Fatal Detraction?

The increasingly volatile pre trial phase of the Lebanon tribunal…

It appears that no acceptable compromise regarding the divergent Lebanese political stances relative to the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) will be achieved.  Support for this hypothesis can be found in the past 24 hours activities of the would-be mediators.  The Saudi King Abdullah, ‘lifted our hand’ (i.e. abandoned mediation) cold. The Turk and Qatari envoys split, the Americans fumbled, Jumblatt flipped his choice from anti-US Omar Karami to pro-US Prime Minister (again!) and then flipped back once again and now, who knows?  Hezbollah’s main Christian ally, Michel Aoun defamed and cursed (ex-Prime Minister Saad Hariri and the American Ambassador respectively), Syria stressed, Iran warned, Egypt remained incoherent, the Arab League waffled and adjourned “pending developments”, Hezbollah prepared, and ex-PM Saad Hariri insisted that he’s going to fight to keep his job after all. His decision late yesterday puts Saad on a collision course with the Hezbollah led March 8 “minority” which, in fact, may now be the “majority”.

The odds are that Saad will not be back as Prime Minister but that Omar Karami will. The Hariri empire and its American and Saudi allies will very likely take revenge on the new Hezbollah controlled government and gut Lebanon’s  economy.  The Saudi Wahabists are said to be not disposed to bail out a Shia dominated country run by those they claim refuse to accept the legitimate Sunnah of the prophet  Mohammad. As one Saudi journalist suggested this morning, “ Let Hezbollah and Iran put their money where their mouths are. They are going to learn a thing or two about the real World.”

It is possible that before long, Le Liban Ancien may be gone with the wind. Indicted, convicted, condemned, dispatched and gifted to others by profoundly flawed American-Israel regional policies. Not even my astute motorbike mechanic, Hussein, is bold enough to say, whether after the coming events that he is predicting, Lebanon can rise like the sacred firebird Phoenix or will simply implode one last time into ashes to be scattered. This week, citizens are staying inside their houses more than usual, the Lebanese army is deployed at key intersections and overpasses, and some friends are cleaning their weapons and pondering whether civil war era ammunition will still fire when needed. “ Informal economy ” gun prices, like the cost of benzene, bottled gas, and fuel oil rose twice this week.

A few hours ago, someone from the Chinese Embassy called (the gentleman must have got my card from me during their fabulous reception and feast celebrating China’s  National day a few months ago)  asking if I thought Lebanon would be safe for Chinese tourists, as a group from Beijing is planning to come to Lebanon before long.  Once more, I had to confess to total cluelessness. Meanwhile the Embassy of Qatar has just announced that all its citizens should leave Lebanon.

Serious doubts are being raised about the post-investigative/pre-trial phases of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL),  specifically regarding the increasing numbers of leaks, the failure of the  so-called Syrian-Saudi initiative, unfulfilled Prosecution pledges to take action against wild media stories and perceived legal problems with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s  Statute and Rules of Procedure.

Some STL staff and observers are reportedly concerned that the competition and enmity between the Canadian Danial Bellemare  and the Belgium pre-Trial Judge Danial Fransen may also harm the STL’s progress.  The reputably mega-ego Bellemare is said to be still smarting from what he considered the unwarranted and rude judicial slap down he received  earlier this year from judge Fransen concerning the Jamil Sayeed case. Sayeed was one of four Lebanese pro-Syrian Generals  who spent nearly four years imprisoned for alleged involvement in the Hariri assassination based on what some believes was grandstanding tactics, including false witnesses, by Bellemare’s predecessor, German lawyer,Detlev Mehlis who recommended the generals be jailed based on Zuhair Siddiq’s false testimony. General Sayeed and his colleagues are understandably mad as hell and are demanding justice following  release from prison after the STL acknowledged there was insufficient evidence to have held them in the first place. Bellemare objected to Sayeed being allowed due process Judicial Discovery in order that he might learn the evidence against him that led to his imprisonment and Bellemare was unexpectedly overruled by  Judge Fransen.  Sayeed’s case continues, as a side event of the STL.

Separate from  the reported smoldering Bellemare-Fransen animus  which hopefully will not cause the proceedings to become fatally mired, there are serious doubts among some legal international law students about problems with trying the suspects Bellemare has identified in his indictments. One named indictee is said to be a Middle East country head of state and also head of government, who like no fewer than 8 Arab countries  “popular leaders of the people” got his job from his dad based on primogeniture rather than his personal record of public service.

Can the STL stage Hamlet without the Prince being present?

Increasingly, international legal critics of the STL are also highlighting flaws in the Special Tribunals Statute and Rules of Procedure. One Court  Statue provision is particularly seen to be  fundamentally inconsistent with international law, and which binds Lebanon,  is Article 22 of the Tribunal’s Statute.

Article 22 allows for trials in absentia. One problem is that trying suspects in absentia is virtually unheard of  among international ad hoc and ‘hybrid’ UN courts. In absentia trials have been consistently forbidden in international tribunals ever since the 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Absentia trials were then, and ever since the end of WW II,  have been condemned for the simple reason that in absentia trials allow for deep and broad politicization of the judicial process.

A careful reading of the STL Statute leads to the conclusion that not only does Article 22 authorize in absentia trials, but it requires them.  As such, Article 22 violates Lebanon’s rights and obligations under international legal standards and practice. In absentia trials will almost certainly lead to the  political  corruption of fair trial standards and  thus gives rise to legitimate grounds  for Lebanon  and other countries to withhold cooperation from the work of the Tribunal.  In absentia  trials also will delegitimize the work product of the Lebanon Tribunal leaving any resulting verdicts deeply flawed and likely rejected by international public and legal opinion.

How so?

The right to Habeas Corpus, being the fundamental right of a person to be present at trial is enshrined in Article 14(3)(d) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which is binding upon Lebanon. It states that any person charged with a criminal offence has the right to be present at trial. This right is a minimum due process guarantee and it is required at all stages of the STL proceedings.   The UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) ruled in  Mbenge v. Zaire that everyone is entitled to be tried in his presence and to defend himself in person or through legal assistance. This provision in Article 14 cannot reasonably  be said to always  prohibit proceedings in absentia and sometimes international humanitarian law would allow them.

One case would be when the accused person,  after being given actual notice of the charges, sufficiently in advance of trial, knowingly declines  the habeas corpus right. The critical question, then, is precisely when departure from the norm in the fulfillment of this objective is justified and does the STL Statue violate international law?  It is submitted that the Court’s reasoning in Mbenge v. Zaire is sound and once it is appreciated where the burden of proving the accused’s knowledge lies — that is, on the prosecution — it becomes plain that any argument based on the accused have received informal knowledge or constructive knowledge is bound to fail. Thus, as indicated by the Court inMbenge v. Zaire, the accused must at a minimum be served with a summons if the STL Office of the Prosecution is to discharge its burden.

The case law of both the Human Rights Council and of the European Court affirms that, absent a right of retrial, actual notice of the proceedings on the part of the accused is a necessary condition in order for those proceedings to be compliant with Article 14(3)(d) of the ICCPR or Article 6 ECHR.  Therefore, under the relevant rules of international law binding upon Lebanon, absent an unfettered right of retrial, which the STL Statute does not provide, it is impermissible to commence a trial in the absence of the accused unless it can be demonstrated that, at the very least, the defendant had actual and direct knowledge of the proceedings. Meaning he/she must be personally served a summons.

In additions, Article 14(3)(d) of the ICCPR, read in light of the subsequent practice concerning trials in absentia in many jurisdictions, indicates that (subject to retrial at the accused’s option) a court may not commence or proceed with a trial unless the prosecutor is able to establish that the accused possessed actual knowledge of the proceedings and intended to waive his right to be present.

Article 22 STL Statute, entitled ‘trials in absentia’, provides as follows:

1. The Special Tribunal shall conduct trial proceedings in the absence of the accused, if he or she:
   1. Has expressly and in writing waived his or her right to be present;
   2. Has not been handed over to the Tribunal by the State authorities concerned;
   3. Has absconded or otherwise cannot be found and all reasonable steps have been taken to secure his or her appearance before the Tribunal and to inform him or her of the charges confirmed by the Pre-Trial Judge.

Another of the problems with Article 22 is the real likelihood  that ‘the State authorities concerned’ may have ‘failed’ to hand over the accused for various legitimate reasons. For example, how can it be known which State authorities are “ concerned” given that the whereabouts of the accused person would likely be unknown. Moreover, as a simple matter of public international law, Countries are under no obligation whatsoever to extradite suspects for trial in another Country. To do so is arguably unlawful in the absence of an extradition treaty providing a basis in law for such an extradition.  International law does not permits canceling an individual’s right to appear at his own trial on the basis that some third state  (possibly hostile to the accused or relevant Country) has not done a positive act that it is under no obligation to do. Also,  the fact that a Country may have refused to extradite an accused person is immaterial when it comes to the critical question of whether the accused himself knew of the proceedings against him and voluntarily elected not to attend.

It is possible that the international community will tire of the STL, given all the tribunals perceived defects, long before any verdicts are achieved or appeals exhausted. It remains to be seen what becomes of the original objectives contemplated by UN Security Council Resolution­­­­ 1757  as serious questions are increasingly raised about the wisdom of the UN stamping its imprimatur to a widely suspected US-Israel project in the first place.

Multiculturalism Utter Failure Across Europe: Growing Tension

This past week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “Our attempt to have ethnic groups and religions live side by side and enjoy each other has failed, utterly failed.”

Surveys show 30 percent of Germans believe the country is overrun by foreigners. An equal number believe the foreigners come to feed off German welfare. The same figures grow in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Holland, France, Norway, Sweden and Austria.

Merkel noted that the Muslim Turks, that arrived as “gastarbeiters” or guest workers, in the 50s and 60s, grew to 2.5 million in Germany. Arabs and East Europeans arrived later. Surveys place the Muslim population at five million.

“Multikulti is dead,” says Horst Seehofer of Merkel’s sister party, the Christian Social Union of Bavaria. He dreads further immigration of “alien cultures.”  Aliens fail to learn the German language and do not assimilate to become Germans.

9/11 A BIG PARTY BASH FOR GERMAN MUSLIMS

Pundit Patrick Buchanan said, “Awareness of deep differences with Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam’s victory with barrages of bottle rockets. Like all of Europe, Germany grows nervous.

“This summer, Thilo Sarrazin, who sat on the Bundesbank board, published “Germany Abolishes Itself,” which sold 300,000 copies in seven weeks. Sarrazin argued that Germany’s Muslim population is intellectually inferior and unable or unwilling to learn the language or culture, and mass immigration is destroying the nation.”

Buchanan, author of Death of the West, said that mass immigration from third world countries to first world countries destroys western culture and values. He said, “Across Europe, there is a resurgence of ethno-nationalism that is feeding the ranks of populist and anti-immigrant parties that are gaining respectability and reaching for power. Austrian nationalists triumphed in 2008 when the Freedom Party of Joerg Haider and the Alliance for the “Future of Austria” together took 29 percent of the vote. The Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher, largest in Bern, was behind the successful referendum to change the constitution to outlaw minarets and prohibit the wearing of burqas.

“Hungary’s Jobbik Party, which to the Financial Times “sits squarely in Europe’s most repulsive arch-nationalist tradition and which blames Jews and Roma for the hardships of other Hungarians,” pulled 17 percent of the vote this year and entered parliament with 47 seats, up from zero seats in 2006.”

Additionally, “The Sweden Democrats just captured 6 percent of the vote and entered parliament for the first time with 20 seats, joining right-wing folk parties in Norway and Denmark.”

Another anti-immigration voice in Holland, Geert Wilders, a rising figure in Dutch politics, stands trial today for expressing his freedom of speech rights, but suffered charges of hate speech for equating Islam and Nazism.

“More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam — that is what the Netherlands has chosen,” said Wilders.

Buchanan said, “In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy — one eye on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the other on the 2012 elections — rejecting cries of “Nazism” and “Vichyism,” is dismantling Gypsy camps and deporting Gypsies to Romania. Milan is now following the French lead. What is happening in Europe partakes of a global trend. Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural nations are disintegrating.

Former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm spoke about it in his speech on October 3, 2004 in Washington, DC, “How to Destroy America.”

Lamm said, “Here is how they destroyed their countries: First, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country.  History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures.  It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.  The historical scholar Seymour Lipset put it this way, “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy.  Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon—all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

Buchanan said, “Russians battle ethnic Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus. Seventy percent of Americans support an Arizona law to identify and expel illegal aliens. Beijing swamps the homelands of Tibetans and Uighurs with Han Chinese. India fights secession in Kashmir, Nagaland and the Naxalite provinces.”

“Wars between nations have given way to wars within nations,” said Barack Obama in his Nobel Prize address.

Germany’s condition may prove unsolvable.  At 1.4 birth rate, it’s running out of native people while Muslims reproduce at an average in Europe of 8.1 children per female.

As one Muslim said, “We won’t have to use bombs or violence; we will out populate them as Allah wishes.”

Can Israel Defeat Hezbollah In The Coming War?

Part I “Know thyself” Sun Tzu

On any day, but particularly since 9/21/10, you can also see beefed up Zionist military patrols, assorted electronic listening posts, sundry spy devices, new Raytheon-produced surveillance equipment, two new supposedly camouflaged cinder block one room shacks with Zionist soldiers peering out menacingly while talking on their (Hezbollah-monitored) cell phones to girlfriends, mothers, pals and their HQ’s. They frequently glare from windows heavily-screened to keep out stones that tourists on the Lebanon side of the ‘blue line’ regularly throw at them when UNIFIL guys aren’t paying attention or shoo them away. You can also see land mine fields, wide soft sand swatches along the wire fences to detect trespassing neighbors footprints, a couple of orchards, and the edges of three colonial settlements. And if one were to squint, like really squint, or better yet, risk getting shot between the eyes by a Zionist sniper with an American 7.62 mm, Sniper Weapon System, M24 (called a “system” because it can be used with various detachable telescopic sights and other accessories) and were to use some Barska Cosmos 25X100 binoculars, one might see, well, vent holes.

These air ducts, according to imaginative and joking village kids, are guarded by specially trained scorpions, the holes bringing in fresh air for scores of 130 feet plus bunkers that some miscreants are rumored to have gone and built all over northern Palestine as far south as Safad.

The increase in activity along the Blue line, especially near Fatima’s Gate is only partially in preparation for the rumored visit of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in mid- October. An Israeli invasion could be launched at any time and locals explain that, for their part, they have selected their targets, completed their surveillance, so far eluded capture and are ready to attack deep into Palestine when commanded.

President Ahmadinejad is also expected to appear and speak at Maron al Ras, presumably without binoculars and resisting the temptation to cast a few stones in solidarity with the Palestinian intifadas. UNIFIL personnel at the scene reveal that several Israeli military leaders have been visiting the area this past month, including Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

It is here in this ancient verdant, war scared hillside village of Maron al Ras where tradition instructs that Jesus (Issa) from Nazareth, less than a day’s walk to the South, accompanying his sainted mother Mary (Miriam), paused to rest on their trek to a wedding feast at Qana, some 30 km west.

At Qana, the site of unspeakable massacres in 1996 and 2006, two of the more than 60 committed by Zionist forces over the past six decades, the bearded Palestinian “terrorist”, so-listed by the Sanhedrin judges, performed at his mother’s request his first miracle. Qana residents are quick to point out that it was this same Sanhedrin that would later pay Judas Iscariot 30 pieces of silver to deliver up Jesus for trial on false death penalty charges of Blasphemy and would sentence his brother James to death by stoning.* According to a local priest who conducts tours of the Grotto of the Virgin Mary in Qana, where Mary and her son visited with the family of the soon to be newlyweds, “By turning water into wine, Jesus dutifully fulfilled his mother Mary’s request to provide additional refreshment for the larger than expected gathering of nearby villagers.” The priest explains to visitors that the parents of the bride and groom wanted to avoid the acute social embarrassment of running out of refreshments and were concerned for the comfort of last minute uninvited guests, who they anticipated would arrive for their children’s wedding as word quickly spread that Jesus and his mother would be attending.

One guest who is receiving invitations even from March 14 pro-Saudi political parties for frank discussions this month and who has already been invited to Qana, but who probably won’t imbibe the local “miracle wine” sold by local entrepreneurs, (from under the tent so to speak) will be the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is said to be a devotee of Prophet Issa and Miriam, both venerated in the Holy Qur’an.

In Lebanon, it sometimes appears even to the “particularly obtuse” – to borrow a phrase from my favorite constitutional law professor and scholar, Henry Paul Monaghan, who sometimes called us first year law students “particularly obtuse” – that everything is viewed thru the smoky prism of local politics and sects. Two lovely and politically passionate Qana villagers (one giggling and claiming to be a “Shia-Christian” and her friend interjecting “I’m a Christian-Shia!”), both Muslims who follow the teachings of “Prophet Issa”, explained to this foreigner that many Rabbis disparage Jesus’ miracle in Qana by claiming that it was the Hebrew Moses who was first able to turn water into another substance. They then gleefully counter that “Moses may well have done it, but Moses turned water into blood as a message of harsh judgment and violence, whereas “our” Palestinian Issa turned water into wine as a message of love, generosity and hospitality.” The discussion ended when an American Yeshiva student from Brooklyn appeared and entered the discussion announcing to the villagers that both Bible stories “suck” and that when the next war comes Qana may witness itself being miraculously turned into depleted uranium dust.

In both Maron al Ras and Qana, villagers believe it’s just a matter of time before Israel will invade Lebanon and it’s a subject of rare unanimous sectarian consensus in all of Lebanon. For example, in the course of no more than two hours the other day, while running errands around Beirut, this observer was informed, without even bringing up the subject, by (1) my Shia Muslim Hezbollah motorcycle mechanic patching up my bike after a slight mishap (again!) (2) Miss Idriss, the Maronite Christian lady who works at the corner bank and who truly adores “al Hakim” Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (since 2006, Geagea and the LF has been siphoning off alienated cadres and youth from the ranks of Geagea’s rivals including the Gemayals’ Phalange and Michel Aoun’s Christian pro-Hezbollah Free Patriotic Movement, and (3) my Sunni Muslim greengrocer lady who has absolutely no use for any of the above, that a major war is coming and probably sooner rather than later.

Purveyors of Israeli Hasbara are also keeping busy with predictions of a World War I type inevitability of major war in Lebanon given the claimed rapid arming of the national Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah, and the Israeli touted collection of yet more new ‘ultra-tech super weapons’ including robotic insects, new stealth drones, Iron Domes, David Sling I and II missile shields, yet even more improvements to the “impenetrable” Merkava Mark IV tank that took such a beating in 2006 that three countries, including Belgium, cancelled Merkava purchase orders. Israel and its “academic agents” tout more than 20 other spectacular “game changing” technological breakthroughs ‘just since the 2006 war which, according to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies and Jane’s Defense Weekly, likely will not function in real war conditions – despite the largess of the unknowing American taxpayers who pick up the tab for their R & D.

Virtually the whole waterfall of Hasbara studies, many handsomely paid for by various Israel lobby funders, conclude that the next Hezbollah Israel war will be nothing like the 2006 July War. In addition, pro-Israel authors routinely skew their research to reassure their paymasters that Hezbollah will lose to the spruced up, better-equipped and trained Israeli soldiers and that their defeat will not only shatter Hezbollah, but destroy Syria and Iran’s political power base and fundamentally change the political scene in Beirut.

This they confidently predict will lead to a pro-American and Israel-tolerant realignment of political parties and even achieve the long sought Lebanon-Israel “peace treaty.” Some “Lobby papers” conclude that the next battle will deliver changes as far away as Iran, and destroy Hamas.

Designed to bolster the increasingly dubious Israeli public opinion, some Israeli think tanks claim that the massive US taxpayer funded therapy program for returning 2006 Israeli troops has succeeded in lowering the rates of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and has lowered the percentage of “shell shock” disability cases in Israel. No mention of the skyrocketing rates of PTSD among US troops returning from various deployments in the Middle East which are skyrocketing, and American family complaints that needed medical help is being denied due to Pentagon budget “priorities.” A Rand study in 2008 estimated the total number of American service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who returned with PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), or “had their bell rung” to use the terminology employed by some staff in Ward E7 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, is more than 320,000. Today the figure is thought to be near 350,000. Only a small percentage are being properly treated according to the Department of Veterans Affairs and Bethesda medical staff, both of which admit they are not equipped to handle them—most severely maimed for life. Increasingly, some family members are becoming bitter and complaining about budget cuts. One mother recently complained to Congressman Steny Hoyer (veteran not of the US military but of more than a dozen US taxpayer paid trips to Israel) that “Israel always comes first and we pay for treatment and therapy for their soldiers and we sent our boys and girls to Iraq and Afghanistan because they told us to.”

As reported by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writing in Counterpunch recently, “Just this past week at Fort Hood, Texas, four decorated veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took their own lives, adding to the 14 other suicides this year at Fort Hood alone.”

Timur Goskel, former advisor to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is dismissive of many of these “Research Papers” and their (almost without exception) Zionist authors: “They don’t know the other side of the story. They don’t know what is happening here in Lebanon or what is Hezbollah doing or what Hezbollah is capable of. They will likely be shocked when they find out. They guess from newspapers and whatever and Hezbollah is not the organization you can read about in newspapers accurately. They don’t talk too much.” Goskel added.

Some of the Israeli Lobby think tank predictions may indeed materialize but the history of Hezbollah and Israel on the battlefield and other factors, ignored by pro-Israel “scholars” who either aren’t aware of them, or don’t want to risk their sinecures by mentioning unpleasant facts to their employers, suggest that Israel will lose its next aggression against Lebanon.

It is clear that Hezbollah has been studying its enemy.

Scorecard: Four Hezbollah conflicts with Israeli forces

The June 1982 Israeli invasion is not included in this brief consideration because Hezbollah was not fully organized and in fact its birth was partially the result of the 1982 “Peace for Galilee” aggression that slaughtered nearly 20,000 Lebanese civilians and Palestinian refugees as well as setting the stage for the Sabra-Shatila Massacre. On August 30, 1982, Israel did achieve its goal of expelling most of its PLO nemesis but catastrophically failed in its main objective of ending Lebanese resistance activity, as a PLO replacement Hezbollah quickly became a far stronger and more sophisticated adversary.

Many fighters who eventually joined Hezbollah but who fought in 1982 with the PLO or with a variety of affiliated militia inflicted much damage on Israeli forces during numerous mountain battles and at Khaldeh on the coast south of Beirut.

• 1985: Hezbollah pushes their Zionist enemy out of the mountain areas

Between 1978 to 1985, Zionist forces occupied approximately 1/3 of Lebanon including 801 towns and villages. The newly forming Hezbollah never stopped its resistance attacks. An important Hezbollah political victory against Israel was achieved on March 5, 1984 when its work to achieve the Lebanese Council of Ministers cancellation of the U.S.-Israel created May 17, 1983 agreement that would have yielded significant Lebanese sovereignty and territory to Israel. Another was the expulsion of foreign “peacekeeping forces” that increasingly attacked the civilian population of Lebanon on behalf of Israel and its local allies.

During this period Hezbollah and its allies surprised and hit Israeli forces hard all over the mountains and valleys and on January 14, 1985 Israel began withdrawing from 168 villages, being 55% of South Lebanon or 11% of Lebanon including Sidon, Tyre, Nabatieh and parts of the Western Bekaa.

Israeli Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, told the Lebanese government on 7/31/93, “Disarm Hezbollah or watch Israeli do it.” He said about the same thing to the Obama administration on 9/30/10 at the Pentagon.

Despite, 1,224 bombing attacks, according to UNIFIL data, and firing of more than 30,000 artillery shells and rockets, Hezbollah retaliated with what AFP on 7/25/93 called, “A hell of a shelling last[ing] 10 hours without a pause.” For seven days resistance forces conducted at least 30 operations along the Blue line targeting Zionist forces and their Lebanese surrogates. The US and Israel, shocked that the CIA-Mossad intelligence estimates that Hezbollah had only 500 rockets and this supply would be depleted in three days, decided to call for a cease-fire. The “July Accord” took effect at 6 p.m. on 7/31/93 and Israel withdrew and stood down, failing to achieve any of its objectives which frankly are always the same– Disarm the Resistance, break Hezbollah’s relationships with the Lebanese public, and force the Lebanese government to dismantle the Resistance. On 8/19/93 Israel’s PM Rabin told his cabinet: “ I regret saying this, but Hezbollah has defeated us.”

This aggression started on April 11, 1996 with bombing attacks in Baalbeck and down south in Tyre at the Lebanese army base and for the first time since 1982, attacks on Dahiyeh in South Beirut. Israel bombed a wider area than in 1993 over a period of 16 days.

This invasion became known among some in South Lebanon as the “Four Massacres aggression”: Suhmor on 4/12/96; the bombing of the Al-Mansouri ambulance on 4/13/96; Nabatieh on Day 7; and the Qana massacre on the same day when 118 civilians were slaughtered and 127 injured. Hundreds of thousands were displaced with 7,000 homes completely or partially destroyed. Total civilian casualties exceeded 250.

Having studied each preceding war with its enemy, Hezbollah succeeded in anticipating Israeli tactics, paths of entrance into Lebanon and targeting actions. Israel, not being able to find any, failed to target a single resistance fighter or to prevent any rocket pads from launching at will. Until the moment the US-Israel requested ceasefire took hold, having been arranged by US Sec. of State Warren Christopher, Hezbollah’s retaliation with Katuysha rockets continued unabated. Israel’s goals were again those noted above. There was one addition and that was to present Shimon Peres with a military victory to help his election campaign which was backed by President Clinton and staffed with some key Clinton campaign staff. On May 29, 1996 Peres lost the election and Hezbollah emerged from “Grapes of Wrath” victorious and widely perceived in Washington and Tel Aviv as having exposed Israeli battle field errors, or what the Resistance called “impotence”.

• The May 24, 2000 withdrawal of Israeli forces and the complete collapse of their surrogate collaborationist Lahdist forces. Israel’s notorious prison at Khiam was liberated by villagers and their loved ones freed. This resistance victory was perhaps its sweetest to date. No cheap political deals to help the Zionists save faced. Total defeat as Israeli faces snuck out during one night without even telling their collaborators. A half century after Israel started its inroads into Lebanon, except for some border enclaves like Shebaa, Kfar Kouba and Ghajar that Hezbollah and the Lebanese army aims to recover during the coming war, it was out. This victory was especially valuable to the Resistance and Lebanon as it demonstrated qualities that will determine the outcome of the next war. It blended a deep belief in God, magnanimous in victory, human treatment of the vanquished, care for the families of martyrs, insistence on dialogue with internal adversaries, confidence in the victory of good over evil, and thorough preparation for future aggressions and acceptance of sacrifice.

The results of the 2006 33-day Israeli aggression are well known and documented, with none of Israel’s stated goals–namely destroying Hezbollah, acquiring a treaty with Lebanon, breaking popular Lebanese support for the National Lebanese Resistance–being achieved. Hezbollah’s victory resulted in a deep sea change in Lebanese sectarian attitude towards Israel partly because during the war all of Lebanon saw through the Hasbara articles produced for cash at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP was set up by AIPAC in 1985), the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies , and the Foreign Policy Initiative, among several others.

Sometimes Hezbollah members complain to this observer, as one did recently, that:

We spend so much time studying every imaginable aspect of the Zionist forces and their corrupt society, from their psychology, strengths and weaknesses on the battle field, every battle and every little encounter over the past 28 years, favorite foods, drugs, and video games. Really, I don’t find them all that interesting I just want to expel them from the rest of Lebanon and all of Palestine. The sooner the better!

Among past wars involving Israel that Hezbollah is said to microscopically study (in addition to all its own battles during Israeli wars and invasions) are those of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1978. As well as the serial aggressions inside occupied Palestine including Gaza.

Hezbollah believes Israel will indeed attack Lebanon and that the Zionist battle plan will include the use of the following Israeli units which Hezbollah has been carefully studying and preparing to confront. Among these are the 91st “Galilee Division” which Hezbollah believes will be backed by multiple regular and reserve brigades trying to seal Lebanon’s southern border to stop Resistance/Lebanese Army units from moving deep inside occupied Palestine.

Additionally, Hezbollah is preparing to seek out and cripple the 162nd Armored Division which it damaged regularly during the 2006 war as well as confronting the 36th Armored Division normally assigned to the Golan Heights, (unless Syria fights this time) and at least three reserve armored divisions (Hezbollah sources believe probably the 366th and 319th).

Hezbollah has prepared meticulous plans to destroy the 98th Paratroop Division, the much touted “Special Forces Quality” Golani Infantry Brigade (which Hezbollah reserve forces mauled badly in 2006), the 35^th Paratroop

Brigade, the 551st “Spearhead” Brigade, the Givati Infantry Brigade, the Alexandroni Reserve Infantry Brigade, the Kfir Infantry Brigade specializing in “Urban Warfare”, the Carmeli Infantry Reserve Brigade, the Sayeret Matkal Reconnaissance Unit, the Sayeret Egoz reconnaissance unit attached to the Golani Brigade, the Shayetet 13 Naval Commando Reconnaissance and Raiding Unit, the Sayeret Yael Engineering Unit, plus a variety of units specializing in combat intelligence, supply, transport and communications.

Both Hezbollah and Israel have declined comment on current rumors coming from concerned Pentagon staff in Washington that Hezbollah intelligence agents inside Israel have provided the Lebanese Resistance with the names, addresses, mobile phone numbers and email addresses of each personnel assigned to every one of the above units to be in its crosshairs when the battle begins.

Is Hezbollah prepared to fight Israeli collaborators on additional fronts?

Lebanese national resistance allies in and around Parliament are claiming that the US is frantically trying to organize a “northern second front” to help Israel in the coming war by enticing right wing Christian militias, Al Qaeda mixed-bag “Salafists for lease”, and anyone else willing to fight a back door war against the Resistance while Israel kicks in the front door north of Safad and Nahariyah down south. The White House has reportedly vetoed one scheme to bring in Blackwater type private contractors.

Former MP Nasr Kandil who is close to Hezbollah stated on 9/30/10: “Egypt is also training hundreds of young gunmen in military camps in northern Lebanon that were set up under the guise of mobile hospitals while Jordan is training more than 700 Sunni militia members” at the behest of the US Embassy in Beirut and Jordan as part of “subversive initiatives against Lebanon for Israel’s benefit”.

These militia are claimed by Kandil and other politicians in Lebanon (including Senior Arab Democratic Party member Rifat Ali Eid) to be Salafi groups with links to Al Qaeda organized by the CIA and Saudi Intelligence Services similar to the Fatah al Islam group that fought a summer long battle from the Palestinian camp of Nahr al Bared in 2007, and whose ranks are being replenished in Lebanon.

This week the Lebanese Forces were accused by Hezbollah’s Sheik Naim Qassim, Deputy to SG Hassan Nasrallah, of running new LF militia training camps with speculation that they are being trained on Russian-made BKC machine guns and the American MAG and small mortars. If so, they are not the only ones participating in an arms acquisition frenzy. A weapons run ignited during the May 8, 2008 violence, cooled down over the past two years but flared up again last month with virtually all political parties and many private citizens buying up available stocks of M4’s (with a launcher $12,000) M16’s ($1,500) and AK47 Kalashnikov’s rifles (ranging between $750-$1,000) out of the back of cars or on road sides and alleys. Truck loads have been reported arriving from Iraq hauling US military supplies ‘shrinkage’.

Some analysts believe that once the Israeli attack date is imminent, northern Sunni militia being clustered around Tripoli and Akkar and other locations will attack Shia targets diverting Hezbollah units and weakening its southern and eastern (Bekaa) resistance.

They expect beefed up Saudi financed “Security-Plus Inc.” type units that were attempted in May of 2008. It may be recalled that effort soon fizzled and was ridiculed in Lebanese media as “Security-Minus Inc.” because when the green recruits got off their buses down in Hamra they quickly defected en masse deciding they did not want to fight Hezbollah “second team” forces after all.

For the past three years, Israel has been instructing the White House and Congress, as Ehud Barak told Bill Clinton on 9/21/10 at the opening of the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC: “This time Hezbollah must be totally eradicated from Lebanon. We don’t even want to find their residue after the next operation!”

Despite Barak’s instructions, the Pentagon’s J-8 Directorate for Force Structure Resources and Assessment, which among other duties conducts analysis, assessments, and evaluates strategies for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and some special American friends, agrees with Israeli military planners and Hezbollah on at least one subject–The next Hezbollah-Israel war will not see Israel using many ground forces outside of armored personnel carriers once they enter Lebanon. The reason is that all three agree with the Pentagon’s J-8 Directorates’ opinion that based on previous battlefield performance, it will likely require 5 Israeli soldiers to offset one Hezbollah defender’s battlefield acumen.

Can Israel Defeat Hezbollah In The Coming War? Part 2

The Corporate Industrial Military Media Security/Surveillance Complex

2010’s Big Brother is The Corporate Industrial Military Media Security/Surveillance Complex and dissent is what keep’s democracies healthy.

10.10.10 is a Global Day of Noncompliance that calls to all people of Conscience to rise up against Corruption, Theft, Fraud, Murder, Propaganda and mindless over consumption.

Totalitarian regimes control their people with FEAR and propaganda and we are NOW living George Orwell’s nightmare.

Coined by Orwell as doublethink, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth fabricates lies and the Ministry of Love tortures and kills any it deems threatening. Most threatening for Big Brother are those with independent thought, such as Seán Clinton, who is the chairperson of the Limerick branch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a former Boycott Officer on the National Committee of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

He wrote:

“Most people are unaware that Israel is one of the world’s leading producers of cut and polished diamonds. As diamonds are normally not hallmarked, consumers cannot distinguish an Israeli diamond from one crafted in India, Belgium, South Africa or elsewhere. The global diamond industry and aligned governments, including the EU, have hoodwinked consumers into believing the diamond trade has been cleansed of diamonds that fund human rights abuses, but the facts are startlingly different.

“Israel — which stands accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the crime of apartheid, extrajudicial executions within and outside the territory it controls and persistent serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions — is the world’s leading exporter of diamonds.

“Revenue from the diamond industry helps fund Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, its brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people and its international network of saboteurs, spies and assassins.” [1]

And all roads lead US to Israel!

The “Fabric of Life Road” in occupied Palestine is in reality an apartheid road; separate and unequal. Palestinians must travel through sewage and tunnels, but Israelis ride on only well maintained contiguous highways. At the checkpoint from Jerusalem to the little town of Bethlehem in occupied territory, the Ministry of Tourism had draped a thirty foot high doublespeak sign that proclaimed “Peace be with you” a loose translation of “War is Peace.”

In 2007, Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel’s tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.

Klein theorized that the source of Israel’s tremendous economic growth in the past five years couldn’t be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation — and to showcase their wares.

“Young Israeli computer scientists and engineers gain their training in the military, and then go on to start the kind of technology companies that have proliferated wildly in Israel and whose products are much sought after abroad. The entire Israeli hi-tech sector and not just military technology per se, is thus an outgrowth of Israel’s hyper militarization. The Israeli economy’s tech sector grew by 20% in 2006 alone, and Israel is now the foreign country with the second most US stock exchange-listed companies. Klein’s point that Israel’s military-derived technologies are an economic growth-driver because they can be tested in situ is correct, but it is insufficient for describing the magnitude of the military’s tremendous penetration of the country’s economy. Palestinians under occupation can indeed be seen as human “guinea pigs” and not just merely military targets, as Klein claims, but the society’s militarization is far more profound than even she suggests.” [2]

After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and “suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war…Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999…That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world…Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion–an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are …precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror… Israel’s policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling “Hamasistan”–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs…” [IBID]

Poster-boy for Israel’s Corporate Industrial Security/Surveillance Complex is Mordechai Vanunu.

Every email Vanunu has ever written, snail mail received, phone call conversation and walk he has ever taken over the last 6 ½ years has potentially been monitored 24/7, since his release from 18 years in an Israeli prison for telling The Truth about Israel’s nuclear deceptions.

Thirty odd years from my first time, I reread Orwell’s 1984, that was published in 1949. I was struck at how much Vanunu reminded me of Winston Smith, Orwell’s man with an independent thought that Big Brother; The Party incarnate found so threatening that they tortured him beyond his endurance in order to break him, brainwash him and strip him of his humanity.
But Big Brother has failed to break Mordechai Vanunu.

Vanunu also threatens Israel in 2010, far more than he did in 2004. If Israel had practiced justice and mercy, they would have let Vanunu go in 2004, and chances are, that by now Vanunu would have faded into a footnote in history, instead of keep making it!

On 11 October 2010, Vanunu returns to the Supreme Court seeking the rescinding of the draconian restrictions that have denied him his inalienable human rights of speech and movement ever since he emerged from 18 in a windowless tomb sized cell on 21 April 2004.

In 2008, Vanunu wrote, “There is a lot of suffering here…Israel wants to hide so much because it is not good for its image as a democracy and a friend of America…1984, yes I read it many times and many years ago.1984 is here.”

In 1987, in Ashkelon Prison, Vanunu wrote, I had “no choice. I’m a little man, a citizen, one of the people, but I’ll do what I have to. I’ve heard the voice of my conscience and there’s nowhere to hide…yes, it’s there all right. I’m all right. I do see the monster. I’m part of the system. I signed this form. Only now I am reading the rest of it. This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me…Who else knows? Who has seen? Who has heard?”

“A working prophet, is able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away; the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place. The means of surveillance in Winston Smith’s era are primitive next to the wonders of computer technology-most notably the Internet.”

“Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins and although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy-all the fighting nations lost moral considerations. The unlimited destruction of civilian populations with atomic bombs; can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?” [Ibid]

The atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a baby step compared to the 21st century slaughter that can be achieved by thermonuclear weapons with capacities to wipe out 100% of a country within minutes. The Corporate Industrial Military Complex cranks out new weapons about every five years and soon those minds driven mad with doublethink-“war is peace”- will create 100 or 1,000 megaton bombs.

Orwell illuminated the illusion that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war and that Leader’s have only one aim: maintaining power!

We waste income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and we close our minds to the fact that they might go off and destroy the world as we now know it and annihilate Mother Nature and all of Creation.

1. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11170.shtml

2. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=860&Itemid=198

In struggle with the American mind

Since The Great Flood hit Pakistan in July …

• many millions have been displaced, evacuated, stranded or lost their homes; numerous roads, schools and health clinics destroyed
• hundreds of villages washed away
• millions of livestock have perished; for the rural poor something akin to a Western stock market crash that wipes out years of savings
• countless farms decimated, including critical crops like corn; officials say the damage is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it does not appear that Pakistan will recover within the next few years
• infectious diseases are rising sharply
• airplanes of the United States of America have flown over Pakistan and dropped bombs on dozens of occasions ¹

I direct these remarks to readers who have to deal with Americans who turn into a stone wall upon hearing the United States accused of acting immorally; America, they are convinced, means well; our motives are noble. And if we do do something that looks bad, and the badness can’t easily be covered up or explained away … well, great powers have always done things like that, we’re no worse than the other great powers of history, and a lot better than most. God bless America.

A certain percentage of such people do change eventually and stop rationalizing; this happens usually after being confronted X-number of times with evidence of the less-than-beautiful behavior of their government around the world. The value of X of course varies with the individual; so don’t give up trying to educate the hardened Americans you come in contact with. You never know when your enlightening them about a particular wickedness of their favorite country will be the straw that breaks their imperialist-loving back. (But remember the warning from Friedrich Schiller of Germany: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. — “With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.”)

Here’s a recent revelation of wickedness that might serve to move certain of the unenlightened: New evidence has recently come to light that reinforces the view of a CIA role in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of The Congo following its independence from Belgium in 1960. The United States didn’t pull the trigger, but it did just about everything else, including giving the green light to the Congolese officials who had kidnaped Lumumba. CIA Station Chief Larry Devlin, we now know, was consulted by these officials about the transfer of Lumumba to his sworn enemies. Devlin signaled them that he had no objection to it. Lumumba’s fate was sealed. ²

It was a classic Cold War example of anti-communism carried to absurd and cruel lengths. Years later, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon told a Senate investigating committee that the National Security Council and President Eisenhower had believed in 1960 that Lumumba was a “very difficult if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world.” ³ This statement moved author Jonathan Kwitny to observe:

How far beyond the dreams of a barefoot jungle postal clerk in 1956, that in a few short years he would be dangerous to the peace and safety of the world! The perception seems insane, particularly coming from the National Security Council, which really does have the power to end all human life within hours. ⁴

President Eisenhower personally gave the order to kill the progressive African leader. ⁵

We can’t know for sure what life for the Congolese people would have been like had Lumumba been allowed to remain in office. But we do know what followed his assassination — one vicious dictator after another presiding over 50 years of mass murder, rape, and destruction as competing national forces and neighboring states fought endlessly over the vast mineral wealth in the country. The Congo would not hold another democratic election for 46 years.

Overthrowing a country’s last great hope, with disastrous consequences, is an historical pattern found throughout the long chronicle of American imperialist interventions, from Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to Haiti and Afghanistan in the 1990s, with many examples in between. Washington has been working on Hugo Chávez in Venezuela for a decade.

Just like the commercials that warn you “Don’t try this at home”, I urge you not to waste your time trying to educate the likes of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who not long ago referred to “the men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps” as “the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century.” ⁶ What can you say to such a man? And this is the leading foreign policy columnist for America’s “newspaper of record”. God help us. The man could use some adult supervision.

A man named Barack Obama

For many years I have not paid a great deal of attention to party politics in the United States. I usually have only a passing knowledge of who’s who in Congress. It’s policies that interest me much more than politicians. But during the 2008 presidential campaign I kept hearing the name Barack Obama when I turned on the radio, and repeatedly saw his name in headlines in various newspapers. I knew no more than that he was a senator from Illinois and … Was he black?

Then one day I turned on my kitchen radio and was informed that Obama was about to begin a talk. I decided to listen, and did so for about 15 or 20 minutes while I washed the dishes. I listened, and listened, and then it hit me … This man is not saying anything! It’s all platitude and cliché, very little of what I would call substance. His talk could have been written by a computer, touching all the appropriate bases and saying just what could be expected to give some hope to the pessimistic and to artfully challenge the skepticism of the cynical; feel-good language for every occasion; conventional wisdom for every issue. His supporters, I would later learn, insisted that he had to talk this way to be elected, but once elected — Aha! The real genuine-progressive, anti-war Barack Obama would appear. “Change you can believe in!” Hallelujah! … They’re still saying things like that.

Last week Obama gave the traditional annual speech at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. ⁷ To give you an idea of whether the man now sincerely expresses himself “outside the box” at all, here’s what he had to say about Pakistan: “Since the rains came and the floodwaters rose in Pakistan, we have pledged our assistance, and we should all support the Pakistani people as they recover and rebuild.” Does he think no one in the world knows about the American bombs? Did he think he was speaking before sophisticated international diplomats or making a campaign speech before Iowa farmers?

Plus endless verbiage about the endless Israeli-Palestine issue, which could have been lifted out of almost any speech by any American president of the past 30 years. But no mention at all of Gaza. Oh, excuse me — there was one line: “the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams”. Gosh, choke. One would never know that the United States possesses huge leverage over the state of Israel — billions/trillions of dollars of military and economic aid and gifts. An American president with a minimum of courage could force Israel to make concessions, and in a struggle between a thousand-pound gorilla (Israel) and an infant (Hamas) it’s the gorilla that has to give some ground.

And this: “We also know from experience that those who defend these [universal] values for their people have been our closest friends and allies, while those who have denied those rights — whether terrorist groups or tyrannical governments — have chosen to be our adversaries.”

Such a lie. It would be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the Western world in the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population. And in recent years as well, Washington has supported very repressive governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia, Egypt, Kosovo, Colombia, and Israel. As to terrorist groups being adversaries of the United States — another item for the future Barack Obama Presidential Liebrary; as I’ve discussed in this report on several occasions, including last month, the United States has supported terrorist groups for decades. As they’ve supported US foreign policy.

“Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.” — John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine. ⁸

The secret to understanding US foreign policy

In one of his regular “Reflections” essays, Fidel Castro recently discussed United States hostility towards Venezuela. “What they really want is Venezuela’s oil,” wrote the Cuban leader. ⁹ This is a commonly-held viewpoint within the international left. The point is put forth, for example, in Oliver Stone’s recent film “South of the Border”. I must, however, take exception.

In the post-World War Two period, in Latin America alone, the US has had a similar hostile policy toward progressive governments and movements in Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Bolivia. What these governments and movements all had in common was that they were/are leftist; nothing to do with oil. For more than half a century Washington has been trying to block the rise of any government in Latin America that threatens to offer a viable alternative to the capitalist model. Venezuela of course fits perfectly into that scenario; oil or no oil.

This ideology was the essence of the Cold War all over the world.

The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War Two the United States has:

• Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
• Waged war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries.
• Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
• Dropped bombs on the people of some 30 countries.
• Suppressed dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world. ¹⁰

The United States institutional war machine has long been, and remains, on automatic pilot.

The 9/11 Truth Movement

The Truthers have long been pressing me to express my support for their cause. Here’s how I stand on the issue. I’m very aware of the serious contradictions and apparent lies in the Official Government Version (OGV) of what happened on that fateful day. (Before the Truthers can be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, it should be noted that the OGV is literally a “conspiracy theory” about the fantastic things that a certain 19 men conspired to do.) It does appear that the buildings in New York collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition, which employed explosives as well as certain incendiary substances found in the rubble. So, for this and many other questions raised by the 9/11 Truth Movement, the OGV can clearly not be taken entirely at face value but has to be seriously examined point by point. But no matter what the discrepancies in the OGV, does it necessarily follow that the events of 9/11 were an “inside job”? Is it an either/or matter? Either a group of terrorists were fully responsible or the government planned it all down to the last detail?

What if the government, with its omnipresent eyes and ears, discovered the plotting of Mideast terrorists some time before and decided to let it happen — and even enhance the destruction — to make use of it as a justification for its “War on Terror”? The Truthers admit that they can’t fully explain what actually took place, but they argue that they are not obliged to do so; that they have exposed the government lies and that the fact of these lies proves that it was an inside job. The Truthers have done great work, but I say that for me, and I’m sure for many others, to accept the idea of an inside job I have to indeed know what actually took place, or at least a lot more than I know now. It is, after all, an incredible story, and I need to know how the government pulled it off. I need to have certain questions answered, amongst which are the following:

1. Were the planes that hit the towers hijacked?
2. Did they contain the passengers named amongst the dead?
3. Were they piloted or were they flying via remote control?
4. If piloted, who were the pilots?
5. Did a plane crash in Pennsylvania? If so, why? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
6. Did a plane crash into the Pentagon? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
7. Why do Truthers say that some, or many, of the named Arabic hijackers have been found alive living abroad? Why couldn’t their identity have been stolen by the hijackers?

If the Truthers can’t answer any or most of the above questions, are they prepared to consider the possibility of 9/11 being a “let-it-happen” government operation?

Do words have to mean something?

“Holocaust denier barred from leading tour at Auschwitz”. That was the headline over a short news item in the Washington Post on September 22. The story, in full, read: “British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving will not be permitted to give tours at Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, museum officials said Tuesday after the controversial historian arrived in Poland to lead a tour of Nazi sites. Irving told the British Daily Mail on Friday that Treblinka was a genuine death camp but that Auschwitz was a ‘Disney-style tourist attraction’.”

So how can Irving be called a “Holocaust-denier” if he says that the Nazi concentration camp at Treblinka “was a genuine death camp”? I don’t know. Do you? Why don’t you ask the Post? They never reply to my letters. And while you’re at it, ask them why they and their columnists routinely refer to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a “Holocaust-denier”. You might even point out to them that Ahmadinejad said in a speech at Columbia University (September 24, 2007), in reply to a question about the Holocaust, “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”

Indeed, I don’t know if any of the so-called “Holocaust-deniers” actually, ever, umm, y’know, umm … deny the Holocaust. They question certain aspects of the Holocaust history that’s been handed down to us, but they don’t explicitly say that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. Yes, I’m sure you can find at least one nut-case somewhere.

Speaking of nut-cases, two days after Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia, Congressman Duncan Hunter (R.-CA) introduced legislation “To prohibit Federal grants to or contracts with Columbia University” (HR 3675, 110th Congress). I’m surprised he didn’t call for a Predator to fly over the campus and drop a few bombs. Don’t ya just love our Congressmembers? Soon to be joined it seems by a few Teaparty types who think that Barack Obama is a socialist. (If Obama is a socialist, what, I wonder, do they call Hugo Chávez? Or Karl Marx?) The new Madame Speaker of the House may be Alice in Wonderland.

Notes

1. Wikipedia, Drone attacks in Pakistan
2. AllAfrica.com, New Evidence Shows U.S. Role in Congo’s Decision to Send Patrice Lumumba to His Death, August 1st 2010
3. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate: The Church Committee), Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, November 20, 1975, p.58
4. Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (1984), p.57
5. New York Times, February 22, 1976, p.55
6. New York Times, October 11, 2009
7. White House Press Office, , September 23, 2010
8. The Providence Journal, “Obama a very smooth liar“, June 17, 2009
9. Reflections by Comrade Fidel, “What they want is Venezuela’s oil“, September 27, 2010
10. A link to any of the first five lists can be obtained by writing to William Blum at . The sixth list has not yet been uploaded to the Internet.

America Cannot Survive Multiple Languages

“A nation is much more…it is a state of mind, a shared vision, and a recognition that we are all in this together. A nation needs a common language as it needs a common currency,” said Governor Richard D. Lamm of Colorado

One look around the world and you will see conflict in many countries in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. The great philosopher Kant said, “The two great dividers are religion and language.”

Today, the United Kingdom finds itself more the Divided Kingdom while the French find themselves becoming Arabic in culture and language. Canada doesn’t know ‘who’ it is with 12 distinct languages and cultures now emerging from its relentless immigration policy. At a fair this year, one Pakistani immigrant told a Canadian, “This isn’t Canada anymore; it’s a world country.” In other words, Canada has displaced itself out of its own culture, identity and language. In order to protect its culture and language, Quebec will only invite those who speak French and share their culture.

Wherever you see conflict in the world today, you see competing religions, cultures and languages. Any country may possess different cultures and religions, but once a country cannot communicate in one single language, it cannot continue its existence as a cohesive entity.

London, England boasts two separate ‘cities’—the British inhabit one part of London and middle eastern immigrants inhabit the other. Two cultures, two languages, two different religions—total separation.

“It is said because it is an advantage for an individual to be bi-lingual that it is also an asset for a society to be bi-lingual,” said Governor Lamm. “I suggest, however, that while it might be a blessing for an individual to be bi-lingual, it is a curse for a society to be so.”
Multiple languages balkanize any country. Seymour Martin Lipset said, “The histories of bi-lingual and bi-cultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy.”

Look at French Canada and English Canada. Their battle continues to this day.

“Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon—all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence,” said Lamm. “Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

Personally, I think the French, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Belgium languages and their cultures represent the first salvo of losing Western democracies to Islam, not by the sword, but by the penis. Islam in Europe runs 8.1 children per mother to 1.6 children per European mother. Clearly, Islam will take over by sheer birth rate dominance. As they do, all those countries and their languages and cultures will vanish into Islamic demographic dominance.

As Lamm noted, some folks romantically think places like Switzerland flourish with multiple languages. Reality check! The Swiss feature three separate cantons and languages with one French, one German and one Italian.

“You have to share something with your neighbor besides a zip code,” said Lamm. “We need many things to tie us together, but one indispensable element must be that we all speak one common language.”

As Lamm noted, we have been successful for 234 years because we’ve become one people. But today, we’re becoming three distinct ethnic and competing cultures and languages: Spanish, English and Arabic or Islamic.

“I suggest that language is a much deeper and more intractable separating factor,” said Lamm. “America has been successful because we have the social glue of a common language, a shared history, uniting symbols that tie us together. We live under a common flag, which we honor and salute.”

Current Immigration Patterns Destructive to One Nation Concept

Lamm said, “First, immigration historically was a mix of many nations and languages; now more than half of our immigrants are from Spanish-speaking countries. Second, immigrants historically came from great distances and had to throw themselves into a new nation; today people can spend every vacation in their home country and hold on to dual citizenship. Third, today we take in four times the historical rate of immigrants without pause.” [Today, 2.1 to 2.4 million legal and illegal immigrants annually enter the USA]

Today, we see entire cities separated by ethnic tribes that refuse to speak English or assimilate into the American way of life. We face accelerating dangerous precedents that not only separate us linguistically, but cause animosities that cannot be solved just because we’re all Americans. Over 40 million people in this country found their births in other countries. By 2035, over 70 million immigrants will call the USA home at current immigration levels.

One look at what’s happening to Europe should make anyone tremble on many levels.
“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing it from continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. We have but one flag. We have one language, English.” President Teddy Roosevelt

As you watch the conflicts at Ground Zero, or Detroit, or Chicago, or Miami, or Los Angeles—you’re looking at Roosevelt’s prophesy coming to fruition. As we fall prey to multiple languages, we will most certainly fall prey to more violence within our own country by competing tribes and languages. Competing languages and cultures prove a blueprint for the demolition of the United States of America.

What happens when Diversity replaces America’s Language and Culture

For the past 30 years, somebody, somewhere, or a group of people in high places decided to destroy the successful equation of “melting pot” within America. That ‘entity’ decided to pitch diversity and multiculturalism as the new monikers dismantling English as America’s common language. “It” decided to inject hundreds of incompatible cultures and languages into America while adding another 100 million people to stress the environment even further.

That same “It” worked its magic in France, Great Britain, Holland, Norway, France, Belgium and other countries—with devastating results: fragmenting, balkanizing and separated societies.

Like a group of chemistry students in a classroom where the teacher leaves for an emergency phone call—for kicks or giggles—the students start tossing multiple chemicals into a test tube to see what happens. Result: the mixture either melts the tube down or explodes. No one knows what kind of volatility may occur.

Today, our once “stable and sustainable” population suffered growth from a reasonable 194 million people in 1963 to a unsustainable 309 million in 2010. While we continue ‘celebrating’ our amazingly ‘diverse’ society with immigrants from over 150 countries, speaking 100 languages—in reality, the wheels fall off the ‘romantic’ pitch by newspapers such as the Denver Post and television networks across the USA. You will hear “racist confrontations” in dozens of media outlets weekly.

On the educational side, Brian Williams reported a 76 percent dropout/flunkout rate in Detroit, Michigan schools last spring. Why? They feature 50 different languages and unending diversity. Everyone speaks a slew of languages except English, they don’t know Thomas Jefferson, promote their own cultures and they call themselves hyphenated-Americans. Illiteracy rates exceed 50 percent according to an article in Time Magazine. (Source: Tragedy of Detroit, Time Magazine)

But hundreds of schools throughout the USA in major cities like LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Denver and others suffer 50 to 60 percent dropout/flunkout rates. Denver vacillates between 52 to 67 percent dropout/flunkout rates. Brian Williams added, “About 1.2 million teens hit the streets every spring unable to read or write.”

What happens when this country finds itself without a common language, culture and national identity? What happens when enough immigrants do not, cannot or will not integrate into American society? What happens when their cultures and languages trump America’s culture and English language? Today, 42 million Americans cannot read or write. Another 50 million read at the fourth grade level. Name the one term that defines third world societies: illiteracy. America degrades with every illiterate citizen.

You can see it accelerating in Islamic Detroit, Michigan. Already, we hear calls for Sharia Law. For Americans that don’t understand Sharia—its runs counter to everything in Western law. It subjugates women, commits barbaric acts such as female genital mutilation and calls for honor killings of women for minor infractions. Mexican reconquista operates in the Southwest and children continue to fare poorly in schools after several generations because of their ‘poverty culture’ roots in Mexico. In Arizona last week, immigrants painted the American flag with Nazi swastikas and stomped on it at the capital in Phoenix.

Other examples:

In New York, February 16, 2009, FOX News, Joshua Rhett Miller reported, “The estranged wife of a Muslim television executive feared for her life after filing for divorce last month from her abusive husband,” her attorney said — and was found beheaded Thursday in his upstate New York television studio. Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37, was found dead on Thursday at the offices of Bridges TV in Orchard Park, N.Y., near Buffalo. Her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, has reportedly been charged with second-degree murder.

Adam Gadahn: The California-born Muslim convert assists Shukrijumah and Osama bin Laden as al-Qaida’s chief propagandist. He tailors the group’s message to American Muslims. In 2006, Gadahn invoked U.S. Muslims to attack military bases. Three years later, U.S. Army Major Hasan shot 43, killing 13 at Fort Hood.

Anwar Awlaki: Articulate and media savvy, the American-born cleric is al-Qaida’s top recruiter of Western suicide cells. Awlaki has recruited or radicalized countless homegrown terrorists, including the Fort Hood shooter and the Times Square bomber, both English-speaking citizens. Authorities also believe he ordered the Christmas airliner attack. Thought to be bin Laden’s heir, Awlaki has called on American Muslims to turn against their government, “Jihad against America is binding on every other (American) Muslim,” he said.

For Americans that cherish the successful “melting pot” concept, at what point do they lose control of their culture, language and way of life—in favor of a polyglot of incompatible cultures, religions and languages?

At what point will all those countries ‘exhausting’ their excess population into America—take responsibility for their own fecundity and their own citizens—in their own countries?

At what point will Americans stand up for being Americans? On every level—unrelenting and accelerating immigration cannot be sustained environmentally, educationally, linguistically or culturally—if America hopes to survive the 21st century.

Latest figures show the USA adding 70 million immigrants within 25 years. Can we remain sustainable? Ask anyone in Bangladesh, Mexico or India!

America’s Future: Squalor, Superstitions, and Fatalistic Sloth

“You don’t know my people—the squalor, superstitions, the fatalistic sloth that they’ve wallowed in for generations. You don’t know what you’re in for if that fleet of brutes ever lands in your lap. Everything will change in this country of yours. They will swallow you up.” Jean Raspail, “Camp of the Saints”.

The author served notice to his beloved France 30 years ago with that incisive novel. The French didn’t listen. The United States isn’t listening, either!

After the past dozen terror attacks around the world such as 9/11, Madrid train bombings, London bombings, nightclub bombings and Theo Van Gogh stabbed in the streets of Amsterdam—in December 2005, Paris, France burned. Their ‘fatalistic sloth’ rose up with Molotov cocktails that torched over 10,000 cars.

America’s own suicide stands SO self-evident through Raspail’s words when he talks about Europe proceeding toward its own peril when it allowed the rate of immigration to exceed the rate of assimilation. They swallowed the deadliest scorpion in the Middle Eastern desert by inviting a stone-age culture and religion into their advanced European culture.

Raspail said the immigrants were, “righteous in their loathing of anything and everything that smacked of present-day Western society, and boundless in their love of whatever might destroy it.”

His tale speaks of a million Third Worlders from India bound for Europe to save themselves from what they created in their own nation—utter misery and failure of their society. Failed societies lack law, morals, sustainability and civilized behavior. Raspail described the ragtag immigrant convoy, “Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers — a welter of dung and debauchery.”

Does anyone catch the parallel with present day Mexico and Central America? Can you glimpse Felipe Calderon’s failed government and wretchedly miserable society procreating endless millions tramping across America’s borders in a desert armada exceeding Raspail’s novel? How about Africa and Asia’s starving millions? According to the World Health Organization, 18 million people starve to death worldwide annually.

In a sobering rendition of Raspail’s novel, an immigrant horde pours into American from Mexico. To be exact, America suffers over 10 million illegal alien Mexicans thus far with more streaming over the gunnels of the USS United States. In the past century, Mexico increased from 50 million to 104 million. It’s expected to hit 300 million in this century. Does anyone understand that Mexico cannot care for its 111 million today?

In his novel, Raspail said the French had given up their souls to multiculturalism and the façade that it ‘might’ work. Instead, he said the French had become nothing more than millions of sheep. If you look at the parallels, Americans have been duped into multiculturalism’s living nightmare now manifesting in Holland, Britain, Belgium, Norway, Spain, Italy and Germany.

“Man never has really loved humanity all of a piece,” he wrote. “It’s inherent that we like some more than others—and some not at all.”

Most in the U.S. realize what is happening in Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago and most other enclaves of this 21st century illegal horde. However, Obama ignores it, disdains action and continues the dogs of war in other countries while our own country suffers invasion.

The fact remains that nations survive only if they unite around common emblems of nationhood. We’re giving our nation away today to legal and illegal immigrants whose governments and societies failed them. They arrive in massive armadas to sink our society.

Raspail gut wrenchingly tosses a dart-in-the-center with his depiction of the systemic guilt-tripping that afflicts America. We’re embarrassed into celebrating horribly incompatible ‘diversity’ and unworkable ‘multiculturalism’ being knifed down our throats while we either gag or die in our own quiet futility.

Who takes advantage of our pathetically unguarded borders? Calderon’s daily demographic invasion recaptures much of America for Mexico. While we battle in Iraq, Middle Eastern immigrants grab significant chunks of Detroit and other cities where they build mosques at breakneck speed—to date—1208 mosques in America.ca. Call them ‘markers’ and they proceed on course to add another one at 9/11 Ground Zero in New York City.

The irony of America’s demise stems from our inability to stand for our own beloved country, much like France. We watch Paris, France become Los Angeles, California—within a matter of months or years-yet most citizens won’t move a finger as their country heads into the Raspail’s social toilet.

From this journalist’s viewpoint having seen it in my travels in Asia and elsewhere in the Third World, it’s sickening to watch as it advances into our country at our government’s behest and our citizens’ disinterest. Why? We’re a nation of immigrants and most of us, like the French, think these massive hordes will finally come to their senses and “become Americans.” One look at our cities illustrates that they “ain’t becoming Americans.” Push ‘1’ for Spanish and ‘2’ for English and ‘3’ for Arabic.

France suffers unemployed Muslim youths with no citizenship in their home country, and no loyalty to their new digs, but America suffers 20 million illegal aliens from God knows where. It’s not ‘if’ our street riots will begin, but when.

With massive population onslaught from overloaded locations in Africa and Asia– France, as well as Europe, represents moribund countries as the gates of their borders suffer an endless invasion of out-of-control fecund societies.

Becoming frightened, Australia, last year, arrested a dozen Muslim-Australian citizen men involved in a terror-bombing conspiracy. They told a group of Muslim clerics if they wanted Sharia Law, they needed to “move back from where they came-we intend to keep democratic law in Australia..” The clerics quieted down but nodded knowing that their numbers will increase given enough time so they will prevail to force Sharia Law on their host country.

Will America escape this massive horde in Raspail’s novel? It’s possible if we call for a 10 year immigration moratorium. It’s possible when we force those overloaded and failed nations to deal with their own masses. It’s possible if all Americans step up to be heard at the local, state and national level. It’s possible if every state develops another D.A. King, Terry Anderson, Roy Beck, T.J. Bonner, Ray Haynes, William Gheen, Dr. Bill Herron, Jan Herron, Terry Graham, Chris Simcox, Bob Copely, Mike McGarry, Barbara Coe, Governor Richard Lamm, Peter Gadiel, Andy Ramirez, Barbara March, Bonnie Eggle, Glenn Spencer, Garrett Chamberlain, Buddy Bishop, Rob Luton, Tim Bueler, Ezola Foster, Brenda Walker, Don Collins, Peter Brimelow, Dan Stein, Dr. John Tanton, John Rohe, Jim Gilchrist, Lupe Moreno, Angie Morfin, Luca Zanna, Robert Vasquez, and Tom Tancredo. Patriots and statesmen will stand up for their country. Politicians pitiably will not.

It’s possible if the pundits and radio talk show hosts become the “21st Century Paul Reveres.” They need to write more and talk faster. They must create a ‘consciousness shift’ that creates ‘counter critical mass’ that forces our national leaders to change our Titanic-like course.

Will Mexico or any of the rest of the Third World such as China, India, Africa, the Middle East and Bangladesh all of a sudden develop stable, sustainable societies? Not a chance! They drown in hurricane accelerating Katrina human numbers increasing so fast—they can’t solve their problems. Their citizens flee to First World countries by any means possible.

Will unending millions be able to keep coming to the United States for a better life? Will our society survive their onslaught?

The grinding reality is: NO!

What’s to stop them? Our presidents, except Eisenhower in 1954, succumb to the dollar or their own faltering characters. For a chilling treatise on the fall of once vibrant civilizations, I leave you with the sobering research by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond’s latest book, COLLAPSE.

You can change the future by your actions today. If we don’t stop them-do we give up this nation as easily as France and most of Europe? Like cattle to the slaughter house, do we offer our country onto the butchering block of national suicide?

If we do, your phone choices in the future will be: Press ‘1’ for English; ‘2’ for Spanish; ‘3’ for Swahili, ‘4’ for Arabic, ‘5’ for Hmong, ‘6’ for Chinese or others crashing across our borders.

Testing the Limits of Freedom of Speech: Ernst Zundel Speaks Out

Ernst Zundel is a German author and historian who has spent seven years of his life behind bars as a result of expressing his controversial viewpoints and opinions. He is a revisionist who has denied the Holocaust as described by most historians. He has been one of the most prominent political prisoners in Europe and has been jailed in three countries on two continents.

After his arrest in the U.S. in 2003, he was deported to Canada, where he was kept in prison as “a threat to the national security” for two years. After deportation to Germany in March 2005, he was convicted and sentenced in 2007 to five additional years of imprisonment on charges of holocaust denial.  He was finally released on March 1, 2010.

This is the first interview Ernst Zundel has given since his release, published in the Foreign Policy Journal.

Firstly, I would like to extend my congratulations on your recent release. Were you ever mistreated or subject to any type of mental or physical punishment in breach of international conventions?

My entire treatment these past seven years by those arresting me, trying and convicting me, and keeping me in prison has been in brutal breach of international conventions.  I was arrested in broad daylight on American soil by officials of the U.S. government who acted as hit squads for a nefarious lobby. There was no arrest warrant. I was not read my rights. I was whisked away in handcuffs without being allowed to get my wallet, to call my attorney, to be allowed to make my case before an American Immigration Judge or even hug my wife goodbye.

I was incarcerated in six different prisons on two continents in three countries—the USA, Canada, and Germany—without relief of any kind. In effect, I have had 10 percent of my life stolen from me – and for what “crime”? For having “overstayed my U.S. visa”?

Throughout my imprisonment, basic human rights principles were trampled underfoot repeatedly and with impunity. The worst prisons were the Canadian detention centers at Thorold, Ontario and at Toronto West, where I was held for two long years in isolation cells, ice-cold in the winter, no shoes or socks allowed. The electric light in these cells, bright enough to be able to read, was kept on 24 hours a day. Through a glass slot in the door I was checked every 20 minutes, and my activities were meticulously noted by the guards: one sheet for every day.  No dignity, no privacy. My toothbrush was kept in a plastic bin in a hall. I was not allowed to speak to other prisoners.

Bed sheets were changed only after three months. No pillows. No chairs. When I wrote to my wife or to my attorneys, I had to sit on a makeshift pile of my court transcripts. No radio, no television, not even an electrical outlet to sharpen my pencils. No ball point pens, only pencil stubs, cut in half with a saw. No spoons, forks, or knives were permitted; only a white plastic spoon with a fork called a “spork” that had to be returned every time at the end of the meal. With very few exceptions when furtive guards showed me some kindness away from the surveillance cameras, I was treated as though I was the worst of criminals. That’s Canada for you, where I have lived and worked without a criminal record for more than 40 years.

It was somewhat better, but not much, in the United States. In Germany, it was quite a bit better in terms of the basic necessities, but personal mail was routinely withheld – 1,700 letters for up to five years – even after I forced a court to order that it be given to me. My so-called trial in Mannheim was a political show trial in the Stalinist mode in that my guilt was a foregone conclusion. I requested that exculpatory exhibits be allowed as validation for what I believed and had written and said. No meaningful defense was allowed. I could not put on record any forensic evidence, any historical documents, or even expert witnesses, That very request to be allowed to offer evidence was held to be a new offense of criminal behavior and could have resulted in new criminal charges – as were, in fact, lodged against my lawyers during that very trial who tried to overcome these restrictions.

Along with the rest of EU members, Germany regularly criticizes other countries for violations of free speech and human rights. However, your case demonstrated the emptiness of such claims within Europe. What’s your take on that? Is Europe really a utopia of liberty and freedom of speech?

Most European countries have only selected free speech for officially approved and sanctioned views on history. Almost all EU countries have laws in place that restrict freedom of speech under the guise of one fig leaf or other, such as the prevention of racist or neo-Nazi activities. The state decides selectively who is and what is racist.  These laws are hypocritical, in Germany’s case superseding even their own Basic Law.

Dissidents are allowed very little opportunity to be read or heard in the mainstream corporate media channels of the West. The control mechanisms of the press are many, often subtle but widely understood and obeyed – fear of loss of jobs, diminished circulation, the withholding of government advertisements etc. There is no longer unrestricted freedom in any Western country, not even in the U.S. with its wonderful Constitution and Amendments such as the Bill of Rights.

Allow me here to point out to your readers the outline of a censorship practice known by its neutral term “rendition”, but more honestly defined as political kidnappings to force the silencing of dissident speech or alternate thoughts.  Renditions in the West are ever more frequently practiced not only against alleged “terrorist suspects” but against ordinary political activists and writers whose viewpoints are frowned upon by such outfits as AIPAC and similar Zionist lobby and interest groups, B’nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress etc.

In order to spell out what I can only describe to you in broad strokes, I’d like to briefly shed light on the period preceding my arrest in the U.S. and Canada, the conniving and the similarity in other cases like mine, where an innocuous or alleged infraction is used as a fig leaf to silence a political opponent.

Viet Dinh, a Georgetown University law professor and director of their Asian Law and Policy Studies Program who helped craft the Patriot Act, put it succinctly, as reported in an American publication called Wired that deals with freedom of speech on the net. That interview reads:

Wired News: An estimated 5,000 people have been subjected to detention since 9/11. Of those, only five — three noncitizens and two citizens — were charged with terrorism-related crimes and one was convicted. How do we justify such broad-sweeping legislation that has resulted in very few terrorist-related convictions?

Dinh: I’ve heard the 5,000 number. The official numbers released from the Department of Justice indicate approximately 500 persons have been charged with immigration violations and have been deported who have been of interest to the 9/11 investigation.

It may well be that a number of citizens were not charged with terrorism-related crimes, but they need not be. Where the department has suspected people of terrorism, it will prosecute those persons for other violations of law, rather than wait for a terrorist conspiracy to fully develop and risk the potential that that conspiracy will be missed and thereby sacrificing innocent American lives in the process.

This is exactly what happened to me. The initial reason given was an alleged immigration infraction – namely a “visa overstay”. I was no terrorist; I was a dissident writer. My political detractors knew perfectly well that I was in America legally, awaiting adjustment of status due to my marriage to an American citizen. I was in Immigration Adjustment of Status proceedings, meticulously following all the prerequisite steps. I was living openly in a rural area in Tennessee and was listed by address in the local telephone book. The U.S. government had given me a Social Security number, a work permit, a document that allowed me to leave the country and return unmolested. I had undergone and passed an FBI check and a health clearance.  The only last step missing was a personal interview by an immigration official to ascertain a valid marriage to my American citizen wife.

We had been notified in writing that this interview could take as long as three years, and that no status report would be given. We were patiently waiting for that last step, a routine interview with an immigration official. Our immigration attorney had requested such an interview in writing – twice!  Under oath, he testified that he had written those letters.  These letters have mysteriously disappeared from our immigration file.  When I was arrested, it was claimed that I had negligently “missed a hearing” which gave them grounds for an arrest due to a visa overstay. In other words, a simple bureaucratic loophole was found or fabricated that has cost me seven years of my life.

What happened to me in the context of a deliberate state policy of deception has also happened to others.  Similar ruses via false accusations were used in cases like Germar Rudolf, likefwise married to an American citizen, El Masri of Germany, Maher Arar of Canada, Gerd Honsik of Spain, Siegfried Verbeke of Belgium, David Irving, and now Bishop Williamson of England, to name only a few individuals who were caught between the grind stones of a criminal policy possible only under the Patriot Act in the U.S. and similar legal instruments in other countries. Embedded in that background of a widespread covert policy and practice to force political conformity, my case makes eminent sense. We are no longer dealing with an aberration. These extrajudicial renditions give 9/11 and the Patriot Act a new light as a global policy instrument of brutal censorship of unpopular thinkers and writers.

The thrust of a prestigious publication such as yours would normally deal with the policies of foreign governments, renditions, kidnappings, and incarcerations not only of foreign enemies but, as in the case of Vanunu, an Israeli-born- and-raised atomic scientist. He was no neo-Nazi, no racist, no Holocaust Denier, yet he was relentlessly pursued by the Mossad and ultimately kidnapped and jailed for 18 years.

The patterns of the breaking of international law and conventions, the use of false identities, and the brazen practice of breaking and entering by spy and intelligence agencies, etc. – these criminal activities are daily in the news. This sets the stage and makes my case a logical progression of an old, established policy, with this one difference: we are no longer talking about hunting and kidnapping alleged “Nazi war criminals” like Eichmann or stone-throwing Palestinians or even “Arab terrorists”, but instead the targeting of writers and other political dissidents in Western countries calling themselves “democracies”.

My story does not even end there. In my case, my “Holocaust Denier” profile was convenient, but passé. It was not even, as is so commonly and falsely claimed, “Denial of the Holocaust” or even more bizarre, my “visa overstay”!  I was told what actually happened by a friend of ours with high-level UN connections. In his own words: “It was the Blue Booklet that did it! That’s when it was decided at the very highest level to take you out for good!”

Here is what happened, briefly: In the early months post-9/11 my wife, an avid Internetter, discovered a compelling research document entitled Stranger than Fiction: An Independent Investigation of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism by Anonymous, 11-11-2. She gave it to me over breakfast. I read it, found it interesting, and ran a few copies off on my printer for people on my mailing list. I did not write that lavishly footnoted paper. I did not research it. I merely copied it.  Somebody must have concluded that I, with my background of thorough forensic investigations in other areas, showed more than ordinary interest in 9/11 as a potential political false flag common in intelligence agency operations!

During my trial in Mannheim, ostensibly for “Holocaust Denial”, portions of my monthly newsletter, where I mentioned this booklet and the 9/11 topic, were referenced by the prosecution as criminal offenses. Only after it became clear that I welcomed the opportunity to have my attorneys present forensic evidence of a potential 9/11 cover-up were those portions of the accusation against me hastily dropped, and my trial became a “Holocaust Denial” show trial in the traditional Stalinist mode, “… accuse wildly but don’t allow a defense!”

As we later found out through various freedom of information requests in various countries, there was in place for years a deliberate, convoluted plan to arrest and detain me under false pretenses so as to take me out and put me behind bars.

I mention this only as an overarching, logical example as to how diabolically clever my political opponents are in using the accusation of “Holocaust Denial” and persecution of Holocaust Revisionists as arrows in their arsenal of weaponry to shore up, consolidate, and protect their deceptively acquired power and influence.

What’s the reality behind Holocaust? Didn’t it happen at all? What about people such as Elie Wiesel, Thomas Blatt, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Leopold Engleitner who are Holocaust survivors and describe their own accounts of those painful days, when they personally witnessed the heart-rending demise of their parents in concentration camps and bone-crushing machines. How should we resolve these contradictions?

I will not answer this question.  I would risk five more years in jail if I answered these questions honestly and truthfully. However, in the age of the Internet, others less known than I am find ways to simplify a painful, multifaceted problem, as the cartoon [Prevent Holocaust, Bomb Iran by Carlos Latuff] makes plain.

Many people of other countries have come to the categorical conclusion that the Western world is a beacon of liberty and unrestricted freedom of speech. But it sometimes seems that the reality is something else, and that people can be easily prosecuted merely for publishing views that are disliked. The booklet you published, Did Six Million Really Die?, is an example. What do you think?

Here is just one more example of what I already outlined above: We have faxes and other documents that prove on official embassy letterhead that the much vaunted and propagandized U.S. Judiciary has run interference for these kidnappers and renditioners via behind-the-scenes ex parte communication, thus engaging in a cover-up and whitewash worse than the ones practiced by those the U.S. government always blames for human rights violations in their hypocritical press campaigns, like against China in Tibet, Lukashenko in Belarus, Putin in Moscow and, of course, Iran during the recent so-called Green Revolution.

Many Zionist websites have introduced you as a white supremacist. Is that a fair characterization?

This claim is a convenient character assassination technique. I have never been a white supremacist and have stated so for decades, publicly, in countless interviews, newsletters, speeches, broadcasts, etc. It is my opponents’ modus operandi to broad-brush complex issues by politically expedient demonization.

You’re opposed to the regime of Israel because of its discriminatory and atrocious approach against the nation of Palestine. You consider yourself a pacifist who advocates stability and peace; aren’t these beliefs incompatible with your viewpoint regarding Hitler, who is internationally considered to be a notorious dictator and relentless killer? How can your peace-seeking stance come together with your approval of Hitler?

I cannot answer this question due to legal restraints.  An honest and complete answer would land me in jail as a re-offender very quickly. Implicit in your question is the toxic image of me that my detractors would like you to have.  To be called a Nazi is worse than being called a leper. For decades I have been on the receiving end of just such a targeted character assassination campaign. I have been jailed many times not for advocating an ideology but for expressing a dissident, alternative viewpoint on many topics, including Adolf Hitler’s role in history.  Revisionism is not an ideology.  It is merely a scientific method of re-examining historical events and of trying to understand the movers and shakers who made history a footnote to their personalities.

Let me answer your question this way:  I have always abhorred any kind of violence in the pursuit of political goals.  By anyone! Politically, I was and am a pacifist, much in the Gandhi style. I advocate a sober, neutral look at history, including the period known as the Third Reich. The peoples of the world, regardless of what system of government they live under, owe it to themselves to emancipate themselves of the simplistic images of propaganda and deceit posing as history.

On May 1995, your Toronto residence was the target of an arson attack which resulted in $400,000 worth of damage. A few days later, some of your extremist opponents were caught trying to break into your property. Again a few days later, you received a parcel bomb which the Toronto police detonated. Have you ever tried to lodge a complaint against them? Have they ever been lawfully sentenced?

This is the flip side of some of the questions above. While I have never advocated or engaged in violence, egregious acts of violence have been repeatedly practiced on me, of which the political kidnapping in 2003 was merely the latest. As to the fire and the bomb, no, nothing was ever resolved. The police apprehended the bomb builders and senders, but the charges laid were stayed. There seems to have been no political will at the highest levels of the Canadian government. There was no political coin to be garnered by prosecuting Jewish arsonists, who even confessed to the deed.

Do you differentiate between the Zionists  and Jews as the followers of a divine, monotheistic religion?

Yes, the two are totally different. Some Orthodox Jews who are united against Zionism, such as the Neturei Karta, believe that also. They know the godfathers of Communism and Zionism followed identical policies. The guiding spirit behind the two systems is the same. Neturei Karta rabbis attended the 2006 Teheran Conference sponsored by your President in an attempt to distance themselves from what they consider to be a dangerous atheist clique in the pursuit of illegal politics of conquest of which they want no part.

The mainstream corporate media, while having already vilified you, remained silent about your release. What do you think about this? Are you going to continue your ideological path or would you prefer to keep a low profile and forget about the intellectual activities?

Ironically, that was exactly what I intended to do when I moved to Tennessee and married Ingrid; keeping a low profile and turning to private endeavors such as my love for art and music.  I felt that my revisionist outreach was finished, concluded to my inner satisfaction. Let others read both sides and then judge for themselves. All the arguments, all the information needed on the Holocaust is out there, on the Internet, in tens of thousands of websites, all for the taking. How often do you have to dig up an archeological site to find yet one more bone, yet one more implicating shard? My wife likes to say that you don’t have to eat a camel to know what a cutlet tastes like. I was quite ready to retire and satisfy my creative needs and desires. I could leave the political mopping-up activities for others to complete. But could my political opponents bring themselves, as rational people might have, to likewise call it quits? No; that is simply not in their nature.

As you point out so cogently, a powerful vilification campaign is still going full blast. It keeps my name in the media for people to decide for themselves who I am. Upon my release, my wife has collected thousands and thousands of letters from readers, only three of which were negative! Not a bad record, of the millions of dollars spent and millions of words dispersed in an attempt to paint me as as a devil with horns.

Let me ask you – would your prestigious publication have cared to interview me if you thought that I deserved the label of Evil Incarnate?

What do Teddy Kennedy, Palin and McCain Enjoy in Common?

History will show the late Senator Teddy Kennedy authored the destruction of the United States of America with his 1965 Immigration Reform Act. That single bill, his most famous and just about the only thing he accomplished in his 40 indolent years in Congress—created America’s decline and fall. Whereas George Washington became the “Father of our country”, Teddy Kennedy will be known as the “Father of the destruction of our country.”

Kennedy’s bill started a deluge of humanity from around the world that pours into our civilization at an astounding 1.5 million annually. That single Kennedy bill added 100 million people to the USA within 40 years. That same bill drives America to add another 100 million people within the next 25 years. If allowed to continue unabated, Kennedy’s bill will swamp our civilization with another 300 million people within sixty years.

A personal note: Teddy Kennedy matched Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Governor Mark Sanford and Tiger Woods any day when it came to cheating, lying and skullduggery. The connection shows unethical behavior that seeps into everything—especially their behavior in the public sector. A fraudulent golf pro can only hurt himself, but a corrupt public official can destroy our civilization. Notice how George W. Bush fraudulently thrust us into the Iraq War—at a cost of thousands of lives and horrific consequences on multiple levels.

Teddy’s bill made America the dumping ground for multiple languages, multiple incompatible cultures, incompatible religions and a new sub-class of poverty heretofore unknown within the United States. They pour into this country so fast; their numbers overwhelm our schools, medical systems and prisons. Kennedy’s favorite term, “multiculturalism”, will be defined in the history books, as the mechanism that destroyed and displaced a successful American civilization and left it in ruins. Examples abound: France, United Kingdom, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway and others overrun by immigration.

Examples explode across America: 76 percent dropout rate in Detroit, Michigan high schools. Entrenched poverty. An astounding $35 million in goods shoplifted every day in America, honor killings of women now in America, mosques growing like flies in a barnyard, Muslim shootouts with FBI agents, first call for Sharia Law to be implemented in Detroit, Islamic calls to worship sounding over the once all American city. Another city, Los Angeles slowly returns to Mexican authority, language and culture. Every girl past 15 features a baby and most of those mothers cannot read past the fourth grade or work simple math. The Mexican “18th Street Gang” of 20,000 illegal aliens controls the drug trade in much of LA and police will not venture into their ghettos. MS-13 drug gangs now in 40 American states. Millions of pounds of trash must be picked up as it is tossed all over LA. Chicago, Miami and Houston feature gangs, drugs and worse—all caused by mass immigration. Phoenix, Arizona features an astounding annual car theft rate of 57,000 vehicles to become the new “Car Theft Capital of the World.” That state also features 460,000 illegal aliens.

In all of this devolving mix lurks two other famous names factoring into this nation’s demise: Sarah Palin and John McCain. Both famous and both out to lunch. Neither has served America with any distinction. Both enjoy notoriety on many fronts. Both feature million dollar bank accounts. They will not be touched by the crime, degraded schools or crushed communities as they live in their gated castles. But we must fight the traffic, breathe polluted air and endure the problems created by their irresponsibilities.

During the ensuing years of the Kennedy bill, neither Kennedy or McCain said a word as millions of illegal aliens crossed into U.S. territory. Because of their blind eyes to the problem, McCain and Kennedy in 1986 authored and pushed for the “Total Amnesty Act” that allowed a purported 1.3 illegal aliens complete amnesty. Result: a total of 4.3 million accepted amnesty and their legacy added another 10 million aliens to tap into the U.S. treasure chest of taxpayer amenities.

A short 24 years later, as Kennedy and McCain stood by to let 20 million illegal aliens to take up residence in this country, today, McCain endorses a full amnesty for that 20 million. But, he doesn’t know if it’s 20 million or 25 million and more. Palin, riding a wild horse of ‘stupid Americans’ drunk on her good looks and sassy rhetoric—endorses McCain’s amnesty to give all of them complete citizenship after breaking our laws and destroying jobs for Americans.

Amazingly, and astoundingly, 20 million Americans remain unemployed. Another 35 million subsist on food stamps. Congress, led by McCain, imports another 150,000 to 180,000 legal immigrants every 30 days. But, as Katie Couric said last week, the U.S. generates ONLY 95,000 new jobs per month in this ‘jobless’ recovery.

Hey folks! Do the math! We can never catch up to employing Americans while we import 150,000 plus immigrants every month. And, as McCain and Congress make certain—our borders remain wide open to allow countless tens of thousands of illegal aliens each month.

So, how stupid is Palin? How dumb is McCain? How completely drunk was Kennedy? How dumb are Americans? They keep electing guys like Kennedy and McCain—therefore, pretty dumb!

Finally, if this amnesty passes, this country will find itself unable to continue as a viable, sustainable and cohesive civilization. If you think ‘gridlock’ in Congress today wrecks any chance of compromise for the betterment of all of us—just wait until enough Muslims and Mexicans and Somalians and Cubans and Brazilians and Palestinians and Chinese and Ethiopians and Iraqis and Sunnis and El Salvadorans and Bangladeshis and Hmongs start demanding their due and their culture and their language and their religion.

To think that it all began with a drunk, lying, cheating and immoral U.S. Senator from Massachusetts named Teddy Kennedy.

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