Dissident Veteran For Peace

I've been listening to National Public Radio's coverage this week on the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the reporting has generally been abysmal. In other words, it has been par for the course.

At least four things have stood out to me in the NPR  coverage I have heard. First, the NPR reporting on the withdrawn (but possibly soon-to-be resumed) Swedish sexual assault investigation has consistently failed to fully report Assange's position. As Wired noted nearly two years ago: "Assange has always maintained that extradition to Sweden was a thin ruse intended to make him vulnerable to further extradition to the United States, where it's widely believed that a secret grand jury for years was investigating him for WikiLeaks-related crimes." (I offer no judgment on the veracity of Assange's protestations that he was innocent of the Swedish allegations.)

Second, the range of guests NPR has hosted on the Assange segments has generally run the gamut from "I don't like Assange much" to "I really dislike the treacherous Assange". For instance, on the day Assange was arrested NPR interviewed Leon Panetta, secretary of defense and CIA director during Obama administration.

(NPR thought it not worth mentioning that Panetta was also Bill Clinton's OMB director and, later, chief of staff or that Panetta endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Less than three months before the election, Panetta also went to bat for her regarding alleged Clinton Foundation improprieties during her tenure as Secretary of State. In 2017, Clinton blamed Wikileaks, in part, for her 2016 loss to Donald Trump. And why mention that less than a year ago the DNC filed a lawsuit against Wikileaks?)

Predictably, Panetta is in favor of the extradition and prosecution of Assange: "So I think ... as a result of the impact of releasing this classified information that he ought to be subject to the laws of the United States and face our system of justice." He also raised the Clinton defeat: "Well, there's no question that there was a huge amount of attention, particularly to WikiLeaks and the impact of WikiLeaks on the 2016 election. There's no question that as a result of the information that he was able to release, it had a huge impact in terms of our politics ..." In response to a question about a recent Tweet by Edward Snowden on Assange's arrest, Panetta avoided commenting on the substance of Snowden's position and launched an ad hominem attack.

Third, NPR on-air personalities and guests have repeatedly made (or declined to challenge the accuracy or relevance of) the claim that Assange/Wikileaks are not covered by the 1st Amendment because they allegedly released classified material without redactions of sensitive material.

Just today, NPR hosted former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who asserted Assange is not a "legitimate journalist", in part, because Assange allegedly declined to redact material that "mainstream journalists" wanted him to remove and, further, that Assange wouldn't even listen "to that case [for redactions]". McLaughlin makes this claim twice in the segment and it is never challenged.

I am unaware of any "not enough redactions" exception to the freedom of the press. Moreover, in October 2010, CNN reported:

With the posting of 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq war, WikiLeaks has shown a much heavier hand redacting compared to its previous publication of documents.

After the leak in July of more than 70,000 Afghanistan War documents, the website was heavily criticized by the U.S. government, the military and human rights groups for failing to redact names of civilians in the documents, putting them at risk of retaliation by the Taliban.

Assange's role in the alleged failure to redact names in the July leak is not discussed in the CNN article, which does go on to say concerning later releases: "An initial comparison of a few documents redacted by WikiLeaks to the same documents released by the Department of Defense shows that WikiLeaks removed more information from the documents than the Pentagon" (emphasis added). Yep, Wikileaks apparently withheld more information than the US military but you're not likely to learn that on NPR.

In the same piece CNN also reported: "Even with redaction, the Pentagon is critical of the documents' release, saying the site had no right to publish and is not equipped to understand what information is harmful." This seems to suggest that Wikileaks failure to redact what the military wanted redacted was due to incompetence or negligence, not malice. In any case, where does the 1st Amendment require journalists to keep secret what the government wants kept secret?

Finally, it is striking that NPR's coverage has featured very little discussion of the substance of the actual charges against Assange' let alone the substance of the material Chelsea Manning provided for Wikileaks to publish (see e.g. the video below). The unsealed federal grand jury indictment is only seven pages long and pretty straightforward but NPR has instead covered ancillary issues, such as Assange's cat, with the seeming goal of smearing and convicting Assange in the court of public opinion.

Assange's purported crime appears to be agreeing to help Manning crack a government password (Indictment, para. 7). However, the indictment also indicates that Assange's assistance did not extend to him actively accessing a restricted government computer system. Thus, paragraph 9 of the indictment speaks of "the portion of the password Manning gave to Assange". At first glance this seems analogous to asking Assange, from afar, for help opening a physical combination safe. It's akin to Assange saying "try this combination" while not turning the dial himself or even being in the same room.

If it's illegal for a journalist to help someone from afar break the password of a computer file or crack a safe then would it also be illegal to open/unseal a stolen envelope clearly marked "Top Secret" and containing classified material or turn the pages of a stolen document clearly marked "Top Secret"? What about helping to decipher an encrypted text? If not, why not? What's the substantive difference between these acts?

To be clear, if Assange sat at a keyboard and unlawfully attempted to access classified files while they were still stored on a government system then that would seem to be an overt, illegal act. However, that's not what Assange is accused of doing.

He is accused of conspiring to help Chelsea Manning do that and, under the particular circumstances, that seems a little fuzzier, especially when something as important as the 1st Amendment is in play. But as Glenn Greenwald puts it:

Neither the most authoritarian factions of the Trump administration behind this prosecution, nor their bizarre and equally tyrannical allies in the Democratic Party, care the slightest about press freedoms. They only care about one thing: putting Julian Assange behind bars, because (in the case of Trump officials) he revealed U.S. war crimes and because (in the case of Democrats) he revealed corruption at the highest levels of the DNC that forced the resignation of the top 5 officials of the Democratic Party and harmed the Democrats’ political reputation.

Download the US indictment of Assange here (PDF): https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/press-release/file/1153481/download

Here, in no particular order, are some alternative views on the Assange arrest that you're not likely to hear represented on NPR:

• "7 Years of Lies About Assange Won't Stop Now" Consortium News
• "Julian Assange's Arrest Should Worry Anyone Who Cares About Freedom of the Press" The Nation
• "EFF Statement on Assange Indictment and Arrest" The Electronic Frontier Foundation
• "Espionage? Computer Crimes? The DOJ's Cast Against Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange" MintPress News
• "10 Reasons Assange Should Walk Free" Foreign Policy Journal
• "Yes, You Should Fear the Arrest of Julian Assange" The American Conservative
• "How You Can Be Certain That The US Charge Against Assange Is Fraudulent" Caitlin Johnstone
• "The Washington Establishment Seems Pretty Happy About Julian Assange's Arrest" Reason
• "Julian Assange's life is in danger" World Socialist Web Site

Labels: civil liberties, Clintons, Iraq, Julian Assange, media, National Public Radio, Trump, video, Wikileaks

So, the Mueller report is finished and the findings are starting to be released. Given their track record in covering the Mueller investigation it is likely that mainstream media outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times will be unable to adhere to the truth when discussing the report.

By this, I mean that, initially, they are likely to get the bare bones of the report correct then they will devolve into spins, distortions, and fabrications. I am not suggesting that the people who write, edit, and report the news will deliberately be dishonest—although there will likely be some of that—but rather that they will be overcome by their own bias.

Just about two weeks ago there was a striking example of this cognitive impairment in action. The Daily is a program produced by the New York Times that airs on National Public Radio stations. On March 11, The Daily aired "Part 2: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (the Mueller Report)". Host Michael Barbaro spoke with "Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times."

Here's an excerpt from the transcript of the program (the highlights in bold below are mine):

Michael Schmidt: ... So if Mueller says, there's nothing here to be seen, then the Republicans — we know where they're going to be. They're going to be standing next to the president.

Michael Barbaro: So in that case, do you expect the Democrats would proceed with these [Congressional] investigations, but they would kind of limp along and there wouldn't be a ton of political support for anything approaching impeachment, no matter what is found? Or is it possible these investigations would literally just start to shut down?

Michael Schmidt: I don't think they shut down. I think that they limp along, because the Democrats will still have a base that thinks that Trump has done a lot of things that are terrible. And there will be pressure on them to continue to press. Democrats will say, Mueller may not have enough evidence to show the president broke the law, but we know that he has abused his power and done X and Y and Z. And they'll go on and on and on, and they'll say we can not ignore this.

In the next segment Barbaro raises the possibility that Mueller's findings will do something other than fully exculpate or fully inculpate Trump.

Michael Barbaro: So Mike, what could possibly be the third option? Because in our legal system, when it comes to the special counsel, there only seems to be two options — charge the president with a crime or not charge the president.

Michael Schmidt: For lack of a better term or to make up a term, I would call it the Comey hybrid.

Michael Barbaro: What is — (CHUCKLES) what is the Comey hybrid?

At this point Barbaro and Schmidt discuss former FBI Director Comey's July 2016 press conference. Their conversation is interspersed with recordings of Comey from the press conference. I'm going to skip most of that and get to my point.

Archived Recording of James Comey: There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position, or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.

Michael Schmidt: But that at the end of the day —

Archived Recording of James Comey: Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

Michael Schmidt: It didn't meet the high bar of indicting her.

Archived Recording of James Comey: We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.

Michael Barbaro: So a Comey hybrid is to come out and say no charges are going to be filed against the subject of an investigation, but here are all the things we found. Here are all the implications — essentially not prosecution, but a kind of scolding.

Michael Schmidt: It's not even about scolding. It's — we're not going to charge, but I'm going to give you a rare look underneath the hood.

Archived Recording of James Comey: Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system in violation of a federal statute that makes it a felony to mishandle classified information, either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way.

I have omitted about two minutes of the program here. The next part is the really striking bit.

Michael Barbaro: So the conclusion was that it [i.e. Comey's press conference] was an unnecessary, kind of gratuitous sullying of Hillary Clinton, even though there was no evidence she had committed a crime.

Michael Schmidt: Correct. They're saying if the F.B.I. investigated the average American and found that that person had not committed a crime, we don't then stand up and say, hey, look at all the unsavory things they did — which we didn't think rose to something they should be charged with.

In case you missed it, just moments earlier Barbaro and Schmidt had listened to a recording of Comey saying: "there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information". Comey also makes a case of sorts that Clinton was grossly negligent in her handling of classified material which he later points out is a violation of the federal statute.

In other words, Comey clearly indicated there is evidence of a criminal violation. Yet less than three minutes later Barbaro is on to "there was no evidence she [Clinton] had committed a crime" and Schmidt is agreeing with him.

In coming days, we can expect the mainstream media and Democrats to do a sort of inversion of this. It will probably go kind of like this: 'Well, yes, Mueller found no evidence of collusion but he clearly failed to exonerate the President on obstruction of justice.' They will focus on the possible obstruction of the investigation of the non-existent crime of collusion. Then, in short order, they will omit or undermine the finding that Mueller found no evidence of collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign.

As somewhat of an aside, Dana Milbank, writing in The Washington Post last Monday, has given us more evidence of the extremes to which Trump Derangement Syndrome has driven liberals, Democrats, etc.

In "Trump is right. This is a witch hunt!" Milbank actually takes up the defense of witch hunts (Milbank is not alone). He asserts: "The treatment of Trump by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and other investigators does have characteristics of a witch hunt. This is because Trump has characteristics of a witch."

He continues, quoting a community college history professor: "if what is happening to Trump is a witch hunt, 'it is only in a good sense, that is, this is society policing the boundaries that they believe to be ethically and morally right.' " You see, "witch hunts weren't all bad, and their targets weren't always innocent."

See also:

• "Critical Analysis On Russiagate"
• "Cohen's Testimony Against Trump"
• "Video: Clinton vs. Comey"
• "The Shoddy Legal Reasoning Used to Clear Clinton" on fee.org

Labels: Clintons, critical thinking, media, National Public Radio, politics, Robert S. Mueller, Russia, Trump

The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being. When he violates this sacred trust, he not only profanes his entire cult, but threatens the very fabric of international society. The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable. They are based upon the noblest of human traits—sacrifice.

Source: Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 1946, confirming the death sentence imposed by a United States military commission on General Tomoyuki Yamashita, as quoted in the epigraph to Telford Taylor's Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (New York: Bantam, 1970 [1971]).


A few years ago, just days after the Sandy Hook/Newtown massacre, I was involved in an email conversation with another veteran (whom I'll refer to "T." ). I've lightly edited the conversation as it appears below. T. started things off as follows:

Reportedly, bushmasters and high capacity handguns and magazines are flying off the shelf as the gun people anticipate new legislation.

If you're antiwar you've probably noticed who the war people are, who form the permanent political base in support of the military as an institution, and become hyper-activated to support every war as soon as the bugle blows. [emphasis in original]

By supporting gun control legislation, you can reduce the self-reinforcing group-think at work here.  They will come around, over decades.  They'll accept that guns are no good.

Liberals are notorious for not noticing their true allies, or the fact that we have a common moral and logical framework.

I replied:

Stereotype much, [T.]? I guess you never saw the GI Voice/Coffee Strong documentary, Grounds for Resistance. One of the opening vignettes is a bunch of the Coffee Strong guys firing a wide array of guns in a gravel pit near Olympia; you can see Seth Manzel firing an AK-47 in the trailer. My point is there is no neat relationship between being pro-gun rights and pro-war. Some of the most active, committed anti-war activists I know are "gun people".

I remember, too, that the President who signed the federal assault weapons ban in 1994 is the same guy who presided over US-enforced sanctions that led to the death of +500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five. On national television, his Secretary of State said of the dead Iraqi children: "We think the price is worth it." A year before he signed the federal assault weapons ban, Bill Clinton also presided over a siege in Waco, TX by the federal gun police that led to the death of 76 people, at least eleven of whom were under the age of five. Where was the liberal outpouring of grief and anger over the death of the Iraqi children or the children in Waco? No one was ever held accountable for any of those deaths. This is part and parcel of the strong pro-violent culture in the US, where, for example, Die Hard is seriously regarded as a Christmas movie.

Supporting gun control legislation in response to the Newtown shooting is a perfect example of "self-reinforcing group-think". And if Obama and the US Congress really care about saving children from violent deaths then they can start by ending US drone attacks on Pakistan. What thinking person in their right mind would trust US politicos on gun control or anything else? As Kevin Carson writes in CounterPunch:

"... what strict gun laws will do is take the level of police statism, lawlessness and general social pathology up a notch in the same way Prohibition and the Drug War have done. I'd expect a War on Guns to expand the volume of organized crime, and to empower criminal gangs fighting over control over the black market, in exactly the same way Prohibition did in the 1920s and strict drug laws have done since the 1980s. I'd expect it to lead to further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, further militarization of local police via SWAT teams, and further expansion of the squalid empire of civil forfeiture, perjured jailhouse snitch testimony, entrapment, planted evidence, and plea deal blackmail."

T. responded:

1. this is a struggle over worldviews.  Whether guns, power and force are effective-- the efficacy of violence.

2. yes sadly, I'm aware many of our fellow veterans think guns are ok.  A lot of them think their military tour was honorable. It wasn't.  military veterans are among the most fucked up people in the country.  VFP are the best of the lot but they think they're smarter than simple indigenous people, women, people who didn't join the military.

In my final response, I said:

You're right about worldviews, [T.]. One worldview I don't understand is that of the peace activist who embraces the idea that empowering people with badges and guns to arrest or otherwise penalize other people for making, selling, owning, or lawfully using guns is consistent with an ethic of peace that eschews violence. Peace activists who support "gun control legislation" should at least have the integrity to admit they're not all that different from "our leaders," who think force violence is okay as long as it's used for some cause they or "the people" support. I fail to see how one can support gun control legislation (or any most any other type of legislation) without implicitly, at least, supporting the force or the threat of force used to enforce that legislation and the force or the threat of force used to collect the taxes to pay the folks with guns and badges who enforce the laws.

You've also answered my question about whether you "stereotype much". You clearly do, viz. your remarks on "fucked up" military veterans and VFP members who "think they're smarter than simple indigenous people, women, people who didn't join the military". The "simple indigenous people" in the US serve in the military in disproportionately higher numbers than just about any other demographic group. Swil Kanim, a Lummi US military veteran and violinist, explains the phenomenon this way: "We're not the enemy. We're not. We're on your side. We believe in America. That's why Indians have the highest percentage of service of any ethnic group in America." As for women, Adam Lanza's mother, Nancy, was reportedly a "gun enthusiast," which kind of smashes that stereotype. As for "people who didn't join the military"—that group includes Barack Obama ... and any number of chicken hawks who never served in the military and lots of mothers who proudly send their children off to the military and to war. So, really, your juxtaposition of veterans and VFP members with "simple indigenous people, women, people who didn't join the military" just doesn't hold much water.

Finally, I submit that military service, even in the US military, can be honorable. Gen. Douglas MacArthur perhaps said it best (even if if he did not always live up to the standard he set): "The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being. When he violates this sacred trust, he not only profanes his entire cult, but threatens the very fabric of international society. The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable. They are based upon the noblest of human traits—sacrifice." It is noteworthy that Telford Taylor chose this as the epigraph to Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. Those who do not knowingly and willingly violate this ethos serve honorably even if they later come to realize that they were misled and betrayed by their parents, teachers, clergy, elected officials, NCOs, officers, etc. The dishonor is to those who knew better and for venal reasons violated the "sacred trust" and deceived others. So maybe you think your military service was dishonorable and shameful—your call—but I hope no one else will be convinced by you that military service is inherently dishonorable.

See also:

• "Green Berets: Who's the Coward?""
• "Ulysses S. Grant on 'Moral Courage' "

Labels: Clintons, guns, military, quotations, War

The Obama administration Justice Department has investigated three senior officials for mishandling classified information over the past two years but only one faces a felony conviction, possible jail time and a humiliation that will ruin his career: former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman General James E. Cartwright. The FBI's handling of the case stands in stark contrast to its treatment of Hillary Clinton and retired General David Petraeus — and it reeks of political considerations.

Source:  Josh Rogin. "General Cartwright is paying the price for Hillary Clinton's sins." Washington Post. Oct. 18, 2016.

Elsewhere in the opinion piece quoted above, Rogin asserts: "Cartwright's greatest mistake was not talking to reporters or lying about it; he failed to play the Washington game skillfully enough to avoid becoming a scapegoat for a system in which senior officials skirt the rules and then fall back on their political power to save them." Perhaps, but it may also be the more compelling case that Cartwright was hammered because his "leak" about the source of Stuxnet virus was perceived as harmful to Israel. Rogin makes no mention of this.

It is also perhaps telling that Cartwright is out of step with the avaricious DC scumbags—I'd call them "hawks" but hawks are graceful creatures who kill only to stay alive—backing Obama's trillion dollar nuclear weapons expansion plans. Contra the Nobel Peace Prize laureate-in-chief, Cartwright has publicly called for major cuts in nuclear weapons and a path to their elimination.

Labels: Clintons, crime, Israel, military, nuclear weapons, Obama, politics, voting

If you vote for the good, evil wins.

Source: An avowed Bernie Sanders supporter (and supporter of evil) on why she's voting for Hillary Clinton.

Labels: Clintons, Democrats, politics, quotations, voting

Labels: Clintons, crime, politics, United States, video

US resident and Turkish expatriate Fethullah Gülen has been fingered as a coup plotter by the Turkish regime. It's hard to know exactly who was behind the events in Turkey earlier this month but Gülen certainly has an interesting background. In 2012, when Gülen was still reckoned as an ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he was discussed at length in a New Yorker profile of Erdoğan. Citing the work of indicted Turkish journalist Ahmet Şık, author Dexter Filkins writes:

Gülen is considered one of Erdoğan’s most powerful allies but is reviled and feared by much of Turkey’s population. Born in either 1938 or 1941—publications distributed by his organization cite both dates—Gülen fled to the United States in 1999, as Turkish authorities were preparing to arrest him, for “trying to undermine the secular system.” He now lives in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, and has emerged as the leader of one of the world’s most important Islamic orders, surpassed only by the Muslim Brotherhood in its reach and influence. His public message, in the books and glossy pamphlets his acolytes distribute, is almost entirely apolitical, but his critics suspect that his ambitions are deeply political.

Gülen’s followers operate a network of schools in a hundred and thirty countries. They also run a network of for-profit college-prep courses, which some Turks say earns tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. (A prominent Gülenist in Turkey told me that the courses were not that profitable.) Turkish businessmen donate money to build Gülenist schools in countries whose markets they are trying to enter, and the schools serve as beachheads of good will. According to the movement’s followers, Turkish businessmen who are Gülenists often make deals with one another, sometimes in Turkey, sometimes in faraway lands that have nonexistent or weak governments. In person, Gülenists often come across as amalgams of Dale Carnegie and Christian missionaries: clean-cut, polite, and relentlessly cheerful.

In Turkey, Gülen’s followers own the newspaper Zaman and the TV channel Samanyolu, which editorialize on behalf of the A.K. Party and the Ergenekon prosecutions. (While Erdoğan himself is not believed to be a Gülenist, President Gül is said to be one, as are several other senior members of the government.) Gülen is thought to have between two and three million followers in Turkey, including as many as sixty members of parliament—about ten per cent of the total.

The Gülenists insist that the organization is too diffuse to function as a political movement. But many Turks say that the Gülenists have ambitions and that these may or may not include Erdoğan. A former member of parliament who was once a confidant of Erdoğan’s told me that, in 1999, he met Gülen in Pennsylvania. Gülen, he said, told him that he had a twenty-five-year plan to take control of the Turkish state, and that this would be accomplished by a group of followers he referred to as “the Golden Generation.” “There isn’t any question that Gülen wants political power,” the former legislator told me. (A spokesman for Gülen denied that he had ever advocated “regime change.”)

The most widely held perception in Turkey is that the Gülenists have taken control of the Turkish National Police—and that they are behind the arrests in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases. James Jeffrey, a former Ambassador to Turkey, wrote in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that at least part of that proposition appeared to be true: “The assertion that the T.N.P. is controlled by the Gülenists is impossible to confirm, but we have found no one who disputes it.”

Gülen has cultivated some powerful friends in the United States. When U.S. officials were trying to expel him to face criminal charges in Turkey, he was able to call on Graham Fuller, a former senior official in the C.I.A., to help him remain. When he applied for permanent residency, Morton Abramowitz, another former Ambassador to Turkey, wrote a letter on his behalf. Fuller’s relationship with Gülen, in particular, has prompted conspiracy theories in Turkey about the C.I.A.’s involvement in Gülen’s rise.

(Abramowitz also teamed up with neo-con Eric S. Edelman, another Jewish former US ambassador to Turkey, to rise to Gülen's defense in 2014 in a Washington Post op-ed). In 2013, The Economist also took note of a possible Israeli dimension in the Gülen-Erdoğan split: "A source of enduring speculation is why Mr Erdogan has chosen this moment to go after the Gulenists. The most likely answer is that Mr Erdogan wanted them to show their hand well before the presidential elections. An increasingly paranoid prime minister is said to believe that a 'Gulen-Israel axis' is bent on unseating him. His suspicions were fuelled by Mr Gulen’s very public criticism of Turkey’s rupture with Israel in 2010."

Earlier this month, just days after the attempted coup, Raphael Ahren wrote a piece in the Times of Israel mentioning Gülen at length. He writes:

[Efrat] Aviv, who teaches at Bar-Ilan’s Middle Eastern studies department and is a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, has done extensive research into the moderate Islamic Gülen movement and its connection to Israel and the global Jewish community.

In an article she published in Turkish Policy Quarterly six years ago, she researched Fethullah Gülen’s interfaith outreach, which included meetings with several Jewish groups both in Turkey and the US.

“Gülen sees great importance in disseminating tolerance because of the fact that the world is a global village, and it is imperative to lay the foundation for communication without making distinctions between Christians, Jews, Atheists or Buddhists,” she wrote.

“Because of this approach, of perceiving dialogue as both a religious and a moral-national-social obligation, Gülen met with countless leaders and key people from the three religions during the 1990s. He met with Jewish leaders, both secular and religious, inside and outside of Turkey, in order to promote dialogue between Judaism and Islam.”

In the late 1990s, the reclusive imam met at least twice with senior delegations from the Anti-Defamation League, which at the time was headed by Abraham Foxman, according to Aviv.

“Gülen talked about his moderation regarding Islam, the Jews, Israel, and expressed reasonable and non-extremist views,” Kenneth Jacobson, who currently serves as the ADL’s deputy national director, recalled in 2005 about his first personal encounter with Gülen in New Jersey. “It was a very good meeting, very friendly.”

Jacobson’s second meeting with Gülen took place in 1998 at Gülen’s initiative — and at his Istanbul residence — and was also attended by then-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Leon Levy, Aviv writes.

“We met, and it was another pleasant encounter. We were given gifts,” Jacobson recalled, adding that Gülen reiterated his message of moderation. “He presented himself as someone that cares about moderation in Turkey and cares about a moderate Islam and as someone interested in good relations with Israel and the Jews.”

In 1998, Gülen met with Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi Doron in Istanbul, a televised visit that came about at the initiative of the cultural attaché in the Israeli consulate. “This was the first time that a chief rabbi came on an official visit from Israel to Turkey, and the second visit of a chief rabbi in a Muslim country,” according to Aviv.

Israel’s consul-general to Istanbul at the time, Eli Shaked, participated in the meeting.

“The Israeli Foreign Ministry thought that a meeting with Gülen could help quell the hatred and resistance to Israel and/or Jews, and therefore they authorized it,” Aviv wrote.

More recently, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, also writing in the Times of Israel, says:

Israelis consider the Mavi Marmara a watershed point in Israeli-Turkish relations, despite gradual difficulties that had set in the relationship up to that point. Israel has recently patched things up with Turkey, more or less. But one relationship was permanently damaged and the Mavi Marmara played a major part in its unraveling. This is the relationship of Prime Minister, now President, Erdogan and Gulen. The two had been close in terms of political collaboration, even though Gulen was all the while in the United States and even though he does not represent a political party but a broad social and educational movement. When asked by a journalist about the Mavi Marmara and the Gaza flotilla, Gulen condemned the initiative, arguing for Israel’s sovereignty and urging that support for Gaza ought to be channeled through the state authority ...

He also recognizes Israel, enough to have distanced himself from Erdogan’s position on Gaza and the flotilla ... I believe Israel owes a debt of gratitude to a principled Muslim voice that recognized its sovereignty, at severe cost.

Given Fethullah Gülen's pro-Israel bona fides is it any wonder that his star seems to be rising in the West and the New York Times has given him a platform for him to profess his innocence and to critique Erdoğan as "an autocrat who is turning a failed putsch into a slow-motion coup of his own against constitutional government"? You can read Gülen's 2010 remarks on the Mavi Marmara massacre in the Wall Street Journal.

P.S. Gülen also likes Hillary Clinton.

Labels: Clintons, Islam, Israel, Turkey, United States, Wikileaks

I first joined Veterans For Peace well over a decade ago. As I explained earlier, one of the main reasons I recently gave up on VFP was because it finally became clear that the VFP national leadership was dead set against involving the group in the kind of broad-based effort that will be required for an effective peace movement in the US. On the contrary, their misguided idea of "broad-based" is to work with Lefties of all types and virtually no one else in pursuit of a statist, Left-Liberal agenda along with all the violence inherent in that. I cannot say that the tiny VFP rank-and-file affirmatively endorses this program as much as they acquiesce in it.

Fortunately, not everyone on the Left is as short-sighted as the leaders of VFP. Last spring Yes! magazine ran an interesting article entitled "Can the Left and Right Unite to End Corporate Rule? An Interview with Ralph Nader and Daniel McCarthy". It may be too little, too late but it is a hopeful sign nevertheless. Below are a two excerpts from the interview.

Ralph Nader: Well, liberalism and conservatism, in various ways, have been hijacked by corporatism.

Liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was the classic philosophy aimed at restraining arbitrary government power—then often exercised by kings and emperors. Civil liberties were the foundation of freedom of speech and due process of law, which became part of our Constitution.

Fast forward, you now have corporate liberals— like the Clintons—and you have the corporatists who call themselves conservatives throughout Congress. They're all pushing corporate welfare and bailouts for banks.

What we're trying to do here is go back to fundamental principles and un-hijack conservatism and liberalism. When we do that, we see that there's a convergence of support on a lot of major issues.

McCarthy: Yeah, the two parties and the bipartisan elite have had their own kind of convergence on a strategy for dominating the country, both in government and in big business.

Americans of all ideological stripes have been feeling a great deal of alienation, resentment, and anger. But it's very difficult to talk about the actual structure of government and of the economy and to explain how it is that people have been effectively disenfranchised and manipulated. It’s much easier on both the left and the right to focus on cultural issues, where you can have scapegoats and think that those are the central issues, and to ignore these more structural problems.

I think the left's embrace of identity politics in the 1960s and '70s was disastrous for the working class. It was very bad for the labor union movement, it was very bad for any number of economic issues. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a place for the civil rights movement. Of course there was. But identity-based politics went from being a necessary thing to being something that started to preclude some of the economic and other policy efforts that needed to be undertaken.

And similarly on the right. It's not just a matter of a cynical manipulation of the public by going for hot-button issues. There really was a sense among many ordinary people in the 1960s that something had gone culturally wrong in the country. Crime rates were going up, promiscuity was going up. There were changes that people found weird or disorienting. Whether or not they were right or wrong, they were unfamiliar and new, and therefore alarming.

This set of emotional complexes was turned into the so-called culture war, to the detriment of anything that would reform our economy, our self-government, or our foreign policy. Those sort of complex issues have been thrown by the wayside in favor of identity politics.

Labels: anti-war movement, Clintons, identity, politics, Ralph Nader, United States, Veterans for Peace

As confirmed in the DVD bonus features, The International (2009) is transparently inspired by the case of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In its heyday, the BCCI was one of the world's largest banks.

BCCI was dissolved in 1991 amidst charges of fraud, arms trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes. The bank served as a CIA conduit and according to the film's screenwriter, Eric Warren Singer, the BCCI was also a Mossad tool (for more on this subject see The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America by Peter Dale Scott (Univ. of California Pr., 2007)).

In 1992, über-Zionist Clark Clifford and his law partner Robert A. Altman were indicted by a grand jury in connection with the scandal at the behest of Zionist Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau. However, as with the fictional bank in The International, no one was ever held criminally responsible for BCCI's conduct. The charges against Clifford were dropped and Altman was acquitted.

Likewise, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich. The 1992 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations BCCI report said of him:

Marc Rich remains the most important figure in the international commodities markets, and remains a fugitive from the United States following his indictment on securities fraud. BCCI lending to Rich in the 1980's amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, Rich's commodities firms were used by BCCI in connection with BCCI's involving in U.S. guarantee programs through the Department of Agriculture. The nature and extent of Rich's relationship with BCCI requires further investigation.

Three months after he was pardoned the New York Times reported: "Israeli officials disclosed in interviews that they rallied around the campaign out of gratitude for Mr. Rich's philanthropy in Israel and because of Mr. Rich's clandestine role as a 'sa-ayon,' a Hebrew word for an unpaid supporter of intelligence operations. Mr. Rich, they said, financed sensitive missions and allowed agents to use his offices around the world as cover, when Israel was isolated diplomatically." After Rich died in 2013, he was buried in Israel.

If BCCI was such a useful tool then why was it shut down? I can think of at least two possibilities: First, BCCI had become so exposed that it was a liability, a magnet for investigations; closing it was damage control. Second, at times even elites have disagreements, BCCI may have been shut down because its principals had simply made too many powerful enemies.


Below are two outtakes from the film.

Character of Italian arms manufacturer Umberto Calvini (Luca Barbareschi at 35:10): "the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything ... this is the very essence of the banking industry, to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt."


Character of New York District Attorney "Arnie" (James Rebhorn at 59:30): "Do you have any idea of the shitstorm you've gotten me into?"

Character of Assistant District Attorney Eleanor "Ella" Whitman (Naomi Watts): "We're just trying to get to the truth."

Arnie: "I get it. But what you need to remember is that there's what people want to hear, there's what people want to believe, there's everything else and then there's the truth."

Ella: "Since when is that okay? I can't even believe you're saying this to me. The truth means responsibility, Arnie."

Arnie: "Exactly, which is why everyone dreads it."

See also: Puppets & Money

Post last revised: 12 September 2015 

Labels: banking, Clintons, debt, Israel, money, Pakistan, quotations, United States, video

Below are some excerpts from Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America by Adam Winkler (Norton, 2011).

Despite the utopian dreams of some gun control advocates, guns in America aren't going anywhere ... Nevertheless, disarmament was the motive behind the D.C. laws challenged in the Heller case. The D.C. city council hoped that its ban on handguns would trigger a nationwide movement to eliminate civilian ownership of guns. The folly of its idealism was highlighted when, a decade or so after enactment of its strict gun laws, the District came to be known as the "murder capital of America." ... In the absence of any short-term hope of disarmament, gun control extremists throw their support behind poorly designed and predictably ineffective reforms. The statistics that clearly suggest bans on handguns and assault weapons don't reduce crime—or even the number of handguns and assault weapons in circulation—don't seem to matter. [p. 10]

Few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organizations; after the Civil War, the Klan and other violent racist groups sought to reaffirm white supremacy, which required confiscating the guns blacks had obtained for the first time during the conflict. To prevent blacks from fighting back, the night riders set out to achieve complete black disarmament. In the 1960s, race was also central to a new wave of gun control laws, which were backed by liberals and even some conservatives, like Ronald Reagan. Enacted to disarm politically radical urban blacks, like the Black Panthers, these laws sparked a backlash that became the modern gun rights movement—a movement that ironically, is largely white, rural, and politically conservative. [pp.13-14]

Nelson "Pete" Shields III, one of the founders of Handgun Control Inc.—later renamed the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence—argued for eliminating all handguns. "We're going to have to take this one step at a time ... Our ultimate goal—total control of all guns—is going to take time." The "final problem," he insisted, "is to make possession of all handguns, and all handgun ammunition" for ordinary civilians "totally illegal." Sarah Brady, who serves as chair of the Brady Center, argues that "the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes," not self-defense, and supports the creation of a national gun licensing system in which only people with government approval can have a gun. Self-defense, the core reason why many people in America own guns, would not be a proper basis for government approval to be gra.[p. 35]

Used to losing battles over gun control, gun controllers latch onto any proposal popular enough to make it through the legislature—usually right after some school shooting or other tragedy. Whether or not a proposed law will actually curb gun deaths is irrelevant; gun control extremists will stand behind it. ... Consider the federal gun ban on so-called assault weapons, adopted in 1994 during the Clinton Administration. The controversy flared up a few years earlier, when Josh Sugarmann, founder of the pro-gun control Violence Policy Center, published a study entitled "Assault Weapons and Accessories in America." Sugarmann called for a ban on guns he termed assault weapons—a name derived from a German World War II-era battle rifle called the Sturmgewehr, or storm rifle. ... Machine guns have been heavily regulated in the United States since the 1930s [civilian ownership of new machine guns has been illegal since the 1986 passage of the Firearm Owners' Protection Act - VFPD], Sugarmann was referring to semiautomatic rifles that just looked like machine guns. A semiautomatic rifle can't spray fire like a machine gun. Instead, when you pull the trigger on a semiautomatic rifle, it fires only one bullet. ... Sugarmann was unusually frank about how public misperception of assault weapons would make banning them the sale of them easier. "The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semiautomatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons." [pp. 35-36]

... in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, law enforcement began confiscating guns from law-abiding people even though police protection was nowhere to be found amid the looting and theft. Often, if there's a crisis, the easy solution is to do away with the guns. [p. 40]

Not only did killing [in Washington, DC] become more common after the [1976 Washington, DC] gun ban, but guns also became a more common way to kill. [p. 42]

Concerning the legislative debate over the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, Winkler writes: Gun rights advocates managed to defeat registration and licensing by arguing that such measures would lead eventually to confiscation of all civilian guns. In the House of Representatives, The Michigan Democrat and NRA board member John Dingell warned his colleagues that the Nazis adopted mandatory registration and used the records to disarm the Jews and political dissidents. This law, too, could be the first step toward a holocaust. While others dismissed the analogy to the Nazis, it didn't help that [US Senator from Connecticut] Thomas Dodd had in fact asked the Library of Congress to provide him with a translation of the German laws of the 1930s when he was drafting his bills ... [p. 252]

Labels: civil liberties, Clintons, guns, politics, quotations, Ronald Reagan

The image at right is from 1994; it is still apt today.

Last Friday, Warren Olney spoke with guests about Haiti on his show, To the Point. If you listen to the program you can hear David Rothkopf essentially erasing the effects of foreign exploitation from Haiti's history and, typically, you can hear Robert Perito and Amy Wilentz bashing former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. If US leaders and the "experts-in-legitimation" such as Rothkopf, Perito, and Wilentz had supported Aristide instead of undermining him at virtually every step then it is quite conceivable that Haiti would have been in a much better position to deal with the recent earthquake.

Below are some excerpts from Paul Farmer's informative albeit compromised, partisan article in the April 15, 2004 edition of the London Review of Books, "Who removed Aristide?" Farmer was appointed as the United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti last fall by Bill Clinton.

In 1825, under threat of another French invasion and the restoration of slavery, Haitian officials signed the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their human ‘property’.

... ‘Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.

By the late 19th century, the United States had eclipsed France as a force in Haitian affairs. A US military occupation (1915-34) brought back corvée labour and introduced bombing from the air, while officials in Washington created the institutions that Haitians would have to live with: the army, above all, which now claims to have the country ‘in its hands’, was created by an act of the US Congress. Demobilised by Aristide in 1995, it never knew a non-Haitian enemy. It had plenty of internal enemies, however. Military-backed governments, dictatorships, chronic instability, repression, the heavy hand of Washington over all: this state of affairs continued throughout the 20th century.

I learned about Haiti’s history while working on medical projects on the country’s central plateau. When I first travelled there in 1983, the Duvalier family dictatorship had been in place for a quarter of a century. There was no dissent. The Duvaliers and their military dealt ruthlessly with any opposition, while the judiciary and the rest of the world looked the other way. Haiti was already known as the poorest country in the Western world, and those who ran it argued that force was required to police deep poverty.

By the mid-1980s, the hunger, despair and disease were beyond management. Baby Doc Duvalier, named ‘president for life’ at 19, fled in 1986. A first attempt at democratic elections, in 1987, led to massacres at polling stations. An army general declared himself in charge. In September 1988, the mayor of Port-au-Prince – a former military officer – paid a gang to set fire to a Catholic church as mass was being said. It was packed with people, 12 of whom died. At the altar was Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the nemesis of the dictatorship and the army. Aristide was a proponent of liberation theology, with its injunction that the Church proclaim ‘a preferential option for the poor’, but liberation theology had its adversaries: members of Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it less Christian than Communist. ‘US policy,’ they said, ‘must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the "liberation theology” clergy.’

Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or French, had few kind words for him. ‘He’s a cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one Haitian businessman was quoted as saying. ‘If it comes to a choice between the ultra-left and the ultra-right, I’m ready to form an alliance with the ultra-right.’ Haitians knew, however, that Aristide would win any democratic election, and on 16 December 1990, he got 67 per cent of the vote in a field of 12 candidates. No run-off was required.

The United States might not have been able to prevent Aristide’s landslide victory, but there was plenty they could do to undermine him. The most effective method, adopted by the first Bush administration, was to fund both the opposition – their poor showing at the polls was no reason, it appears, to cut off aid to them – and the military. Declassified records now make it clear that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and fund a paramilitary group called FRAPH, which rose to prominence after a military coup that ousted Aristide in September 1991. Thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands fled overseas or across the border into the Dominican Republic. For the next three years Haiti was run by military-civilian juntas as ruthless as the Duvaliers.

In October 1994, under Clinton, the US military intervened and restored Aristide to power, with a little over a year of his term left to run. Although authorised by the UN, the restoration was basically a US operation. Then, seven weeks after Aristide’s return, Republicans took control of the Congress, and influential Republicans have worked ever since to block aid to Haiti or burden it with preconditions.

The aid coming through official channels was never very substantial: the US gave Haiti, per capita, one tenth of what it distributed in Kosovo. It is true that, as former US ambassadors and the Bush administration have recently claimed, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti – but not to the elected government. A great deal of it went to the anti-Aristide opposition. A lot also went to pay for the UN occupation, and Halliburton support services. There was little effort to rebuild schools, the healthcare infrastructure, roads, ports, telecommunications or airports ...

That the US and France undermined Aristide is not a fringe opinion. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Union have called for a formal investigation into his removal. ‘Most people around the world believe that Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said.

Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and . . . should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.

Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

It’s usually easy to tell, in even the briefest conversation about Aristide, how your interlocutor feels about him. Opinion in Haiti is almost always referred to as ‘polarised’ in the US press, but this isn’t true in every sense. Elections and polls, even recent ones, show that the poor majority still support Aristide. It’s the middle classes and the traditional political elites who disagree about him, as well as people like me: non-Haitians who, for whatever reasons, concern themselves with that country’s affairs ...

It would be convenient for the traditional Haitian elites and their allies abroad if Aristide, who has been forced to preside over unimaginable penury, had been abandoned by his own people. But Gallup polls in 2002, the results of which were never disseminated, showed that, despite his faults, he is far and away Haiti’s most popular and trusted politician. ...

See also:

• "Clinton and the taming of Haiti" by José Antonio Gutiérrez D. on Anarkismo.net, November 12, 2009.
• "Securing disaster: The US repeats past mistakes in Haiti" by Peter Hallward in the The National, January 21, 2010.
• "Haiti: The Israeli Connection" on the Middle East Reality Check blog, January 16, 2010.

Labels: Clintons, Empire, Haiti, Ronald Reagan

I recently watched Capricorn One, The Family That Preys, and Boy A. I told the friend I was watching Capricorn One with that this was the kind of major Hollywood film that could only have have been made in the Woodward and Bernstein era and a few minutes later there was a reference to the Watergate duo in the film. An original 1978 movie poster sums up the film's plot: "The mission was a sham. The murders were real." The mission was a manned landing on Mars.

The Family That Preys is a recent offering by Tyler Perry, who has created and dominates a film niche that caters primarily to Black audiences. Perry's films feature predominantly Black casts and include some of the big names in Hollywood. TFTP included Alfre Woodard, Kathy Bates, and Sanaa Lathan. If you want insight into the values and dreams/illusions of much of the Black American middle-class then watch Perry's films.

Boy A is a compelling adaptation of a novel of the same name. The novel and film are British and the film provides a striking contrast to what is known as an "American ending" in cinema. A typically American ending is a happy ending with no loose ends. It tends to minimally, if at all, engage the intellect and the imagination. An American or Hollywood ending encourages passivity in the viewer as the sweet, but ultimately poisonous, syrup is spoon-fed to you. The best of the non-American endings (and American films can have such endings) provide no neat resolution and, thus, engage viewers intellectually and imaginatively.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the insidious nature of the "American ending" as well as the remarks of Dan Glickman. At a major film industry convention last month Glickman, the Motion Picture Association of America Chairman and CEO, told his audience:

... the fact that in the dark ... in the theater ... we are on ... and if only for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, nice guys finish first ... underdogs have their day…and whether it's autobots versus decepticons ... Harry versus Voldemort ... humans versus cyborgs ... or guinea pigs versus billionaires ... the good guys carry the day ... and the little guy can take on the system and win. In the global cinema, this is known as the American ending--the happy ending.

Few people know better than Dan Glickman just how heavily the deck is stacked against the underdog and in favor of the billionaires in real American life. Thus, the surfeit of vicarious victories in reel American life.

In 1998, as Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton administration, Glickman defended a $600 million federal ethanol subsidy saying: "Political theory is really the rationalization of economic interests." The chief beneficiary of the subsidy was corporate agro-monster Archer Daniels Midland. Among other things, in 1996, ADM agreed to pay a $100 million fine for illegally manipulating the price of lysine. Of course, none of this deterred Congress or Glickman and the rest of the Clinton administration from giving hundreds of millions of tax dollars to ADM.

Labels: art and literature, Black America, Clintons, Hollywood, Jews, media, politics, United States

Bear in mind that the "weapons embargo" described below is much like the "embargo" during the Spanish Civil War--one that the forces of injustice and repression deftly violated. Thus, the criminal Winters--with the help of Jimmy Hoffa, Sr.--did get the bombers to the Jewish invaders. Needless to say, there's no record of anyone receiving a presidential pardon for the 'crime' of helping Palestinians--just ask Sami al-Arian.

Here's a few excerpts from "Bush pardons man who helped Israel during wartime" by Deb Reichmann:

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a gesture of forgiveness for a decades-old offense, President George W. Bush on Tuesday granted a pardon posthumously to a man who broke the law to supply aircraft to Jews fighting in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

Charles Winters, a Miami businessman considered a hero in Israel, was listed in a batch of 19 pardons and one commutation that Bush issued before leaving for Camp David to spend the holidays. No high-profile lawbreakers were on the list. ...

Members of the Jewish community, who adorned his father's funeral with blue and white flowers symbolic of the Israeli flag, filled in details about his father's past. His obituary in The Miami Herald read, "Charles Winters, 71, aided birth of Israel."

In the summer of 1948, Winters, a Protestant from Boston who exported produce, worked with others to transfer two converted B-17 "Flying Fortresses" to Israel's defense forces. He personally flew one of the aircraft from Miami to Czechoslovakia, where that plane and a third B-17 were retrofitted for use as bombers.

"He and other volunteers from around the world defied weapons embargoes to supply the newly established Israel with critical supplies to defend itself against mounting attacks from all sides," New York Reps. Carolyn Maloney, Gary Ackerman, Jose Serrano and Brian Higgins said in a Dec. 15 letter urging Bush to pardon Charlie Winters. "Without the actions of individuals like Mr. Winters, this fledgling democracy in the Middle East almost certainly would not have survived as the surrounding nations closed in on Israel's borders."

The three B-17s were the only heavy bombers in the Israeli Air Force. It is reported that counterattacks with the bombers helped turned the war in Israel's favor. In March 1961, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir issued a letter of commendation to Winters to recognize his contributions to Israel's survival as an independent state.

Winters, a Protestant from Boston, was convicted in 1949 for violating the Neutrality Act for conspiring to export aircraft to a foreign country. He was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Two others, Herman Greenspun and Al Schwimmer, also were convicted of violating the act, but they did not serve time. President Kennedy pardoned Greenspun in 1961. President Clinton pardoned Schwimmer in 2000.

"Rules are rules, but it's interesting that my dad was the low man on the totem pole in the operation, but he's the only one who had to serve time," said Jim Winters, 44.

Reginald Brown, an attorney who worked on the Winters pardon, said Bush's action "rights a historical wrong and honors Charlie's belief that the creation of the Jewish state was a moral imperative of his time. ... Charlie Winters helped shape human history for the better."

Film director Steven Spielberg wrote a letter to Bush appealing for a pardon for Winters.

"There are probably many unsung heroes of America and of Israel, but Charlie Winters is surely one of them," wrote the director of "Schindler's List," his Oscar-winning movie about the Holocaust. "While a pardon cannot make Charlie Winters whole, and regrettably he did not live to see it, it would be a fitting tribute to his memory and a great blessing to his family if this pardon is granted." ...

Here's a report of Clinton's remarks on Greenspun:

As an adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the mid-1980s, Al Schwimmer traveled to the United States often and met with former Presidents Reagan and Bush.

He served as an intermediary between the United States and Iran in the arms-for-hostages scandal.

It never seemed to matter that he was a U.S. felon, convicted for his role in smuggling airplanes from the United States to Israel as it fought its War of Independence in 1948.

Now, a half-century after his conviction, Schwimmer has been exonerated, one of the many pardons granted by President Clinton on his last days in office.

It was a pardon he never asked for and is less than enthusiastic about.

“I appreciate it,” said the 83-year-old Schwimmer, who lives in Israel and holds dual American and Israeli citizenships. ...

Schwimmer, the founder and former CEO of Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd., was convicted in 1950 of violating the United States Neutrality Act for his role in aiding Israel. ...

A veteran of World War II originally from Connecticut, Schwimmer – known then as Adolph – joined TWA after the war as a flight engineer and was recruited through friends to help bring airplanes to the Middle East to aid the Jews in their war for independence.

He set up dummy airline companies that were supposed to be flying charter flights, and purchased airplanes from the United States, which was selling surplus planes no longer needed after the war.

In all, Schwimmer and his crew brought 30 planes to Israel, flying them through either Italy or South America and to Czechoslovakia, from where the planes were sent to the Middle East.

They also recruited men, mostly World War II veterans, to go to the Middle East and fight. ...

After the War of Independence had been won, Schwimmer came back to the United States to face the music.

“I decided I didn’t want to be a fugitive the rest of my life,” Schwimmer said.

He pleaded not guilty but was convicted in 1950 – along with his colleagues – and received a $10,000 fine.

The fine, and his court costs, were paid for by the Jewish Agency for Israel, he said.

Schwimmer returned to Israel and founded Bedek, the precursor to Israel Aircraft. After nearly 25 years at the helm of the military and commercial airplane manufacturer, Schwimmer retired.

But that did not end his life in the spotlight.

For one shekel a year, Schwimmer joined Peres’ government in the mid-1980s as a special adviser to the prime minister for technology and industry.

He would once again find himself in the midst of controversy.

On his role in the Iran/Contra affair, Schwimmer would not reminisce. He would say very little about the role he played.

“We used the connections we had, which were perhaps better than the United States had, to try to get the hostages out,” he said, but would not elaborate.

According to the 1993 Independent Counsel report on the Iran/Contra Affair, Schwimmer played a key role as an Israeli intermediary between the United States and Iran in the weapons-for-hostages plan.

The Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran, using Israel as an intermediary, in an effort to secure the release of American hostages being held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.

Some of the proceeds from the sale of weapons to Iran was diverted to the contras, who were waging war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

According to the report, Schwimmer introduced Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser, to Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian businessman who would lay the Iranian’s demands on the table.

He also helped secure El Al planes to transport the weapons from Israel to a mediating country. ...

Labels: Bush, Clintons, crime, Israel, Palestine, Ronald Reagan, United States, Zionism

Two months I posted a piece on Barack Obama and his problems with Jewish voters. A recent article in the Jewish Daily Forward, source of the graphic above, sheds light on another dimension of the Democratic presidential primary. Here are some excerpts from "Dozens of Jewish Super-Delegates May Hold Key to Democratic Race" by Jennifer Siegel (all emphasis is mine):

According to a new survey conducted by the Forward, a disproportionately large share of the Democratic party’s super-delegates are Jewish. Many of them have declared their support for Hillary Clinton, accounting for more than 15% of her current backers.

Like the general population of super-delegates, whose support remains fluid, several Jewish supporters of the New York senator said in interviews that their votes still remain up for grabs. All told, more than 70 Jewish super-delegates will make the trip to Denver this summer for the Democrats’ nominating convention. They account for nearly one-tenth of the party’s nearly 800 so-called super-delegates, the informal term for elected and party officials whose status as delegates to the convention does not depend on state primaries and caucuses.

VFPD: According to the American Jewish Year Book, Jews comprised only 1.78% of the US population in 2006 as opposed to almost or more than 10% of the Democratic Party's super-delegates.

If the Democratic presidential primary comes down to a photo finish, these Jewish insiders could play an outsized role in anointing a nominee at the party’s August convention. And it would be a history-making experience: Although Jews have long been considered a formidable voting bloc and have been overrepresented among the country’s cadre of liberal activists and thinkers, they have only more recently become common as Democratic establishment insiders, with unprecedented numbers of both Jewish elected officials and party leaders.

“Politics in America has become a Jewish profession, just like arts and the law,” said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council and the author of a book about Jews and American politics. “We now are overrepresented in all these areas.”

The relatively high number of Jews among super-delegates highlights a larger political shift that has occurred in recent decades, according to Forman. Although Jews have always been well represented on the American left, he said, historically they have tended to gravitate toward causes, such as the labor and civil rights movements, rather than active participation in party politics.

In the years since World War II, however, the number of Jewish politicians has grown significantly, with 33 Jewish members elected to Congress in 2006, up from 13 in 1950. In addition, over the past 15 years, the DNC has been led by three Jewish chairs — Americans for Peace Now head Debra DeLee; Massachusetts-based party activist Steve Grossman, and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, all now backing Clinton — while the current chairman, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, is married to a Jewish woman and has raised his children as Jews. Of the DNC’s nine national officers, three are currently Jewish.

Susan Turnbull, who became a vice chair of the DNC in 2005, told the Forward that she has begun organizing get-togethers for Jewish DNC members at the party’s national meetings in recent years, and occasionally communicates via e-mail on issues of mutual concern, as when, several years ago, she was helping to pass a DNC resolution against divestment from Israel.

To compile a list of Jewish super-delegates, the Forward included elected officials and DNC members known by the paper to be Jewish. Turnbull identified additional Jewish DNC members, and the Forward’s list was vetted by the Clinton and Obama campaigns. This list may omit Jewish super-delegates whose religious affiliation is not widely known.

Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada has an interesting editorial on Obama and the controversy over Jeremiah Wright entitled "The senator, his pastor and the Israel lobby". Here are some excerpts:

US senator Barack Obama was widely hailed for his 18 March speech calming the media furor about the sermons of his pastor for twenty years Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright's remarks, Obama said, "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

It might seem odd for Obama to mention Israel and "radical Islam" in a speech focused on US race relations, especially since Wright's most widely reported comments were about America's historic and ongoing oppression of its black citizens.

But for months, even before most Americans had heard of Wright, prominent pro-Israel activists were hounding Obama over Wright's views on Israel and ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In January, Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), demanded that Obama denounce Farrakhan as an anti-Semite. The senator duly did so, but that was not enough. "[Obama has] distanced himself from his pastor's decision to honor Farrakhan," Foxman said, but "He has not distanced himself from his pastor. I think that's the next step." Foxman labeled Wright "a black racist," adding in the same breath, "Certainly he has very strong anti-Israel views" (Larry Cohler-Esses, "ADL Chief To Obama: 'Confront Your Pastor' On Minister Farrakhan," The Jewish Week, 16 January 2008). Criticism of Israel, one suspects, is Wright's truly unforgivable crime and Foxman's vitriol has echoed through dozens of pro-Israel blogs.

Since his early political life in Chicago, Barack Obama was well-informed about the Middle East and had expressed nuanced views conveying an understanding that justice and fairness, not blinkered support for Israel, are the keys to peace and the right way to combat extremism. Yet for months he has been fighting the charge that he is less rabidly pro-Israel than other candidates -- which means now adhering to the same simplistic formulas and unconditional support for Israeli policies that have helped to escalate conflict and worsen America's standing in the Middle East. Hence Obama's assertion at his 26 February debate with Senator Hillary Clinton that he is "a stalwart friend of Israel."

But Obama stressed that his appeal to Jewish voters also stems from his desire "to rebuild what I consider to be a historic relationship between the African American community and the Jewish community."

Obama has not addressed to a national audience why that relationship might have frayed. He was much more candid when speaking to Jewish leaders in Cleveland just one day before the debate. In a little-noticed comment, reported on 25 February by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Obama tried to contextualize Wright's critical views of Israel. Wright, Obama explained, "was very active in the South Africa divestment movement and you will recall that there was a tension that arose between the African American and the Jewish communities during that period when we were dealing with apartheid in South Africa, because Israel and South Africa had a relationship at that time. And that cause -- that was a source of tension."

Obama implicitly admitted that Wright's views were rooted in opposition to Israel's deep ties to apartheid South Africa, and thus entirely reasonable even if Obama himself did "not necessarily," as he put it, share them. Israel supplied South Africa with hundreds of millions of dollars of weaponry despite an international embargo. Even the water cannons that South African forces used to attack anti-apartheid demonstrators in the townships were manufactured at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, a "socialist" settlement in northern Israel. Until the late 1980s, South Africa often relied on Israel to lobby Western governments not to impose sanctions.

... For many African Americans, it was intolerable hypocrisy that so many Jewish leaders who staunchly supported Civil Rights and the anti-apartheid movement would be tolerant of Israel's complicity.

Thus, Reverend Wright, who has sought a broader understanding of the Middle East than one that blames Islam and Arabs for all the region's problems or endorses unconditional support for Israel, stood in the mainstream of African American opinion, not on some extremist fringe. ...

See also "Barack Obama: The War in Iraq and the Jewish Vote"

Labels: Clintons, Democrats, Jews, Obama, politics, Zionism

Ralph Nader announced last weekend that he is running for president again this year and all across the country adherents of the 'moderate' wing of the single business-war party--the Democratic Party--whined, "No, not again." This blog post is dedicated to them.

Below is Steve Rosenthal's article from 2000 on the Nader-Gore-Bush contest of that year. I would provide a link but I can't find it on the web anywhere except archived here. At bottom, Ralph Nader deftly answers a critic on the 2000 election controversy in a Youtube video. To Rosenthal's list, I would add:

And, if only one Democratic Senator--Kerry, Kennedy, Wellstone, Harkin, Boxer, Clinton or one of the Florida senators, Graham or Nelson--had supported the efforts of Congressional Black Caucus members to challenge Florida's electoral votes during the Electoral College count, Gore might very well have won. At the least, Americans might have gained a better understanding of the colossal fraud perpetrated in Florida where thousands of mostly Black voters were systematically disenfranchised by being illegally removed from the voting rolls, having their ballots disqualified, or simply not being allowed to vote (and this had nothing to do with butterfly ballots).

I don't want to overstate the importance of electoral politics, though. On the contrary, because we have the best democracy money can buy (and I don't mean voting machines), I have little faith in elections to provide solutions to the problems we face (see also Rosenthals' concluding remarks). Instead, we must realize our own power and struggle primarily outside the electoral arena.



So we're still debating whether Nader cost Gore the election.

Well, if Nader hadn't been in the race, Gore probably would have picked up enough of Nader's 2.7 million votes to beat Bush.

And, if some six million registered Democrats hadn't voted for Bush, Gore would have won.

And, if Gore had inspired a few of the 50 million eligible voters who did not vote, Gore would have won.

And, if Gore and his "new" Democrat friends hadn't supported the war on drugs, the prison construction boom, and the disenfranchisement of over four million citizens, disproportionately black and poor, at least enough of them would have voted Democratic to put Gore in the White House.

And, if Democrats hadn't joined Republicans in refusing to spend money to update election machines in poorer counties, fewer ballots would have been thrown out, and Gore would have won.

And, if Democrats hadn't traditionally agreed with Republicans that immigrants, documented and undocumented, are not eligible to vote, Gore would surely have gained enough Latino and Asian votes to win the election.

And, if Democrats hadn't joined with Republicans in preventing U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico from being eligible to vote for president, Gore no doubt would have picked up enough votes to win.

And, if Democrats had refused to confirm Clarence Thomas or one of the other racist pro-Bush majority on the Supremely Racist Court, maybe the court would not have helped Bush steal the election.

And, and, and so on. You can undoubtedly add much more to this list.

So to select one factor (Nader) as THE factor that determined the winner of the election strikes me as mainly of an indication of who you want to scapegoat.

More importantly, the Gore vs Nader discussion rests on the premise that at least one of those two candidates was worth supporting. Frankly, I think that what Nader said about Gore was mostly true, and much of what the Gore supporters said about Nader was also true.

Both Gore and Nader played the ideological role of telling masses of oppressed and/or disaffected people that the capitalist economic and political system can be reformed, and both Gore and Nader diverted people away from seeing the crucial necessity to make anti-racism central in building an anti-systemic movement.

Alan Harrison asked why the U.S. doesn't have at least a right wing social democratic party. My answer is that the Democratic Party basically plays that role in U.S. politics. Like the Labor Party in Britain, the Democrats have close ties to the unions, and both parties have moved to the right and adopted what some call "neo-liberalism" during the past decade or so.

Whether the U.S. has a "soft landing" or a recession next year will be determined a little bit by the the Fed, but it will be determined mainly by the laws of capitalism. So will the continued pervasiveness of racism and future imperialist adventures and wars.

It won't matter who stole the election. The ruling class did us a favor by staging an election so corrupt and fraudulent that it must have deepened the contempt that more and more people have for the system.

By all means, let's analyze this election. It will help many to shed illusions they have had about the political institutions of U.S. capitalism.

Ralph Nader on the 2000 Election

Labels: Bush, Clintons, Democrats, politics, Ralph Nader, Supreme Court, video, voting