U.S. Patriots Need a Reality Check: "by Byron Williams"
'We the people' must stand up for the truth about our country's actions
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I believe the recently published memo in the Sunday London Times suggesting the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its desire to wage war in Iraq has again brought us to a reality check moment.

As we collectively stand at the intersection of patriotism and nationalism, we are presented with a question: Which direction will America take?

Patriotism and nationalism, especially in moments of crisis, are often confused.

Patriotism is simply defined as love and devotion to one's country, while nationalism is the devotion to the interests of a nation; a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

Nationalism itself does not carry a negative connotation, but that which is currently practiced in America is cause for great concern.

While patriotism finds its roots in dissent and questioning, the contemporary form of American nationalism depends on the power of groupthink. The Nazi regime remains the gold standard of nationalism gone awry.
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In a report by the former head of British Intelligence MI6, Richard Dearlove, who had recently returned from meetings with the Bush Administration, to Prime Minister Tony Blair states: "Military action was now seen as inevitable."

According to Dearlove, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD (weapons of mass destruction). But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

If the response to the memo is based on nationalism's "America: my country right or wrong," the subject obviously is closed. ...

- posted by Editor @ 7:11 PM

Guardian | Tarnished image abroad fails to register with Americans at home: "Jonathan Steele | Saturday May 21, 2005 | Guardian

The US faces an uphill struggle to win a positive image for its foreign policy after the disclosures of torture and other atrocities at Bagram air base, according to senior American and international analysts.

"The Abu Ghraib pictures have become an icon of the occupation of Iraq. It's difficult to erase them from people's minds. Bagram only adds to the problem," Nadim Shehadi, acting director of Chatham House's Middle East programme, said yesterday.

The Bagram revelations - described by the New York Times as "a narrative counterpart to the images from Abu Ghraib" - are the latest in a string of episodes which started soon after President George Bush launched his so-called war on terror.

They began with pictures of hooded prisoners being flown to the US base at Guant�namo Bay in Cuba in 2002. The first detainees released spoke of torture, sleep deprivation and other forms of ill-treatment.

The scandal over the US-run prison at Abu Ghraib a year later was more dramatic and shocking, both because the torture was caught on camera, but also because of the strong element of sexual humiliation. Reporters found evidence that torture was not just the action of a few soldiers, but had the consent of officers and was systematic.

Policy statements emerged to show that Mr Bush and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had authorised US interrogators and military prison officials to ignore the statutory rights of detainees. In February 2002, Mr Bush ruled that the Geneva convention did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaida, and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war.
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According to Professor Richard Sennett, a US sociologist at the London School of Economics, pressure on the Bush administration from US public opinion is weak because most Americans do not believe that the atrocities are systematic.

"With all due respect to my countrymen, I don't think they realise how bad the US image is. It's still the 'rotten apple theory' when this stuff happens. This is an administration which has practised a lot of denial. Criticism is swept under the carpet by being treated as anti-Americanism," he said yesterday.

A new survey shows widespread anger at the US among Muslims. "Many Muslims are so alienated that they claim they would not like to visit the United States, nor would they mind if the US withdrew, politically, economically, and militarily, from the Muslim world", says the report based on focus groups in Egypt, Indonesia and Morocco.
- posted by Editor @ 6:56 PM

Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World: "May. 14, 2005 23:57 | Updated May. 15, 2005 9:19
AIPAC campaigns for Iran sanctions | By ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON

As Iran appears to move closer to resuming nuclear activities, support has been quietly building in Congress for new US sanctions, including penalties that could affect multinational companies and recipients of US foreign aid.

The legislation would put the United States on a more confrontational course than the one pursued by President George W. Bush's administration. Bush has supported European efforts to offer Iran incentives in exchange for abandoning its nuclear program.

More than 200 members of the House of Representatives – almost half the body – are co-sponsoring a bill that would tighten and codify existing sanctions, bar subsidiaries of US companies from doing business in Iran and cut foreign aid to countries that have businesses investing in Iran.
- posted by Editor @ 6:12 AM

Haaretz Article: "13/05/2005
U.S. Anglicans eyeing divestment criticize Israel W. Bank policy | By The Associated Press

The U.S. Episcopal Church, considering a review of investments in companies that do business with Israel, said on Thursday a high-level fact-finding team came back deeply disturbed after visiting the West Bank and nearby areas.

'Israel has a right to defend itself. But it appears that, in the name of security, injustices are being done to the Palestinians that amount to collective punishment,' said Jacqueline Scott, a member of the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns."
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It is not known how much of the church's roughly $3.6 billion portfolio might be affected or what companies could be involved, but the issue is heating up in America where the Presbyterian Church USA also has a study under way that could lead to divestments. The latter, with 2.4 million members, has a portfolio valued at $8 billion.

In addition, the World Council of Churches, the main body uniting non-Catholic Christians, encouraged its members earlier this year to sell off investments in companies that make money from the Israeli occupation.

"What the commission members found the most shocking of all was that the Wall or Separation Barrier or Fence, as it is variously called, is perceived by all parties as being almost entirely underwritten by the American taxpayer," said Michele Spike, another member of the commission.

The wall, which Israel said it had to erect as a security measure, "invades Palestinian fields, dividing grazing lands - including the valley of the shepherds at Bethlehem -- and, at times, encircling Palestinian cities," she added.
- posted by Editor @ 6:52 AM

McCarthyism Deja Vu: Zionist Thought Police On Campus: "McCarthyism Deja Vu: Zionist Thought Police On Campus | By Edward W. Miller, MD

'The Likud (Sharon's party) is closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.' -Albert Einstein, 1948

The military expansionism of Zionist Israel has occupied the media for well over half a century. As Israel has come under more scrutiny in a world increasingly tethered by the Internet and satellite communication, Sharon's campaign of both covert and violent colonization is condemned around the globe. In 2003 some 7,000 Europeans were asked to pick, from a list of 15 countries, those which represented the greatest threat to world peace. Chosen for first place by the vast majority interviewed was Israel, with the United States a close second.

American media, dominated by five huge consortiums, continues to both censure and distort the situation in the Mideast in favor of Israel. On American university campuses, however open and intelligent discussion had always been available, even in Universities sponsoring Mideast studies. Beginning sometime in late 2001, however, on some campuses, Zionist organizations have attempted to stifle criticism of Israel and its fascist behavior just as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in his anti-Communist campaign during the Nixon Administration tried to stifle criticism and control public discussion, employing character assassination, innuendo with threats of political, economic and even judicial retaliation.

In March 2002 a network of Jewish organizations formed the Israel On Campus Coalition (ICC) in partnership with Hillel and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation which donated $1,050,000 to the Coalition. McCarthyism then made its appearance on the Web as 'Campus Watch.' Organized a by Zionist, right-wing columnist, and sometime professor, Daniel Pipes, student members of Hillel, the popular on-campus Jewish fraternity, were indoctrinated as 'thought police' to report back to Pipe's headquarters in Washington any professors who made disparaging remarks about either Israel, the Zionist movement, or appeared to intimidate Jewish students in discussions relating to Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Jewish organizations pressured their Representatives from districts where targeted departments were located., to warn university administrators that support from federal funding might be removed unless the accused professor was either chastised, or dismissed."
- posted by Editor @ 9:02 PM

AxisofLogic/ Featured: "Israel and the meaning of the 'secular state' | By Robert Thompson | Apr 21, 2005, 21:43

It is a constitutional principle of our Republic, as of yours in the USA, that there is no state religion. This can be called "separation of church and state" or each of our respective countries can declare itself a "secular state". If we consider this to be a proper situation, as I do as a committed practising Catholic Christian, we can see the advantages which it offers to other states, and we should be in favour of other nations throughout the world adopting it.

Why then do so many who declare their backing for a secular state in principle nevertheless support the idea of a state which openly practises discrimination based upon the religious background of individuals?

I ask the question, very obviously and simply, about all and any support given to the Zionist "State of Israel", which can only continue to exist because the government of the USA provides massive financial backing. It is estimated that the current support received from the USA amounts to about two thousand million USA dollars in military aid, some five hundred million in various froms of miscellaneous financing and loan guarantees which have now most probably reached a further ten thousand million dollars.

The simplistic answer, forcefully promoted by the Zionists ... [is] that opposition to Zionism is in effect opposition to the same suffering Jews who were so ill-treated by the Nazis. He deliberately encourages this confusion of these "unlikes".
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The best known founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, invented the ridiculous concept of a "Jewish race" which was welcomed and built upon by the Nazis, and he pretended that the area of the Ottoman Empire then known as Palestine was more or less unoccupied. On both counts, he was either a liar or self-deceiving (it is not for me to judge which), since, firstly, we all know that Jews (as do their Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters) come in various colours of skin and, secondly, Palestine was then, as it remained until 1948, fairly heavily populated by Muslim and Christian Arabs with a comparatively small Jewish community.
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Let us then show our disapproval of religious discrimination, even when applied by persons who do not genuinely practise what the religion they use to justify or promote their self-serviing objectives. Let us work towards a secular one-state solution in what is still and always will be, for so many of us, the Holy Land.
- posted by Editor @ 5:58 AM

Antiwar.com: "

Yesterday, Pentagon analyst and Iran specialist Larry A. Franklin was arrested by the FBI. The charge: turning over classified U.S. government documents to two operatives of the American Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), longtime policy director Steve Rosen and his deputy Keith Weissman.

As Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball pointed out when the Franklin affair first came to light: 'Franklin's motive appears to have been ideological rather than financial.'

What ideology are they talking about? Unconditional support to Israel has always been a central tenet of neoconservative doctrine. As we have argued in these pages for years, American foreign policy has been shaped – and distorted – by a cabal of ideologues who put Israel, not America, first. Franklin's arrest confirms our thesis in spades.

It's no accident that Franklin was part of the Pentagon policy shop presided over by DoD undersecretary Douglas Feith, who also presided over the infamous 'Office of Special Plans' – which was set up to funnel misinformation about Iraq's nonexistent 'weapons of mass destruction' and lie us into war. Israel's fifth column in Washington is about to be exposed – big time."
- posted by Editor @ 10:22 PM

Defense Analyst Charged With Sharing Secrets: "By Jerry Markon | Washington Post Staff Writer | Thursday, May 5, 2005; Page A01

A Defense Department policy analyst has been charged with disclosing classified information two years ago related to potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, the Justice Department announced yesterday.

Lawrence Franklin, 58, made the unauthorized disclosure to two pro-Israeli lobbyists while having lunch at a restaurant in Arlington in 2003, according to court documents and law enforcement sources. Franklin also gave classified information to a foreign official and unidentified members of the media, and 83 classified documents dating back three decades were found in a search of his West Virginia home, the documents stated.

Court documents did not identify to whom Franklin gave information at the lunch, but law enforcement sources said it was two top officials with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, one of Washington's most influential lobbying organizations. The officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, recently left their jobs amid what sources have said is a long-running FBI probe into whether they passed classified U.S. data to the government of Israel. It remains unclear whether any classified information reached Israel.
- posted by Editor @ 9:45 PM