Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Headlines for December 2 - December 8

A Stand For Justice


Thirty-Nine Congressmen Can’t Be Wrong by Philip Giraldi
For those who think it inconceivable that a large number of congressmen might petition seeking clemency for a convicted foreign spy who did enormous damage to the United States, think again. Pollard has recently obtained the services of Barney Frank and thirty-eight other Democratic congressmen who have signed on to a letter coordinated with a number of Jewish groups. They apparently believe that the poor guy has suffered enough in service to his country, which is of course Israel, making one wonder why American politicians should feel the pain. But no matter, as we all know where the faux compassion comes from. Treason, folks. If you care about this country, you just have to read the whole thing. Then do something about it.


Cables Belie Gulf States' Backing for Strikes on Iran



Rep. Ackerman Cheers Obama's Shift in Peace Process
Instead, Ackerman now suggests focusing on Iran, which he sees as the biggest Middle East problem. Here, he is once again on the same page as Netanyahu.




Focus on the Policy, Not WikiLeaks by Rep. Ron Paul
The neoconservative ethos, steeped in the teaching of Leo Strauss, cannot abide an America where individuals simply pursue their own happy, peaceful, prosperous lives. It cannot abide an America where society centers around family, religion, or civic and social institutions rather than an all-powerful central state. There is always an enemy to slay, whether communist or terrorist. In the neoconservative vision, a constant state of alarm must be fostered among the people to keep them focused on something greater than themselves – namely their great protector, the state. This is why the neoconservative reaction to the WikiLeaks revelations is so predictable


WikiLeaks Exposes Israeli Mafia’s Growing Influence by Justin Raimondo
Take, for example, this excerpt from a cable dated May 15, 2009 — entitled "Israel, A Promised Land for Organized Crime?" – sent by our embassy in Tel Aviv, which deals with the rising influence of Israeli organized crime The bottom line here: Israel's organized crime syndicate is free to roam the US on visas. And if they commit crimes against Americans, they can hightail it back to Israel to avoid extradition, as so many of them evidently do. And anyway, even if they out and out KILLED Americans, what would our government do about it? Well, what did our government do about the murder of Rachel Corrie, or the men aboard the USS Liberty? ZERO.


Covert war against Iran's nuclear aims takes chilling turn
The assassination had the hallmark of well-practised professionals. The explosives were shaped to focus the blast and fire a hail of projectiles into the car at an individual target, with minimal "collateral damage". The targets were obviously carefully chosen and the attack would have required weeks of surveillance. So even if local assassins were involved, the questions of who trained and funded them and assigned the targets would remain.......Stuxnet does not bear fingerprints, but a western military source recently told the Observer that it was an Israeli creation.


NYT Stokes Fear of Iran by Ray McGovern



Israel: US too consumed by WikiLeaks to talk peace
Israel's defense minister said Tuesday the U.S. has halted talks with Israel about curbing West Bank settlement construction and resuming peace talks with the Palestinians because Washington is distracted by the WikiLeaks release of secret documents.

Cui bono - who benefits -- from Wikileaks? Who is sitting pretty and smug, with Julian Assange singing Netanyahu's praises?


Oil prices hit another two-year pinnacle
World oil prices surged Monday to a new two–year peak, propelled by a raft of positive investor sentiment after the US Federal Reserve signalled more monetary easing could be on the way.

Soak the American Bloke continues apace.


Iran, Syria, NKorea in hot seat at IAEA meet



Netanyahu Forces an Obama Mideast Retreat
"I know what America is," Benjamin Netanyahu, then an opposition politician, told Israeli settlers in 2002. "America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction." And in the last few months, Prime Minister Netanyahu has proved his point by walking back President Obama's call for a freeze in Israeli settlement construction so much so that the Administration on Tuesday essentially gave up and took it off the table.

America is not the land of the free, not when it is ruled by Israel.


Iran makes arrests over nuclear scientist killing
"The three spy agencies of Mossad, CIA and MI6 had a role in the (attacks) and, with the arrest of these people, we will find new clues to arrest other elements," Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi was quoted as saying on state television's website.




'Promised land for organized crime'
"It is fair to assume that many known OC figures hold valid tourist visas to the United States and travel freely," Cunningham wrote, adding that the embassy "has developed an extensive database and placed lookouts for OC figures and their foot soldiers." He did not elaborate.


The 9/11 of American Diplomacy by Patrick J. Buchanan
Reader comments are interesting as well.


Oil prices hit $90 milestone
Oil prices had been relatively stable for more than a year, wavering mostly between $70 and $80 per barrel. They've moved higher since the Federal Reserve announced plans to inject $600 billion into the economy. As soon as the economy got better, it's back to soaking the American Bloke. Outrageous. All of that money that could have been better spent here at home, how much did that harm the economy 2 years ago? How much will it hurt the economy in the near future as the cost of gasoline nears the 4-dollar a gallon mark (again)?


Gulf leaders want Iran to respond to peace efforts
A communique issued by the six leaders at the end of a two–day summit in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, said they wanted the dispute over Iran's nuclear program to be resolved through "peaceful means" and make the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

Kind of goes against the Wikileaks cables.


mossad was this the chief's last hit - Telegraph
Last Monday, a thousand miles further east in the Iranian capital, Tehran, it appears that the kidon put both of those skills into practice, killing a top nuclear scientist and critically injuring a second as they drove through the rush-hour traffic. .....To assist in the attack, Persian-speaking Mossad deep cover agents have been steadily infiltrating Iran for years. How exactly they helped the hitmen flit in and out of the country remains a secret.


UN investigating reported device blast in Lebanon
The U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon says it is investigating a blast reportedly caused by the detonation of an Israeli device spying on Hezbollah's private telecommunications network.




Mossad and Iran's nuclear scientists Part II
Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian's Iran correspondent in exile, has pointed me towards this Wikileaks cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv. It is dated May 2009 and says:

In November 2008, Israeli crime boss Yaakov Alperon was assassinated in broad daylight in a gruesome attack on the streets of Tel Aviv, only about a mile away from the Embassy. According to several media accounts, a motor scooter pulled up alongside Alperon's car and the rider attached a sophisticated explosive device with a remote detonator to the car door. The bomb killed Alperon and his driver, and injured two innocent pedestrians. The hit was the latest in a series of violent attacks and reprisals, and indicated a widening crime war in Israel.

The interesting point here is that this is exactly how the two Iranian nuclear scientists, Majid Shahriari, and Fereidoun Abbasi, were attacked last Monday morning.


Israel fears 'flood' of migrants threatens state
In a speech to parliament last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of a "flood" of illegal migrants. "It is threatening the jobs of Israelis, and it is threatening the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel," he said.

The supreme irony here is that it is the Jewish groups here in America that are squarely behind the effort to grant amnesty to illegals in America, by their own admission. Yet, it's another standard for Israel. Ironically, many of these immigants are from Sudan, another celebrated cause of American Jews.


WikiLeaks cables: Don't trust Israel on Iran



Hezbollah says it found Israeli spy device
Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group said Friday that it discovered an Israeli device spying on its private telecommunications network.

The device exploded, apparently detonated remotely by the Israelis, when it was found near the village of Majdel Silim, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the border with Israel, Hezbollah said in a statement.




Covert war against Iran's nuclear aims takes chilling turn
Time magazine last week claimed to have been given details of the attack from "a western intelligence expert with knowledge of the operation" and asserted that it "carried the signature of Israel's Mossad".


Wikileaks: Israel in the list of countries not clamping down on terror funding
ABC Nightly News just ran a Wikileaks story exposing terror funding during which they showed documents exposing bank transactions from countries not clamping down on this funding. I spied some transactions from Tel Aviv in the list (a few times) of the document but yet no mention of this in the report or any other that I can find in the Google News index.


Hezbollah has 50,000 rockets: report
The Times quoted a Pentagon official expressing concern over the Hezbollah arsenal, in response to a series of leaked diplomatic cables on the issue.

which neocon in the Pentagon was it? Name names.


Israel on Iran So wrong for so long
According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s -- or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.


New Iran Nuclear Talks Under a Cloud After WikiLeaks Dump



Daniel Pipes Dreams (Again)



Most Americans "Are Ignorant": Zbigniew Brzezinski
I am very worried that most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.


The Deafening Silence About the War in the Deficit Debate



Institutional Insanity by Ralph Nader



Alarmed Mosque-Goers Turn FBI Informant over to FBI
Compounding the damage, Monteilh has gone public, revealing secret FBI methods and charging that his "handlers" trained him to entrap Muslims as he infiltrated their mosques, homes and businesses. He is now suing the FBI.


Wikileaks: Saudis 'chief funders of al-Qaeda'
Why wasn't Saudi attacked after 9/11? Do you believe for one moment that without Saudi funding, those attacks would have been able to proceed? Not likely. One would've thought it was Iraq that funded 9/11, or even Iran. Who is driving our policy here? Who benefitted from our invasion of Iraq? The United States? Whose number 1 enemy did we depose? Israel's. So while we're bogged down fighting Israel's enemies (next comes Iran), our real foes get away with murder, incitement, and the funding of terror against US citizens and soldiers.


U.S. diplomats may be out in the cold for a while
If you are a U.S. diplomat accustomed to coaxing, cajoling or strong–arming governments behind closed doors, you will be out in the cold, at least for a while, because of WikiLeaks.




WikiLeaks founder: Netanyahu believes exposé will aid Mideast peace
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday defended his disclosure of classified U.S. documents by singling out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an example of a world leader who believes the publications will aid global diplomacy. A little strange his praise of Israel. IT kind of goes against the premise of the whole Wikileaks operation, or at least the premise that the public is led to believe.


Middle class falls short on retirement funds



The Limits of a Coalition Without AIPAC
So here is where the administration’s efforts to engage the Jewish community on START stand: On the one hand, the White House and congressional Democrats were successful in creating a remarkable Jewish coalition in support of the treaty, which spans from J Street to ADL. On the other hand, without the lobbying power of AIPAC, this coalition isn’t even close to showing lawmakers what Jewish power really means.




Leaks Hint at Chance, Risk of Coalition Against Iran
“These leaders now have to hide following these comments,” Parsi said. “They are really going to have to pull back from the brink, and the primary reason is that this is a policy that is at odds with what their populations want.”

Parsi said the main reason that these strong sentiments were only revealed now is that these Arab leaders, though heads of authoritarian regimes, were keeping their Iranian saber rattling to themselves because it puts them at odds with public opinion in their own countries.





Another Mosque Project Seeks Support, This Time With Jewish Help
Asked why his group decided to spend the first night of Hanukkah with a Syrian-born imam and his flock to support their bid to build a mosque in the rolling hills of the Temecula Valley in California’s Southwestern Riverside County, Eric Greene replied, “We remember when there were protests in this country against synagogues being built.”




Who’s winning wikileaks?
It may take years to absorb the Wikileaks phenomenon, and to ascertain if there was an agenda, or various agendas, behind the selection of the initial documents released. But thus far it is indisputable that those trying to ignite a war with Iran have made better use of the information released so far. First there is the neocons’ “strange new respect,” as Michael Dougherty called it, for the geopolitical views of the Gulf Arab autocrats. The media’s heavy coverage of the fears of Arab petrosheiks feeds the meme that “everyone” feels menaced by Teheran.


Senior Turkey official says Israel behind WikiLeaks release
“One has to look at which countries are pleased with these," Celik was quoted as saying. "Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents.”


Nigeria to charge Dick Cheney in $180 million bribery case, issue Interpol arrest warrant



BUSTED – WIKILEAKS WORKING FOR ISRAEL Veterans Today



WikiLeaks: Saudi proposed force to crush Hezbollah






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