pressure from the NeoConazis they buckle and boot these poets off their program. Why would anyone want to support a watered-down AIPAC? 
Sibel Edmonds, the FBI Turkish translator turned whistleblower, is the most gagged person in the history of the United States. The Justice Department under George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft twice silenced her using the rarely employed state secrets privilege. The government and the mainstream media have presented a united front against her, calling her a “kook” and a liar, even though the gag order in itself confirmed that she had a tale to tell about massive government corruption that was all too credible and would embarrass Democrat and Republican alike.
By Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi — 
Many congressmen undoubtedly display knee-jerk support for Israel either because it is career enhancing or because they are afraid not to. Those who truly believe that Israel’s interests are of paramount importance and that the United States ought to go to war on its behalf should perhaps find another line of work… 
“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.” ~ R.L. Bushman
Recent Comments