5.28.2005
Some Informative Reading
Not much time to write, to connect the dots between articles; but I'll leave you some interesting reading to consider.
AIPAC Holds National Meeting Amid Spy Scandal Investigation
Israeli Spying:The Mother of all Scandals
Nancy Pelosi Gives a Pep Talk to AIPAC
"There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.
"The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran. For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology.
THE THIRD TEMPLE'S HOLY OF HOLIES: ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Warner D. Farr, LTC, U.S. Army, The Counterproliferation Papers,Future Warfare Series No. 2 USAF Counterproliferation Center Air War College Air University Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama September 1999
ISRAEL: Washington backs Middle East’s nuclear outlaw
Israel may well be the world’s fifth-largest nuclear power, ahead of Britain, and could even rival China for fourth place. Estimates of its stockpile range from 200 to more than 400 nuclear weapons, including medium- and long-range nuclear missiles, aircraft-mounted nuclear bombs and submarine-based nuclear cruise missiles, as well as sophisticated low-blast, deadly radiation-producing (“neutron bombs”) nuclear artillery shells and even nuclear land mines.
Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control Avner Cohen
A comparison with Israel’s nuclear weapons (NW) program highlights this point. Although Israel has not acknowledged possessing NW and has declared that it “will not
be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” the existence of the Israeli bomb has been the world’s worst kept secret since about 1970.4 That is not
the case, however, for Israel’s other potential non-conventional capabilities, especially biological weapons (BW). To this day, the Israeli government has issued no policy statement on biological arms control, and it has neither signed nor ratified the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
Agreement signed by Arabs not worth paper its written on: Sharon
Sharon: Settlements can expand, despite road map
JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his Cabinet on Sunday that Israel can keep building Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite a construction freeze required by the U.S.-backed road map to Mideast peace.
Sharon said construction should proceed quietly, Israel TV's Channel 1 reported. It said Sharon told the ministers that settlement building "isn't part of the road map, it's my personal commitment
Israeli Settlements (Updated) .pdf
"Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country…there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left."
Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund, diary entry, 1940
IDF troops take over Palestinian family's home to watch soccer
Israel Defense Forces soldiers barged into a Palestinian home and commandeered its television room so they could watch a soccer match, a military source said on Friday after a TV report on the incident.
Footage on Channel 10 TV showed broken furniture and windows in the room of the house in the West Bank city of Hebron where the television station said the troops watched Wednesday's Champions League final between AC Milan and Liverpool.
Anti-AIPAC ad from the NY Times, .pdf
The Franklin Affair: A Spreading Treason
There's more to the AIPAC spy scandal than 'mishandling' classified information
Here are a couple paragraphs from the information heavy article
Rozen, a perceptive reporter who has been following this story from the start, gives us the essential context of the Franklin affair by showing that he was very much a part of a small, tightly-knit network inside the Pentagon dedicated to provoking war not only with Iraq but also igniting a regional conflict including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. She does a very good job, in her piece, of showing how Franklin was at the center of this group's covert machinations: he had a penchant, as she puts it, for "showing up at critical and murky junctures of recent history":
"He was part of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which provided much-disputed intelligence on Iraq; he courted controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, who contributed much of that hyped and misleading Iraq intelligence; and he participated with a Pentagon colleague and former Iran/contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in a controversial December 2001 meeting in Rome – which, in a clear violation of US government protocol, was kept secret from the CIA and the State Department."
"In all these endeavors," Rozen writes, "Franklin … was hardly acting as a lone wolf." These rogue operations were projects of the neoconservative matrix in Washington, which reaches not only into the bowels of the Pentagon but also seems to have gained access to the higher echelons of this administration, and virtually taken over the Vice President's office lock, stock, and barrel.
Douglas Feith, Franklin's boss, is close to Israel's Likud party, and in 1996, he and Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser prepared a position paper for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break," that outlined a strategy for extracting Israel from its strategic dilemma: the invasion of Iraq, followed by the elimination of Syria, and the neutralization of Iran, topped their agenda. What they didn't say in the policy paper was that the United States would be doing their dirty work for them, but in retrospect we can see plainly enough that utilizing American military power figured prominently in their plan.
Read and reason for yourself. Our tax dollars at work.
5/28/2005
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