Gov't Likely to Retry Muslim Charity

By DAVID KOENIG

23 Oct 2007

DALLAS (AP) — Prosecutors will likely retry the former leaders of a Muslim charity, as well as the organization itself, after the government's biggest terror-financing case since Sept. 11 ended in a mistrial.

Not one of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was convicted Monday, and many acquittals were thrown out after three jurors took the rare step of disputing the verdict.

Juror William Neal told The Associated Press that the panel found little evidence against three of the defendants and was evenly split on charges against Shukri Abu Baker and former Holy Land chairman Ghassan Elashi, who were seen as the principal leaders of the charity.

"I thought they were not guilty across the board,"

said Neal, a 33-year-old art director from Dallas. The case

"was strung together with macaroni noodles. There was so little evidence."

Some jurors were dead-set for convictions even before they began deliberating, Neal said.

"They brought up stuff that wasn't even in the case," he said. "They brought up 9-11."

The jury heard two months of testimony on charges that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development funnelled more than $12 million in aid to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Such aid was illegal after January 1995 because President Clinton branded Hamas a terrorist group.

After 19 days of deliberations, and a bewildering final day in court Monday, jurors returned no convictions against any of the five former leaders of Holy Land, the largest Muslim charity in the country when it was shut down in December 2001.

Former Holy Land chairman Mohammed El-Mezain was acquitted on all but one charge. The judge declared a mistrial on the remaining El-Mezain charge and all counts against the other defendants and the defunct charity itself.

Prosecutor James Jacks said the government would probably try the case again.

"This is a stunning setback for the government," said a former U.S. attorney, Matthew Orwig. "There is absolutely nothing positive in that verdict today for the government."

During the trial, prosecutors introduced bank records showing Holy Land sent money to groups in Gaza and the West Bank.

• A lawyer for the Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet, who testified under a false name, said those groups were controlled by Hamas, which has carried out suicide bombings in Israel.

Prosecutors also offered thousands of pages of documents, many of them translated from Arabic, and hours of videotape that showed Holy Land leaders consorting with Hamas figures. One showed defendant Mufid Abdulqader pretending to kill an Israeli in a skit.

Jurors finally indicated that they had reached verdicts last Thursday. But their decisions were sealed until Monday because federal District Judge A. Joe Fish was out of town.

As Fish read the results, it appeared that jurors had acquitted Abdulqader on all charges, El-Mezain and Abdulrahman Odeh on most charges, and failed to reach decisions on any counts involving Baker, Elashi or Holy Land itself.

But even that partial result was precarious. When the judge polled each juror whether he or she agreed with the verdicts — normally a formality — things turned chaotic, as three jurors disavowed the vote.

Fish sent the jury back to resolve the differences, but after about an hour, they said they could not continue, and the judge declared a mistrial.

Interest in the case ran all the way to the White House. President Bush personally announced the seizure of Holy Land's assets in December 2001, calling the action

"another step in the war on terrorism."

• The mistrial followed two other high-profile terror-financing trials in Chicago and Florida that also ended without convictions on the major counts.

Abdulrahman Odeh is lifted by supporters in front of the federal court in Dallas, Texas, Monday, Oct. 22, 2007. after a mistrial was declared in the case against five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

'Israel gives US unreliable intel'

Sep 5, 2007 9:38
'Israel gives US unreliable intel'
By AP AND HERB KEINON
DALLAS

Israeli intelligence about Palestinian groups that a US-based Muslim charity aided was often unreliable, a former senior US diplomat testified at the organization's trial on terrorism-support charges.

Edward Abingdon, who served as US consul-general in Jerusalem during the 1990s, said the Israelis had an

"agenda" and provided "selective information to try to influence US thinking."

Abingdon's testimony Tuesday took dead aim at prosecutors' claims that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was knowingly funding terrorists instead of providing humanitarian aid.

Holy Land, once the United States' largest Muslim charity, and five of its leaders are charged with funneling millions in illegal aid to Hamas, which the US government considers a terrorist organization.

Prosecutors say Holy Land funded schools and hospitals it knew were run by Hamas. US agents raided Holy Land and shut it down in December 2001.

In six weeks of testimony, the prosecution's key witness was an Israeli government lawyer who was allowed to testify anonymously. He said many of the Palestinian schools and charities to which Holy Land gave money were controlled by Hamas.

Prosecutors presented bank records of transactions with a man who later became a Hamas leader, and secret surveillance including Holy Land officials at a Philadelphia meeting of Hamas supporters in 1993.

Abingdon, whose post essentially made him the US ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, testified that he was privy to daily CIA reports in Jerusalem yet was never told that terrorists controlled the groups that got money from Holy Land.

Abingdon, the first defense witness of the trial, said the US Agency for International Development gave money to some of the same groups. He added that he met many officials of the charities.

The diplomat said he had heard of Holy Land "as a Palestinian-American charity that distributed assistance to needy families in the West Bank and Gaza."

• From 1993 to 1999, Abingdon was consul-general in Jerusalem, and like others he was under orders not to have contact with Hamas.

• Abingdon said the Israelis provided intelligence to the CIA, and defense attorney Nancy Hollander asked him if he found the Israeli information reliable. "No," he answered, and she asked why not.

"I feel the Israelis have an agenda ... they provide selective information to try to influence US thinking," he said.

• Abingdon spent 30 years in the State Department. He resigned in 1999 and spent seven years at a Washington lobbying firm that represented the Palestinian Authority for as much as $750,000 a year. He said he never worked for Hamas.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Barry Jonas questioned Abingdon's objectivity, suggesting that officials in Washington considered him anti-Israeli and close personally to the late Yasser Arafat, who led the Palestinian Authority.

• Both Israeli and American diplomatic officials placed little stock in Abingdon's statement, saying that the intelligence cooperation between the two states was very tight.

The relationship between the national security establishments in Israel and the US is a close and intimate relationship, based on mutual trust, respect and cooperation, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. Both countries value highly this cooperation which is built upon mutual respect for each side's professionalism and integrity.

A US diplomatic official said that Abingdon expressed his opinion as a private citizen, and that it doesn't reflect the attitude of the US government.

"We have excellent relations with the Israelis,"

he said.

A protestor holds up a sign showing support for the Holy Land Foundation and leaders of the Muslim charity that federal officials say funneled millions of dollars to Hamas.
Photo: AP [file]

The Mother of all Pretexts

The Mother of all Pretexts

13/10/07
Uri Avnery's Column

WHEN I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations" I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.

To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.

To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.

WHY WAS the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people?

At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest.

From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a far-away and - by the standards of the time - primitive country. Here, in a savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they performed bone-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.

For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole enterprise.

But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?

The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its very existence: the land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no people living here at all. That was the justification that served as a bridge over the moral abyss.

Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80 years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people (whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an "Iron Wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.

When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he replied that the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening them in Europe, and, therefore, their morality trumped the morality of the Arabs in Palestine.

Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.

Thus started the long quest for justifications - with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world.

THE FIRST justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: we were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We shall redeem them from their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We shall teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced medicine. Everything - except employment, because we needed every job for the Jews we were bringing here, which we were transforming from ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.

When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a Marxist justification: It's not the Arabs who oppose us, but only the "effendis". The rich Arabs, the great landowners, are afraid that the glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their oppressors.

That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the Zionists bought the land from those very same "effendis" and drove out the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.

The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country. The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936. Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution of the Jews by the Europeans? But the Arab Revolt gave us a new justification: the Arabs support the Nazis. And indeed, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was photographed sitting next to Hitler. Some people "discovered" that the Mufti was the real instigator of the Holocaust. (Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the Mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis.)

World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees. That did not trouble the Zionist conscience, because everybody knew: They ran away of their own free will. Their leaders had called upon them to leave their homes, to return later with the victorious Arab armies. True, no evidence was ever found to support this absurd claim, but it has sufficed to soothe our conscience to this day.

It may be asked: why were the refugees not allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947 rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this they lost 78% of their country, they have only themselves to blame.

Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the "Free World", while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, got his weapons from the Soviet bloc. (True, in the 1948 war the Soviet arms flowed to us, but that's not important.) It was quite clear: No use talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny.

But the Soviet bloc collapsed. "The terrorist organization called PLO", as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian people.

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the "Clash of Civilizations". And so we found the mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, "Muslim" and "terrorist" are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods - the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist - Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.

When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechnyan freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris banlieus, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.

Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.

This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into one and the same pot.

THIS WORLD VIEW is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds.

The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.

This is now the line of argument of official Israel: the Palestinians elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented - and indeed, some people assert it was created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic, and so is Hizbullah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself, but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all Palestinian territories. So we cannot talk with them. We have no partner. Actually, we cannot possibly have a partner, because we belong to Western Civilization, which Islam wants to eradicate.

IN HIS book "Der Judenstaat", Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli "Prophet of the State", prophesied this development, too.

This is what he wrote in 1896: "For Europe we shall constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of culture against barbarism."

Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children, not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns and villages like Abu-Dis, a-Ram, Bil'in and Qalqilia. No, beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.

With an official position like that - who is there to talk to? What is there to talk about? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or anywhere else?

And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?

Neocons in Cheney's Office Fund al Qaeda-Tied Groups ... and No One Cares?

Neocons in Cheney's Office Fund al Qaeda-Tied Groups ... and No One Cares?
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com.
Posted March 17, 2007.

Seymour Hersh's recent report that Iran-Contra veterans working out of Dick Cheney's office are using stolen funds from Iraq to arm al Qaeda-tied groups and foment a larger Sunni-Shia war is a very big deal.

Let me see if I've got this straight.

Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -- holding positions in the Bush administration -- was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others -- and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw Reagan administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras.

In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success -- and would have worked far better if the CIA and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the Vice President's office.

Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began.

Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funnelled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

All of this was being done as part of a "sea change" in the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government -- and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back, or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror), despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officials may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shiite rift in the region.

Imagine. All this and much more (including news of U.S. military border-crossings into Iran, new preparations that would allow George W. Bush to order a massive air attack on that land with only 24-hours notice, and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of four U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to the President in the Persian Gulf) was revealed, often in remarkable detail, just over a week ago in "The Redirection," a Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker. Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai story in the Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent years, from the Abu Ghraib scandal on, he has consistently released explosive news about the plans and acts of the Bush administration.

Imagine, in addition, that Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air, Hardball with Chris Matthew, and CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually elaborated on these claims and revelations, some of which, on the face of it, seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offences, if they do indeed reach up to the Vice President or President.

Now imagine the response: Front-page headlines; editorials nationwide calling for answers, Congressional hearings, or even the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed page pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking questions, demanding answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold reporters from a recently freed media standing up in White House and Defense Department press briefings to demand more information on Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for hearings and investigations into why the people's representatives were left so totally out of this loop.

Uh ...

All I can say is: If any of this happened, I haven't been able to discover it. As far as I can tell, no one in the mainstream even blinked on the Iran-Contra angle or the possibility that a vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is being run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds and Saudi money, out of the Vice President's office. You can certainly find a few pieces on, or reports about, "The Redirection" -- all focused only on the possible build-up to a war with Iran -- and the odd wire-service mention of it; but nothing major, nothing Earth-shaking or eye-popping; not, in fact, a single obvious editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no journalistic questions publicly asked of the administration; no Congressional cries of horror; no calls anywhere for investigations or hearings on any of Hersh's revelations, not even an expression of fear somewhere that we might be seeing Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own moment.

This, it seems to me, adds up to a remarkable non-response to claims that, if true, should gravely concern Congress, the media, and the nation. Let's grant that Hersh's New Yorker pieces generally arrive unsourced and filled with anonymous officials ("a former senior intelligence official," "a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel"). Nonetheless, Hersh has long mined his sources in the Intelligence Community and the military to striking effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of sourcing makes it harder for other reporters to follow-up, though when it comes to papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times, you would think that they might have Washington sources of their own to query on Hersh's claims. And, of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed editors, Congressional representatives, and reporters at administration news briefings don't need to do any footwork at all to raise these subjects. (Consider, for instance, the White House press briefing on April 10, 2006, where a reporter did indeed ask a question based on an earlier Hersh New Yorker piece.) As far as I can tell, there haven't even been denunciations of Hersh's report or suggestions anywhere that it was inaccurate or off-base. Just the equivalent of a giant, collective shrug of the media's rather scrawny shoulders.

Since the response to Hersh's remarkable piece has been so tepid in places where it should count, let me take up just a few of the many issues his report raises.

"Meddling" in Iran

For at least a month now, our press and TV news have been full to the brim with mile-high headlines and top-of-the-news stories recounting (and, more rarely, disputing) Bush administration claims of Iranian "interference" or "meddling" in Iraq (where U.S. military spokesmen regularly refer to the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as "anti-Iraq forces"). Since Hersh published "Plan B" in the New Yorker in June 2004 in which he claimed that the Israelis were

"running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria,"

he has been on the other side of this story.

In "The Coming Wars" in January of 2005, he first reported that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had been

"conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since"

the summer of 2004. In April of 2006 in "The Iran Plans," he reported that the Bush administration was eager to put the "nuclear option" on the table in any future air assault on Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at least temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran). He also reported that American combat units were "on the ground" in Iran, marking targets for any future air attack, and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also

"working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops ëare studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,' the consultant said. One goal is to get ëeyes on the ground' ... The broader aim, the consultant said, is to ëencourage ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime."

In "The Redirection," he now claims that, in search of Iranian rollback and possible regime change,

"American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the [Iranian] border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq."

In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added:

"[W]e have been deeply involved with Azeris and Baluchis and Iranian Kurds in terror activities inside the country ... and, of course, the Israelis have been involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan ... Iran has been having sort of a series of backdoor fights, the Iranian government, because ... they have a significant minority population. Not everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Baluchis and Kurds, you're really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country."

In addition, he reported that

"a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours," and that its "new assignment"

was to identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime-change targets, but

"targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq."

Were there nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of this would still have been significant news -- if we didn't happen to live on a one-way imperial planet in which Iranian "interference" in (American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret U.S. operations in, and military plans to devastate, Iran are your basic ho-hum issue. Our mainstream news purveyors don't generally consider the issue of our "interference" in Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do our pundits consider it a topic worthy of speculation or consideration; nor, in a Congress where leading Democrats have regularly outflanked the Bush administration in hawkish positions on Iran, is this likely to be much of an issue.

You can read abroad about rumoured American operations out of Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at unsettling Iranian minorities like the Baluchis and about possible operations to create strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near the Iraqi border -- the Iranians seem to blame the British, whose troops are in southern Iraq, for some of this (a charge vociferously denied by the British embassy in Tehran) -- but it's not a topic of great interest here.

In recent months, in fact, several bombs have gone off in minority regions of Iran. These explosions have been reported here, but you would be hard-pressed to find out what the Iranians had to say about them, and the possibility that any of these might prove part of a U.S. (or Anglo-American) covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian fundamentalist regime basically doesn't concern the news mind here, even though past history says it should. After all, many of our present Middle Eastern problems can be indirectly traced back to the Anglo-American ur-moment in the Middle East, the successful CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry) and install the young Shah in power.

After all, in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA (with the eager connivance of the Pakistanis and the Saudis) helped organize, arm, and fund the Islamic extremists who would someday turn on us for terror campaigns on a major scale. As Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost Wars, for instance, "Under ISI [Pakistani intelligence] direction, the mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. [CIA Director William] Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."

Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Iraq National Accord, an organization run by the CIA's Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad Allawi, evidently planted, under the Agency's direction, car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime. The New York Times reported this on its front page in June 2004 (to no effect whatsoever), when Allawi was the Prime Minister of American-occupied Iraq.

Who knows where the funding, training, and equipment for the bombings in Iran are coming from -- but, at a moment when charges that the Iranians are sending into Iraq advanced IEDs, or the means to produce them, are the rage, it seems a germane subject.

In this country, it's a no-brainer that the Iranians have no right whatsoever to put their people, overtly or covertly, into neighboring Iraq, a country which, back in the 1980s, invaded Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it, resulting in perhaps a million casualties; but it's just normal behavior for the Pentagon to have traveled halfway across the planet to dominate the Iraqi military, garrison Iraq with a string of vast permanent bases, build the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and send special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA teams as well) across the Iranian border, or to insert them in Iran to do "reconnaissance" or even to foment unrest among its minorities. This is the definition of an imperial worldview.

Sleepless Nights

Let's leave Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other matters highlighted in "The Redirection" that certainly should have raised the odd red flag and pushed the odd alarm button here at home far more than his Iranian news (which did at least get some attention):

1. Iran-Contra Redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that, under the leadership of Elliot Abrams (who in the Iran-Contra period pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress and was later pardoned), such a meeting was held? Does no one want to confirm that this happened? Does no one want to know who attended? Iran-Contra alumni in the Bush administration at one time or another included former Reagan National Security Advisor John Poindexter, Otto Reich, John Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his post as Director of National Intelligence in order to avoid the twenty-first century version of Iran-Contra -- "No way. I'm not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. [National Security Council] running operations off the books, with no [presidential] finding."), Roger Noriega, and Robert Gates. Did the Vice President or President sit in? Was either of them informed about the "lessons drawn"? Were the Vice President's right-hand men, I. Lewis Libby and/or David Addington in any way involved? Who knows? In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration drew together the seediest collection of freelance arms dealers, intelligence agents, allies, and -- in the case of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian regime -- sworn enemies in what can only be called "amateur hour" at the White House. Now, it looks like the Bush administration is heading down a similar path and, given its previous "amateur hour" reputation in foreign policy, imagine what this is likely to mean.

2. Jihadis as Proxies: Using jihadis as American proxies in a struggle to rollback Iran -- with the help of the Saudis -- should have rung a few bells somewhere in American memory as another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s -- on the theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend -- the fundamentalist Catholic CIA Director William Casey came to believe that Islamic fundamentalists could prove tight and trustworthy allies in rolling back the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the Saudis royals, who themselves represented an extremist form of Sunni Islam, regularly favored and funded the most extreme of the mujahedeen ready to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the results? Today, according to Hersh, the Saudis are reassuring key figures in the administration that this time they have the jihadis to whom funds are flowing under control. No problem. If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

3. Congress in the Dark: Hersh claims that, with the help of Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan (buddy to the Bushes and Dick Cheney's close comrade-in-arms), the people running the black-ops programs out of Cheney's office have managed to run circles around any possibility of Congressional oversight, leaving the institution completely "in the dark," which is undoubtedly exactly where Congress wanted to be for the last six years. Is this still true? The non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly encouraging.

To summarize, if Hersh is to be believed -- and as a major journalistic figure for the last near-40 years he certainly deserves to be taken seriously -- the Bush administration seems to be repeating the worst mistakes of the Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in our history. Given what we already know about the Bush administration, Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this means now as well as down the line. For Congress, the media, and Americans in general, this report should have been not just a wake-up call, but a shout for an all-nighter with NoDoz.

In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a perilous situation -- say, clinging to the ledge of a tall building -- would be screaming for help, while passersby were so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the opposite situation. A journalist essentially writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently cares -- not yet anyway -- to pay the slightest attention. It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn. Think Kitty Genovese on a giant scale.

Why Did Israel Attack Syria?

Why Did Israel Attack Syria?

September 28, 2007

by Jonathan Cook

Israel's air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon. Although little more than rumors have been offered about what took place, one strategic forecasting group, Stratfor, still concluded: "Something important happened."

From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the "something" occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?

It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel's month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney's recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.

The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hezbollah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.

But faced with constant rocket fire from Hezbollah last summer, Israel's public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.

The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group's program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East – the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel – was at risk of being shunted aside.

Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq – presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.

Israel's leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hezbollah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear program – whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim – had to be stopped at all costs.

• While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumours that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day.
• Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.

While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel's neighbours watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran's network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hezbollah and Damascus.

• For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.

So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as antitank weapons of the kind Hezbollah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel's planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.

As the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran's uncomfortable embrace:

"Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."

• Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behaviour of an enemy, called the Syrian military buildup proof of Damascus' appetite for war.
  
• Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation." The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer's war along the northern border.

It was at this point – with tensions simmeringly hot – that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.

Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country's military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.

• One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

• Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hezbollah a year earlier, when the Shi'ite militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more.
  
• Hezbollah's act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel's response was "disproportionate." Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?

The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one – including the Israeli leadership – believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel's attack. Olmert's fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.

So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?

The stories emerging from the less-gagged American media suggest two scenarios.

• The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hezbollah;
  
• the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.
• (Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)

How credible are these two scenarios?

The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea's behalf.

• But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a ready-made pretext for still harsher treatment?
  
• Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US?
  
• And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?

The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hezbollah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel's job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.

Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad's speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries' alliance.

• Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009.
  
• Each scenario suggests a Shi'ite "axis of evil," coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel's destruction.
  
• And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran – launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv – to save Israel.

That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon masters of spin like John Bolton is warning enough – as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli "intelligence," the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.

It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America's invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.

Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed more than a decade earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.

There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon ideologues like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumours that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.

Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its fellow Shi'ite in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.

So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?

The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons "creating their own reality," as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hezbollah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves – such as arming – that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel and world order.

Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hezbollah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.

But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria's culpability and by provoking it to respond.

Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shi'ite arc of extremism" and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.

Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms – which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights – would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.

Were either of Damascus' initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality – one in which the forces of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.