Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq new york times
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: June 20
AKHMUR, Iraq, June 17 — Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.

The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.

Okay. In the article I posted below, you have al-Qaida denying involvement in the latest beheading, but now it seems ‘the head’ of the cell that supposedly killed him left a note! Well I’m glad to see that’s all cleared up now. This combined with the appearing and disappearing body (also below) tells me that SOMEBODY is seeing the p.r. value in beheading an American over there every now and then. One concrete result I have seen here in the U.S. is a a sudden rise in murders that feature beheadings…beheaded children, beheaded wives…

al-Qaida Head Justifies Targeting Johnson
Sunday June 20, 2004 4:31 PM

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) – The head of the al-Qaida cell that killed Paul M. Johnson Jr. justified targeting the American engineer in a message written before he himself was killed in a gun battle with Saudi security forces.
the guardian uk full article

website says Saudi Security Forces aided in kidnapping:aol news

Today:
Saudis Search for Slain Hostage’s Body
By SALAH NASRAWI, Associated Press Writer yahoo news
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Saudi security agents searched homes in the capital and surrounding deserts Saturday for the body of slain American hostage Paul M. Johnson Jr., while Saudi officials hailed as a victory their slaying of his executioner, the top al-Qaida figure in the kingdom.

…Saudi officials had reported that Johnson’s body was found Friday dumped on the northern outskirts of the capital, hours after his captors killed and decapitated him and posted Web photos of his severed head.

But officials backtracked Saturday. “We haven’t found the body yet,” said Adel al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah in Washington. “We think we know the area where it is.”

Saudi security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they have been searching in desert areas around Riyadh. They said they were also searching houses and apartments that they suspect were used by militants.

yesterday:
 
 Al Qaeda militants kill American hostage
Saturday, June 19, 2004 Posted: 3:04 AM EDT (0704 GMT)
cnn.com
(CNN) — Saudi security forces killed a top al Qaeda leader in the kingdom shortly after the decapitated body of American hostage Paul Johnson Jr. was left in a remote area of Riyadh, security sources said.
But a statement attributed to al Qaeda denied al-Muqrin’s death, saying “Saudi tyrants” trying to discourage the mujahideen were spreading “false news.”
There was no way to immediately confirm the denial.

…His body was found Friday in northern Riyadh soon after an Islamist Web site posted photographs of his decapitated body.
U.S. officials said the remains were “definitely” Johnson’s.
One photograph showed a severed head sitting on the back of a headless body.

‘Saudi officials.’ Saudii security officials’. ‘Security sources’. ‘American officials.’ ‘Officials.’ ‘Saudi security forces.’ Well whatever the story is, it is clearly neither official nor secure.

by Arnold J. Oliver commondreams.org
Democracy has been much in the news of late. At the G-8 Summit in Georgia, one of the main items on the agenda was the democratization of the Middle East, and the recent commemoration of the D-Day anniversary and the passing of President Reagan both generated discussion concerning the defense and spread of democracy.

But amidst all the hoopla, the anniversary of a decisive event in the modern history of democracy has somehow escaped notice. Fifty years ago, in June of 1954, the government of the United States overthrew the legitimate and democratically elected government of Guatemala. It was the Central Intelligence Agency’s first major covert action in Latin America, and by leading to the rise to a series of military regimes across the region, it changed the course of history.

What was done to Guatemala in 1954 was criminal, and because the U.S. government committed the dreadful deed, American citizens are obliged to remember.
(more…)

by Jamey Hecht, PhD from the wilderness.com full article

There is some good stuff in this article.
…Yet the forces of violence, reaction, and American exceptionalism can claim a long series of epochal triumphs, of which I will name only the most egregious: Operation Paperclip, which brought the Nazi Intelligence “community” into the nascent CIA (thereby rescuing the most depraved murderers in history from certain death at the hands of British military tribunals); the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA as a secret society of military adventurism and political sabotage under the guise of an intelligence-gathering body; the murders of President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, which issued in a disastrous Vietnam War that killed up to three million people and pitched the U.S. economy into a permanent free-fall of debt; the Savings and Loan Robbery, which did so much to bankrupt the vanishing middle class; the 1990’s three trillion dollar theft under the auspices of the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which motivated America’s international creditors to begin withdrawing their confidence from the dollar; and the “velvet coup” of the fraudulent presidential election of 2000, which openly discredited the residual myth of popular sovereignty. But perhaps 11-22-63 and 9-11-01 are the deepest wounds they have inflicted upon the body politic so far. These represent two seizures of state power by the most violent elements of the longstanding elites who make policy in the absence of popular sovereignty and genuine legislative oversight. In the meantime, they have consolidated their power and expanded their domain of operations and propaganda with an inexorable momentum.

Policy is no longer driven by leadership figures, but by consortia of mutually interested elites. Like the forty years since 11-22, the three years since 9-11 have seen exponential growth in defense spending as a portion of the USG’s annual budget. Between forty-six and fifty-three cents of every tax dollar we pay goes to military debt payments, salaries, deployments, and weapons stockpiling. This flood of capital into the arms industry drives a domestic policy of despair and a “foreign” policy of violence. Weapons are expended so that they can be replaced; their manufacture enriches Lockheed-Martin, the largest purveyor of lethal weapons in the world, and its competitive partners. In pursuit of new raw materials to seize and new markets to monopolize, corporations and their clients drive policy toward aggressive expansionism. CIA is the spearhead of the war process, so its activity has been cloaked from all genuine Congressional interference. The beauty of the CIA’s position is that it apparently always takes its orders from the President, but for the most part it also insures that the President orders roughly what CIA wants. When he doesn’t do so, and seeks to replace their programs with his own initiative, he is murdered; when he insists on forming his own intelligence apparatus inside the White House or the Pentagon – as in the Nixon and G. W. Bush administrations, respectively – the CIA is likely to destroy the administration. Whenever the latter occurs, the administration is unseated on the strength of some nonviolent crime like a “third rate burglary” or the disclosure of a CIA operative’s identity. Bombing Vietnam and Cambodia or Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of thousands of lives never ranks as an impeachable offense.
(more…)

By Gary Leupp counterpunch.org full article

Painting al Zarqawi as the cheeky contender vying with Osama for ‘biggest baddest terrorist guy’ provides a handy pretext for some disastrous military operation in Iran, since Iran is accused of ‘sponsoring’ him. So far al Zarqawi is the dead man, the one-legged man, the one-legged man with two legs…I remember being convinced through most of the 90’s that Osama was a fictional character-to tell the truth I may never be convinced. Bin Laden and now al Zarqawi are just so darned convenient…

some excerpts:

“A memo indicating that his [Cheney’s] office was directly involved in the decision to award Halliburton (of which he was formerly CEO) no-bid contracts worth seven billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction work prior to the war last year; reports that most likely a member of Cheney’s office vindictively (and criminally) leaked to the press the identity of former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA agent wife; charges that Cheney personally, repeatedly visited CIA headquarters to influence “intelligence” reporting in order to bolster the administration’s case for war with Iraq; and even his role as Bush “transition director” in placing neocons eager for a war with Iraq in key positions in the Defense Department and his own office…all these will likely embarrass him further in the coming months. But maybe, with the arrogance for the masses that typifies neocons, he will plod on disseminating disinformation, in his cool, measured, grandfatherly style, knowing that if challenged on the Iraq al-Qaeda link he will need only say, “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

If al-Zarqawi did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The “Jordanian-born” militant (variously described as “Palestinian” or “Bedouin”) is the link posited by the Bush administration between Saddam Hussein, the secularist, and bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalist. (In his crucial speech to the United Nations before the war, Colin Powell declared that there was a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network” and asserted that al-Zarqawi was the key figure in that nexus.) Any other links—such as the 1997 training of al-Qaeda operatives in airline hijacking, which supposedly took place at the Salman Pak training facility outside Baghdad—have been discredited. That leaves us with the al-Zarqawi link. The nice thing about the latter is that al-Zarqawi straddles the pre-invasion and post-invasion periods, and so can be used (by the neocons anyway) to justify not only the invasion but the ongoing occupation. Why’d we invade? Because, Cheney (who can no longer speak of weapons of mass destruction) explains, of those “long established ties with al-Qaeda.” Why are we still there? Because al-Zarqawi (either depicted as “linked to al-Qaeda” or as an al-Qaeda “operative”) is there in Iraq, and if his influence grows, Iraq will become Osama bin-Laden’s base for more attacks on the USA Homeland. His supposed presence, that is, justifies (so long as it may be posited) the presence of U.S. occupying forces. He—another personification of evil, a human face on Terror to add to that of the frustratingly elusive bin Laden—is indeed necessary.

As such, it is best that he remain as vaguely defined as possible. If, for example, you say he had his leg amputated in 2002 in the Baghdad hospital from which (you say) he made a phone call that you intercepted (that call being your key piece of evidence for the “long established” Saddam al-Qaeda ties), and then you, for example, say that the person beheading Nick Berg in Iraq two months ago, who seems to have both legs, is none other than arch-villain al-Zarqawi—then you run into logical problems. Some people (including German intelligence agents) think al-Zarqawi is as much a rival as ally to bin-Laden. The Christian Science Monitor suggests that the two men differ on how to exploit Shiite-Sunni differences in Iraq. (So best not to give to many details about this evil person, other than to make sure all know he is indeed evil, so sneakily so that if logical contradictions appear in media coverage of his activities, he, rather than they, are to blame.) But logical thinking aside, if one can depict al-Zarqawi as the mastermind of ongoing resistance to the occupation of Iraq, then you can divert attention from the general, indigenous, Iraqi rejection of the occupation, while depicting that occupation as an anti-al-Qaeda effort…”
(more…)

This is an excellent article which gives a history of modern Zionism and the state of Israel, the origins of the ‘Palestinian problem,’ gives an example of Zionist collaboration with Hitler, discusses the Christian Coalition’s relationship with Israel, and engages at length the tabu topic of how any faint criticism of Israel leads to charges of anti-Semitism. The author goes on to propose a ‘one-state solution.’

by Noel Ignatiev counterpunch.org full article
…Unlike many countries, including the United States, the Israeli state does not belong, even in principle, to those who reside within its borders, but is defined as the state of the Jewish people, wherever they may be. That peculiar definition is one reason why the state has to this day failed to produce a written constitution, define its borders, or even declare the existence of an Israeli nationality. Moreover, in this “outpost of democracy,” no party that opposes the existence of the Jewish state is permitted to take part in elections. It is as if the United States were to declare itself a Christian state, define “Christian” not by religious belief but by descent, and then pass a “gag law” prohibiting public discussion of the issue.

If one part of the Zionist project is the expulsion of the indigenous population, the other part is expanding the so-called Jewish population. But here arises the problem, which has tormented Israeli legal officials for fifty years, what is a Jew? (For a century-and-a-half U.S. courts faced similar problems determining who is white.) The Zionists set forth two criteria for determining who is a Jew. The first is race, which is a myth generally and is particularly a myth in the case of the Jews. The “Jewish” population of Israel includes people from fifty countries, of different physical types, speaking different languages and practicing different religions (or no religion at all), defined as a single people based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham. It is so patently false that only Zionists and Nazis even pretend to take it seriously. In fact, given Jewish intermingling with others for two thousand years, it is likely that the Palestinians-themselves the result of the mixture of the various peoples of Canaan plus later waves of Greeks and Arabs-are more directly descended from the ancient inhabitants of the Holy Land than the Europeans displacing them. The claim that the Jews have a special right to Palestine has no more validity than would an Irish claim of a divine right to establish a Celtic state all across Germany, France, and Spain on the basis that Celtic tribes once lived there. Nevertheless, on the basis of ascribed descent, the Zionist officials assign those they have selected a privileged place within the state. If that is not racism, then the term has no meaning.
(more…)

Interview with Daniel Hopsicker
Conducted by Sander Hicks
Broadcast 6/11/04 on INN World Report
full interview

…HOPSICKER: What I found in Florida was that the government story about the terrorist conspiracy’s activities before September 11th is not just an error, it s a lie. The time line is wrong. The FBI’s timeline is wrong. Everything they are doing is designed to protect an operation that was under way in southwest Florida that trained, between 1999 and September 2001, literally hundreds of Arabs to fly. In other words, in 1998, there were two or three Arabs learning how to fly, by the end of ‘99 it was flying hundreds of them. So obviously there was a covert operation going on; the flight school where Mohammad Atta went to, Huffman Aviation in Florida is not a business and was not operating like a business. So it was, and is, something else…

This interview connects the goon squad behind any number of squalid episodes, like the Bay of Pigs, Kenneddy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, to 9-11. I wish I was surprised.

Reuters story
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel set in motion a plan Thursday to dig a moat along the Gaza-Egypt border, inviting contractor bids for the project meant to prevent arms reaching Palestinian militants through tunnels.

The Defense Ministry published the bid notice 11 days after the cabinet approved in principle a Gaza withdrawal plan, under which Israel would keep a narrow corridor on the Egyptian frontier pending possible security arrangements with Cairo.

Inviting bids by July 12, the ministry said the southern Gaza Strip “canal” would be 50 feet to 80 feet deep and stretch 2.5 miles.

“This is the beginning of turning the Gaza Strip into a big prison,” Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said, comparing the trench to the barrier Israel is constructing in the West Bank with the declared aim of stopping suicide bombers.

The notice, in Israeli newspapers, did not give the width of the canal — a figure crucial to determining whether any Palestinian homes along the “Philadelphi Corridor” buffer zone adjacent to Rafah refugee camp would need to be demolished.

It was not clear whether the moat would be filled with water, as Israeli military sources had suggested last month, or would be dry…

Well I suggest filling it with crocodiles. It is uncanny how Israel reconstitutes the Jews’ own history of persecution in its aggression against Palestine. First the fence, conjuring up the Warsaw Ghetto, and now the Medieval moat, hearkening back to feudal times or even earlier to the Crusades, when whole Jewish populations were wiped out. Now apparently they are the feudal lords.

Envoy Puts Latin Post, and Stormy Past, Behind Him
By TIM WEINER new york times

MEXICO CITY, June 16 – Otto J. Reich, President Bush’s special envoy to Latin America, resigned on Wednesday, taking with him a lifetime of experience fighting Fidel Castro and other opponents of American foreign policy.

…In 2001, President Bush nominated Mr. Reich to become assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, the top State Department post for Latin America. Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the president’s brother, and the state’s anti-Castro Cubans supported the nomination.

But the Senate would not confirm him; some Democrats called him an ideologue. After a bitter fight, the president appointed him temporarily when Congress recessed. After that yearlong term expired, he took the special envoy post, which did not require Senate approval, in January 2003.

…Mr. Reich, a former ambassador to Venezuela, also led the State Department’s office of public diplomacy under President Ronald Reagan. He carried out the president’s policy of undermining the left-wing leaders of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. He tried to generate public support in the United States for anti-Sandinista rebels, known as contras, after Congress cut off funds to them in 1984.

In 1987, the comptroller general of the United States reported that Mr. Reich’s office had “engaged in prohibited, covert activities” of domestic propaganda “designed to influence the media and the public to support the administration’s Latin American policies.” Those acts violated restrictions on the use of public funds for propaganda without Congress’s consent, the report said.

…In the 1990’s, Mr. Reich worked as a lobbyist. He helped persuade Congress to tighten the American embargo on Cuba. His clients included Lockheed Martin, which sought to sell F-16 fighter aircraft to Chile.

In May 2001, shortly after he joined the administration, Chile agreed to buy 10 F-16’s for more than $600 million, ending a two-decade United States ban on the sale of high-technology arms to Latin America.