by Robert Robideau
…United States history attests to the genocide of North American Indians and most educated Euro Americans and Europeans would agree that a genocide has been committed on this continent in the name of God and riches, but when it comes to the Muslim world the racism is disgusting.

The “Gods” must be crazy to think that their programs of racism and genocide will stop freedom fighters around the world from carrying on with their struggles for liberation and self defense.
counterpunch.org

…While commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Wiesel, who has written fairly extensively on the conflict despite claiming “neutrality” and always, in his words, desiring peace while feeling “sadness” for it being out of reach, has consistently blamed the Palestinians completely for the conflict and, despite any notions of peace, has indirectly endorsed the worst of Zionist politics.

In a 2001 essay for the New York Times titled Jerusalem in My Heart, Wiesel began with the following:

“As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel’s internal debates. I consider Israel’s destiny as mine as well, since my memory is bound up with its history. But the politics of Israel concern me only indirectly.”

Those who know of Wiesel may question this alleged neutrality given his membership in Begin’s Irgun in the 1940s (or his 1982 statement “I support Israel-period. I identify with Israel-period”) but he goes on in the same essay to renounce any such neutrality on the question of Jerusalem:

“Now, though the topic is Jerusalem. Its fate affects not only Israelis, but also Diaspora Jews like myself. The fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives in meThat Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any other is understandableBut for Jews it remains the first. Not just the first; the only.”
counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON – Capitol Police dropped a charge of unlawful conduct against anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Wednesday and apologized for ejecting her and a congressman’s wife from President Bush’s State of the Union address for wearing T-shirts with war messages.

“The officers made a good faith, but mistaken effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol,” Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said in a statement late Wednesday.

“The policy and procedures were too vague,” he added. “The failure to adequately prepare the officers is mine.”

The extraordinary statement came a day after police removed Sheehan and Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young, R-Fla., from the visitors gallery Tuesday night. Sheehan was taken away in handcuffs before Bush’s arrival at the Capitol and charged with a misdemeanor, while Young left the gallery and therefore was not arrested, Gainer said.
yahoo.com

Thousands of troops in riot gear clashed today with hundreds of stone-throwing Jewish settlers holed up behind barbed wire and on rooftops in this illegal West Bank settlement outpost of Amona.

It was the first forced evacuation of Jewish settlers since last summer’s pullout from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, and came after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site.

The violence on par with the most dramatic scenes of the Gaza pullout. Dozens of people were evacuated with injuries. Both settlers and policeman were among the wounded, with police saying 31 of their officers had been hurt.

…”They are treating people here like Arabs,” said legislator Arieh Eldad in a telephone interview from the scene with Israel Radio. Eldad said he suffered a broken arm.
independent.co.uk

Khalid Mish’al
It is widely recognised that the Palestinians are among the most politicised and educated peoples in the world. When they went to the polls last Wednesday they were well aware of what was on offer and those who voted for Hamas knew what it stood for. They chose Hamas because of its pledge never to give up the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and its promise to embark on a programme of reform. There were voices warning them, locally and internationally, not to vote for an organisation branded by the US and EU as terrorist because such a democratically exercised right would cost them the financial aid provided by foreign donors.

The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections the world’s leading democracies failed the test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of Hamas as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, seize the opportunity created by the result to support the development of good governance in Palestine and search for a means of ending the bloodshed, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their right to choose their parliamentary representatives.

We are being punished simply for resisting oppression and striving for justice. Those who threaten to impose sanctions on our people are the same powers that initiated our suffering and continue to support our oppressors almost unconditionally. We, the victims, are being penalised while our oppressors are pampered. The US and EU could have used the success of Hamas to open a new chapter in their relations with the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Muslims and to understand better a movement that has so far been seen largely through the eyes of the Zionist occupiers of our land.

Our message to the US and EU governments is this: your attempt to force us to give up our principles or our struggle is in vain. Our people who gave thousands of martyrs, the millions of refugees who have waited for nearly 60 years to return home and our 9,000 political and war prisoners in Israeli jails have not made those sacrifices in order to settle for close to nothing.

Hamas has been elected mainly because of its immovable faith in the inevitability of victory; and Hamas is immune to bribery, intimidation and blackmail. While we are keen on having friendly relations with all nations we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our legitimate rights. We have seen how other nations, including the peoples of Vietnam and South Africa, persisted in their struggle until their quest for freedom and justice was accomplished. We are no different, our cause is no less worthy, our determination is no less profound and our patience is no less abundant.

Our message to the Muslim and Arab nations is this: you have a responsibility to stand by your Palestinian brothers and sisters whose sacrifices are made on behalf of all of you. Our people in Palestine should not need to wait for any aid from countries that attach humiliating conditions to every dollar or euro they pay despite their historical and moral responsibility for our plight. We expect you to step in and compensate the Palestinian people for any loss of aid and we demand you lift all restrictions on civil society institutions that wish to fundraise for the Palestinian cause.

Our message to the Palestinians is this: our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return. We shall spare no effort to work with all factions and institutions in order to put our Palestinian house in order. Having won the parliamentary elections, our medium-term objective is to reform the PLO in order to revive its role as a true representative of all the Palestinian people, without exception or discrimination.

Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us – our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.

We shall never recognise the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.
· Khalid Mish’al is head of the political bureau of Hamas.
guardian.co.uk

VIENNA, Austria – The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said in a report Tuesday that Iran obtained documents and drawings on the black market that serve no other purpose than to make an atomic warhead. Tehran warned of an “end of diplomacy” if plans to refer it to the U.N. Security Council are carried out.
news.yahoo.com

Iran ‘has bomb and trying to make more’
01/29/06 “Gulf News” — — Dubai: A well-known US nuclear proliferation and terrorism expert told Gulf News yesterday that Tehran not only has the nuclear bomb, it is seeking to “duplicate them in large numbers before revealing their existence to the world”.

Mansoor Ijaz said, “Iran has a functional nuclear device stored, like the Pakistanis did for nearly a decade, in component parts at multiple locations to justify its publicly declared stance of ‘nuclear ambiguity’ until Tehran can replicate the nuclear fuel cycle and duplicate components reliably needed to manufacture a diverse array of nuclear devices.”

This, he says, requires patience and time, and underscores the delay tactics seen with increasing frequency by Tehran regarding their nuclear agenda.

Speaking exclusively to Gulf News while on a brief visit to the region, Ijaz, an American financier of Pakistani ancestry whose partners include former CIA Director James Woolsey and retired US Air Force Generals James Abrahamson and Tom McInerney, warned: “Iran is committed to expanding and supplying its global ‘jihadist’ network with tactical nuclear capabilities, ranging from dirty radiological devices to electromagnetic pulse devices or ‘electron bombs’, in order to redress what Tehran sees as a growing geostrategic imbalance aligned against its interests.”

Since the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in March 2005, the U.S. Administration has played an increasingly imperious role in Lebanon, exacerbating divisions in an already fiercely sectarian country.

Against a backdrop of bombings and assassinations which have filled the security vacuum left by Damascus, Lebanon is now sharply polarized into two camps: one resolutely opposed to the growing American presence in their country; the other united through its opposition to Syria.

Hizbullah, Lebanon’s largest political party, allied with the other main Shiite group Amal and a collection of Leftists/Arabists are rejecting the U.S. embrace. This group’s less than outraged response to allegations that Damascus was behind a string of attacks on anti-Syrian figures has created tremendous animosity toward Lebanon’s large Shiite community, who are now known to number between 40 and 50 per cent of the population.

America’s major Lebanese allies: the mostly Sunni entourage of the murdered former Prime Minister Hariri allied with Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, leftists funded by the Hariri camp and the remnants of Lebanon’s Christian far right are spearheading the anti Syrian camp.
counterpunch.org

…British and US policy towards Afghan opium after the 2001 invasion was totally cynical. As a covert reward to the warlords for supporting Karzai, the occupiers turned a blind eye to the 2002 replanting. Since the market for any unregulated global product tends to be near perfect, the prospect of rocketing profits brought an unprecedented acreage of Afghanistan into production. Twenty-eight of 32 provinces were instantly under cultivation. Refining factories were set up, keeping more profit in the country and creating jobs. Europe was soon swamped with cheap heroin. A Glasgow 11-year-old could buy it for £10 a packet. Afghanistan’s economy is now wholly reliant on opium as a result of the west’s ending of Taliban crop suppression and refusal to curb consumption. The policy was deliberate.

Britain is now pretending otherwise by sending the army to Helmand province, Afghanistan’s poppy-growing area. Its Herculean objective is to stamp out both the opium trade and Taliban infiltration. According to the defence secretary, John Reid, the war on terror is “absolutely interlinked to countering narcotics”. By eradicating poppies in Helmand, Britain hopes to drain the swamp on which terrorism floats.
guardian.co.uk

…This is an unpatriotic government. This is a government that deals openly in illegalities, whether it is attacking a country which has done us no harm, two countries — Iraq and Afghanistan — because we now believe, not in declaring war through Congress as the Constitution requires, but through the President. ‘Well, I think there are some terrorists over there, and I think we got to bomb them, huh? We’ll bomb them.’ Now, we’ve had idiots as presidents before. He’s not unique. But he’s certainly the most active idiot that we have ever had.

And now here we are planning new wars, ongoing wars in the Middle East. And so as he comes with his State of the Union, which he is going to justify eavesdropping without judicial warrants on anybody in the United States that he wants to listen in on. This is what we call dictatorship. Dictatorship. Dictatorship. And it is time that we objected. Don’t say wait ‘til the next election and do it through that. We can’t trust the elections, thanks to Diebold and S&S and all the electronic devices which are being flogged across the country to make sure that elections can be so rigged that the villains will stay in power.
democracynow.org

I think the myth of sovereignty of the people in the U.S. has been fully exposed. We can demonstrate all we want. Who cares?

1/31/06 “Washington Post” — — The National Security Agency is in the process of building a new warning hub and data warehouse in the Denver area, realigning much of its workforce from Ft. Meade, Maryland to Colorado.

The Denver Post reported last week that NSA was moving some of its operations to the Denver suburb of Aurora.

On the surface, the NSA move seems to be a management and cost cutting measure, part of a post-9/11 decentralization. “This strategy better aligns support to national decision makers and combatant commanders,” an NSA spokesman told the Denver paper.

In truth, NSA is aligning its growing domestic eavesdropping operations — what the administration calls “terrorist warning” in its current PR campaign — with military homeland defense organizations, as well as the CIA’s new domestic operations Colorado.

Translation: Hey Congress, Colorado is now the American epicenter for national domestic spying.

In May, Dana Priest reported here in The Washington Post that the CIA was planning to shift much of its domestic operations to Aurora, Colorado.

The move of the CIA’s National Resources Division was then described as being undertaken “for operational reasons.”

The Division is responsible for exploiting the knowledge of U.S. citizens and foreigners in the United States who might have unique information about foreign countries and terrorist activities. The functions extend from engaging Iraqi or Iranian Americans in covert operations to develop information and networks in their home countries to recruiting foreign students and visitors to be American spies.

Aurora is already a reconnaissance satellite downlink and analytic center focusing on domestic warning. The NSA and CIA join U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) in Colorado. NORTHCOM is post 9/11 the U.S. military command responsible for homeland defense.

The new NSA operation is located at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, at a facility commonly known as the Aerospace Data Facility.

According to Government Executive Magazine — thanks DP — “NSA is building a massive data storage facility in Colorado, which will be able to hold the electronic equivalent of the Library of Congress every two days.” This new NSA data warehouse is the hub of “data mining” and analysis development, allowing the eavesdropping agency to develop and make better use of the unbelievabytes of data it collects but does not exploit.
informationclearinghouse.info