The Ameriya Shelter - St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Felicity Arbuthnot

 

URUKNET    February 13, 2007

 

It is sixteen years since the Ameriyah Shelter in west Baghdad was bombed, incinerating all but eight, inside. Figures for the souls lost, still vary from four hundred and five to over twelve hundred, the registration book was incinerated along with those who had sought refuge, women,children, students and on occasion, the very old. The men stayed out to make room for those whom they wished protection - and to rescue others from the ongoing carpet bombing. The Shelter was only used over night.

 

The shelter had been built to withstand a possible nuclear attack, during the eight year, western driven, Iran-Iraq war. Walls three metres thick with the roof reinforced by the near indestructable steel 'mesh' used to support four or six lane road bridges. The only vulnerable point was the ventilation shaft. Iraq had chosen a Finnish company to build shelters throughout Baghdad, selecting the company because of perceived Finnish neutrality and commercial integrity. The company, reportedly passed the plans to the US prior to the 1991 onslaught.

 

I visited the Shelter just months after the bombing. We were a group from various countries and arrived in the early, sparkling sunlight. So unscathed was the building from the outside, that we had not realised where we were, talking and laughing under a sky still painted with dawn's translucenct trails and myriad shades of orange and ochre.

 

Entering, there was a stunned silence. The smell of burning flesh still overwhelmed. I found myself tiptoeing through the blackened interior, under the melted piping, tiptoeing through the screams. There were sooted plastic flowers laid in dark corners, pathetic scraps of bloodied gauze. The only light was from the near perfect spherical entry point of the missiles, illuminating below, the great crater where they fell, the jagged remains of the centimetres thick steel mesh, hanging, a 'surgical strike' indeed, as a knife through butter - against women and children.

 

The Shelter, as during the Iran-Iraq war and in 1991, had been a safe haven in abnormal times. With electricity bombed, the huge generators allowed the children brief childhood normality: watching television, playing video games, reading, playing, homework - and the bombs could not be heard. The rows of bunk beds were a treat, with a rush to get the top bunk, a joyous eyrie of escape and escapism.

 

There were two vast floors, the top for sleeping, studying, socialising, sharing meals, the lower had showers, kitchens, a medical centre. When the bombs fell, the heat incinerated those on the top floor - and the vast water tank on the lower floor heated to bursting - boiling those showering, or chatting whilst cooking the evening meal, or those whose ailments were being treated and the medical staff.

 

The breast high 'scum' on the walls, was the flesh of those who perished. On the upper floor is the seared 'shadow' of a mother, holding her baby. Hiroshima revisited. I could bear the screams no longer and fled out and in to the sunlight. Noticing a small, blackened, brass plaque on the wall, I asked a Jordanian friend what it read. He struggled with the translation for a moment, the: 'It is like when there is a crisis and civilian people try to help ..' 'Civil Defence?' I asked : 'Yes, yes, it says Civil Defence Shelter No:24.'

 

America had, of course, claimed it was a Command Centre for Saddam Hussein's government. A lie, as ever, of enormity. Further, the U.S. had satellites watching everything (which continued through the embargo years, as now, clearly visible, blinking away like vast stars, floating, rotating.) A consistent comment over numerous interviews in the area and Baghdad, about the Shelter horror, that first vist and over subsequent years, was that for three days before, a satellite had been rotating over the district.Thus it would have recorded women and children entering it at dusk and leaving at dawn. That night there would have been a particular procession and it was the eve of the festival of Eid and with no means of cooking at home for the fast breaking, women took their food to prepare in the kitchens and their festive gifts, to wrap under the lights.

 

When the fire engines arrived, the rescuers could hear the screams, until they began to fade away - but the great metre thick steel door, with airline type handles to seal it from the inside for safety, was glowing like a furnace, then as it melted, re-sealed itself. Dante, revisited. To have poured water from gaping missile hole in the roof, would have subjected those inside to boiling steam.The fire Chief, the toughest of men, who had seen the unimaginable and directed rescues over many years, faltered as he said, of the remains they finally brought out: 'We thought we were bringing out only children and wondered why they were there alone - then we realised the (adult) bodies had (contracted) to child size with the intensity of the heat.'

 

Anwar, then eighteen and a student ran to help, with a friend with whom he was staying, nearby. When talking of that night, he too faltered and stilled, then gestured with his hands, saying: 'The peoples, the bodies, they had gone so small - like this ..' There is a haunting tale told by Umm Rheda (mother of Rheda) who left the shelter temporarily to take some preparations home. Whilst she way away, the bombs fell her children were incinerated, with Rheda, her eldest daughter. When all the emergency services experts, the army which was drafted in, had failed to open the door, she begged and screamed to try. It opened: 'Rheda opened it for me',she says.The fire Chief confirmed that Umm Rheda opened the door.

 

The Shelter, over time, became a shrine, the bereaved, visitors brought momentos, pictures of the dead, the babies, the mischevious, the young mothers, the earnest students, stared from the walls. The floor was cleaned and polished, but the skin, the shadows, the seared walls and the screams remained. Until 2003, this was a unique U.S. wickedness. Another was an early act of their invading troops : to storm it (with their boots on of course) and search this sacred, sobbing site, for weapons. And now courtesy again, of the U.S.A., all Iraq is Al Ameriyah.

 

Three days before the Shelter bombing, Dick Cheney, now Vice President and General Colin Powell (designated a 'dove' by the George W. Bush Administration) visited the US Air base at Khamis Mushat, Saudia Arabia (slogan: 'bombs are us' and 'we live so others may die.') After a pep talk to troops, they both signed two thousand pound bombs: 'To Saddam with fond regards', wrote Cheney ('A General's War', General Bernard Traynor and Michael Gordon, Little Brown, p.324.)

 

When the Shelter was bombed, frantic calls followed incase the bombs might have been involved in this massacre. Cheyney's bomb apparently fell on northern Iraq, dropped by a Major Wes Wyrich. What souls Powell's decimated, is seemingly unknown.

 

The Ameriyah Shelter was bombed on the night of 13th/14th February : the celebration of Eid, St. Valentine's Day and the anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden. When I put this to a U.S. General and remarked on the 'coincidence', he looked me in the eye and said: 'Kinda neat, eh?'

 

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m30603&hd=&size=1&l=e

George Monbiot : The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law

How long can Britain's biggest arms company run a secret service and trump the armed forces in political influence?

 

The Guardian     Tuesday February 13, 2007

 

There is a state within a state in the United Kingdom, a small but untouchable domain that appears to be subject to a different set of laws. We have heard quite a bit about it over the past two months, but hardly anyone knows just how far its writ runs. The state is BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms company. It seems, among other advantages, to be able to run its own secret service.

 

This week, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) hopes to obtain a court order against BAE. The order would allow it to discover how the arms company obtained one of its confidential documents. CAAT instructed its lawyers, Leigh Day & Co, to seek a judicial review of the government's decision to drop the corruption case against BAE, which is alleged to have paid massive bribes to members of the Saudi royal family. Leigh Day sent CAAT an email containing advice on costs and tactics. The email ended up in the hands of the arms company.

 

How? Correspondence between a plaintiff and his lawyers couldn't be more private. The last people you would show it to are the defendants in the case. But somehow the letter found its way to BAE's offices.

 

The arms company argues that it was the unwitting and unwilling recipient of the email. So why does it refuse to tell CAAT who sent it? Why, far from assisting CAAT's attempt to explain this mystery, has it threatened the group with costs for seeking to reveal BAE's source?

 

CAAT has good reason to be suspicious. In 2003, the Sunday Times revealed that BAE had carried out a "widespread spying operation" on its critics. "Bank accounts were accessed, computer files downloaded and private correspondence with members of parliament and ministers secretly copied and passed on." The paper said the arms company made use of a network run by a former consultant for the Ministry of Defence called Evelyn Le Chene. "Le Chene recruited at least half a dozen agents to infiltrate CAAT's headquarters at Finsbury Park, north London, and a number of regional offices." They provided BAE with advanced intelligence on CAAT's campaign against the sale of its Hawk aircraft to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. The arms company also obtained CAAT's membership list, its bank account details, the identity of its donors, its letters to ministers, even the contents of private diaries belonging to its staff.

 

After the story was published, CAAT asked a team of investigators to examine the messages sent from its offices. They found that one of the group's most senior members of staff, the national campaigns and events coordinator, had sent 181 emails to an unfamiliar address. Many of them contained extremely sensitive information.

 

The coordinator, Martin Hogbin, denied that he was an agent of Le Chene's. He claimed that the mysterious email address belonged to a former CAAT volunteer, and that he had been sending him this information because he might find it interesting.

 

The investigators contacted the former volunteer, who told them that he had not received any messages from Hogbin, and did not recognise the address. CAAT took the case to the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner, who found that the email address belonged to "a company with links to Evelyn Le Chene". Both Le Chene and Hogbin refused to assist the investigations. If it was true that Hogbin was working for Le Chene, it would be a tremendous coup for her and her clients. As campaigns and events coordinator, he knew more than anyone else about CAAT's plans. If BAE were to obtain and make use of such intelligence, it could anticipate and outmanoeuvre the Campaign's attempts to expose or embarrass it.

 

BAE's spying operations represent just one way in which the company looks like a parallel state. It also appears to enjoy crown immunity. Last August, this column suggested that the Saudi corruption case might be dropped, in order to protect a new order for 72 BAE jets. It was not a hard prediction to make - Saudi Arabia had made the new deal conditional on the abandonment of the case. But I could not have guessed that both the attorney general and the prime minister would make such a show of squashing the investigation. They seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate to BAE's clients that they would do whatever it took to protect the new order, even if it meant exposing themselves to allegations of collusion.

 

The prime minister has never taken such a risk on behalf of one of his departments, let alone his ministers or officials (witness how Lord Levy and Ruth Turner have been left to swing). There are just two friends for whom he will put his legacy on the line: George Bush and BAE.

 

In 2001, Blair overruled Clare Short and Gordon Brown to grant an export licence for BAE's sale of a military air-traffic control system to one of the world's poorest countries, Tanzania. The World Bank had pointed out that the contract was ridiculously expensive - Tanzania could have bought a better system elsewhere for a quarter of the price. In January the Guardian revealed that BAE Systems allegedly paid a $12m (£6.2m) "commission" to an agent who brokered the deal.

 

In 2005, Blair made a secret visit to Riyadh to expedite BAE's deal with the Saudi princes. He then sent both John Reid and Des Browne to clinch the order. Ministers in the UK have always acted as unpaid salesmen for the arms companies, but seldom has a prime minister muddied his hands this much. Blair pushed the order through by promising the Saudis that they could have the first 24 planes ahead of schedule. How? By selling them the jets already allotted to the RAF. BAE's interests, in other words, trump the requirements of our own armed forces.

 

Blair has also broken his government's pledge to publish the report by the National Audit Office on BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia. It remains the only NAO report never to have been made public. We can only guess why the prime minister needs to protect it.

 

It could be argued, with some force, that this government has always had a special relationship with big business, rather like its special relationship with George Bush (it gets beaten up and thanks him for it). But the special favours it grants BAE are deeply resented by other corporations. After the suppression of the Saudi case, F&C Asset Management, a very large institutional investor, wrote to the government to complain that its decision undermined the rule of law and the predictability of the investment climate. Hermes, Britain's biggest pension fund, said that it threatened the UK's reputation as a leading financial centre, and the chairman of Anglo-American wrote that the abandonment of the case "damaged the reputation of Britain".

 

At what point does the government conclude that this company has got out of control? That it presents a danger to national interests, to the reputation of the prime minister, to the privacy and civil liberties of its opponents? Why does it appear to be above the law? For how much longer will it be permitted to run what looks like a parallel secret service? Of all the questions we might ask of our ministers, these are the least likely to be answered.

 

monbiot.com

Malcolm X's daughter carries on his message

Muslim News      14-02-2007

 

By Brad A. Greenberg

 

NORTHRIDGE - On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X walked onto a stage in New York's Audubon Ballroom to preach his message of African-American freedom by any means necessary.

 

It was a message he had delivered hundreds of times. But within moments, three members of the Nation of Islam rushed the stage. He was shot 15 times.

 

"This was not somebody on a grassy knoll," his eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, told an audience Monday in Cal State Northridge. "This was in a room like this."

 

Shabazz spoke to about 250 students and faculty - black and white, Muslim and non-Muslim - about her father's legacy as an African-American and Muslim leader.

 

"He didn't leave this Earth knowing he would matter 42 years later," she said. "That is a conversation I have with God: That if you live right, you will be remembered."

 

Shabazz was invited by the Muslim Student Association to highlight Cal State Northridge's events for Black History Month. The event, co-sponsored by the Black Student Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, included a screening of the Malcolm X PBS documentary "Make It Plain," followed by a half-hour Q&A with Shabazz.

 

"A lot of us wonder why a Muslim organization doing an event for Black History Month," association President Zabie Mansoory said in a brief introduction. "An interesting piece of information: 40 percent of Muslims in America are African American."

 

The film spanned Malcolm's life - from teenage hustler to Nation of Islam spokesman to the movement's antagonist and finally its victim - showing how radical his message was at a time when Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching nonviolence.

 

Malcolm, whom the film said evaded service in World War II by telling the draft board he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites, told African Americans that if they weren't willing to fight for themselves, no one would be.

 

"Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet? ... Who taught you to hate yourself as God created you?" he asks in the beginning of the film.

 

After a falling out with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm underwent another transformation in 1964. He had attended hajj, the journey to Mecca that every able Muslim is instructed to do once. And he returned a Sunni Muslim, suddenly able to embrace nonblack Muslims, one of his many legacies.

 

"Malcolm X is one of my heroes," said Sarah Chaudhry, a 19-year-old Muslim of Pakistani descent. "He was one of us."

 

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_5216167

 

http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/news/news.php?article=12349

Long a Target Over Faulty Iraq Intelligence, Ex-CIA Chief Prepares to Return Fire

By Mark Mazzetti and Julie Bosman

    The New York Times    Tuesday 13 February 2007

 

    Washington - For the past two years, George J. Tenet has maintained a determined silence even as senior White House officials have laid the blame for the prewar mistakes about Saddam Hussein on him. But now Mr. Tenet, the nation's former spy chief, is preparing to return fire.

 

    Mr. Tenet was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom at a grand White House ceremony in December 2004, after stepping down as director of central intelligence, only to have Vice President Dick Cheney appear on "Meet the Press" 21 months later and pin the mistake about the Iraq intelligence squarely on him.

 

    Now, as he races to complete a memoir due out this spring, the talk in Washington has turned to how Mr. Tenet, known for fierce loyalty and political survival instincts that enabled him to weather both Democratic and Republican administrations, will use the book to juggle a host of agendas: polishing his legacy, settling scores and explaining just what he meant when he said it was a "slam dunk" that Mr. Hussein had unconventional weapons.

 

    Of course, Mr. Tenet must finish the book first, which has proved to be something of challenge. The book was supposed to hit shelves last week, but Mr. Tenet was still writing as late as last month. The book has also undergone a slow vetting process at the White House and the C.I.A., which reviewed it to ensure it did not contain classified information.

 

    Friends and former colleagues of Mr. Tenet note that he built his career by making more friends than enemies, and they say he is unlikely to use his book to pick new fights. But some of president Bush's top aides with whom Mr. Tenet clashed in the past, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are said to be targets of criticism.

 

    "George is a born politician and he wants everyone to love him, but in order to sell books he's going to have to throw somebody out of the lifeboat," said a former colleague of Mr. Tenet at the C.I.A., one of several people interviewed for this article who requested anonymity because they did not want to speak on the record until the book was published.

 

    Mr. Tenet is not expected to take on Mr. Bush, with whom he developed a close bond during early morning intelligence briefings in the Oval Office. But Mr. Tenet's friends said he had been surprised when Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice, appearing on Sunday talk shows last September, fingered him in justifying Mr. Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq.

 

    In the interview on "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney said: "George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, 'George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?' The director of the C.I.A. said, 'It's a slam dunk, Mr. President, it's a slam dunk.'"

 

    Mr. Cheney added, "That was the intelligence that was provided to us at the time, and based upon which we made a choice."

 

    Promotional materials for the book promise that Mr. Tenet will give the "real context" for that episode.

 

    One person who has read early drafts of the book said Mr. Tenet defended himself by carefully parsing the "slam dunk" comment: he said he was not telling Mr. Bush that there was rock-solid evidence that Mr. Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, only that the president could make a "slam dunk" case to the American public about these weapons programs.

 

    David L. Boren, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime friend of Mr. Tenet, said it was Mr. Tenet's friends and former C.I.A. colleagues who urged him to write a book to balance the record.

 

    Mr. Boren said that in the weeks before the Iraq war, he warned Mr. Tenet that since he was not a member of Mr. Bush's closest circle of advisers, the White House would make him the scapegoat if things went badly in Iraq.

 

    "I told him they had your name circled if anything goes wrong," recalled Mr. Boren, who is now president of the University of Oklahoma.

 

    Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, declined to discuss the book in detail. People who have read parts of the manuscript said it would span Mr. Tenet's career at the C.I.A., with a particular focus on the agency's warnings about Al Qaeda and operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

 

    One publisher who met with Mr. Tenet to discuss publishing the book said he had vowed to defend the assessments of C.I.A. analysts about Iraq.

 

    "He wanted everybody to know that he felt the portrayal was inaccurate," the publisher said. "He defended the agency. He was very emotional. This was not a mea culpa."

 

    Mr. Tenet has been applauded for sounding an early alarm about the threat from Osama bin Laden and his network. Yet his exchanges with the Sept. 11 commission left some commission staff members puzzled about his recollection of details of certain crucial decisions.

 

    "He has a lot to be proud of and a lot he will want to explain," said Philip D. Zelikow, who was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and more recently a counselor to Ms. Rice. "If he felt that he was constrained in his ability to tell the full story when he was a member of the Clinton or Bush administrations, then people like me should wait patiently and read what he has to say now before offering further judgments."

 

    According to HarperCollins's original news release for the book: "Tenet will offer a gripping narration of the run-up to the war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusual foe: Never before had a rogue nation tried so hard to convince the world that it had WMD."

 

    A string of carefully planned news media appearances to promote the book has been in place for months. HarperCollins has decided to release it on a Monday, rather than a Tuesday, when most books are released, to coincide with a scheduled Sunday evening appearance by Mr. Tenet on "60 Minutes" on CBS.

 

    The Crown Publishing Group first signed a book contract with Mr. Tenet in December 2004 for a reported $4 million, but the contract was dissolved a few months later when Mr. Tenet hedged on a delivery date.

 

    The publisher who met with Mr. Tenet said he had spoken extensively about the toll that the Iraq war had taken on his family, particularly on his son, who was "teased mercilessly" at school. "Other kids would yell, 'Your dad's a murderer!' and that kind of thing," the publisher recalled him saying.

 

    For Mr. Tenet, the downside of waiting so long to emerge with his own account is that other books by journalists and former officials have already shaped public opinion about his role in the Iraq war, and some of Mr. Tenet's friends fear that his account may be arriving too late.

 

    Other allies said that while his book would give a fresh perspective, it would still be one account among many competing interpretations of the events of the past five years.

 

    "Because of the nature of intelligence work, you can never totally set the record straight," said former Senator Bob Kerrey, a member of the Sept. 11 commission who has known Mr. Tenet since the two worked together on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The record is always going to be a little bit murky."

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021307D.shtml

Media fall for pro-Israel hate group's "Terror Free Oil"

Ali Abunimah,

Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse

 

The Electronic Intifada, 13 February 2007

 

see photos here : http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6551.shtml

 

In recent days, National Public Radio and the BBC have been among the countless media outlets to give prominent publicity to an organization calling itself "Terror Free Oil," (TFO) which claims to have established gasoline filling stations in several US cities, that do not sell oil from the Middle East.

 

Much of the coverage has read like a press release for the organization, or has treated it as a cute feature story, accepting at face value the claims made by its spokesman. The fundamentally racist nature of the claims TFO makes, and the long history of anti-Muslim statements and activities of its founder have been totally ignored.

 

The Terror-Free Oil Initiative claims on its website that it is "dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism." It states, "We educate the public by promoting those companies that acquire their crude oil supply from nations outside the Middle East and by exposing those companies that do not."

 

Yet it does not specify anywhere which countries these are more precisely than the "Middle East," nor how buying oil from them supports terrorism.

 

The initiative's founders view all the people of the Middle East and their governments as supporters of terrorism. Emphasizing this, the website includes slogans that gas station owners are encouraged to display, such as "Our oil does not come from the Middle East, Your dollars do NOT finance terrorism."

 

Another, demonstrating the indiscriminate and racially-based nature of the campaign, states "This Gas Station is part of Terror Free Oil Initiative - We do not purchase our oil from countries whose regimes or populations are hostile to the United States."

 

Non Middle East countries whose "regimes or populations" American nationalists view as hostile to the United States, such as Venezuela are not targeted by the initiative. The TFO logo features the Twin Towers and an outline of the Pentagon with the flight numbers of the aircraft that were crashed into them by hijackers on September 11, 2001.

 

Other TFO propaganda features the image of Osama Bin Laden with his face crossed out, reinforcing the message that the entire population of the Middle East should be viewed as indistinguishable from Bin Laden. In short, the Terror Free Oil Initiative is as blatantly racist as somebody opening a "Usury Free Bank" and proclaiming "We don't lend Jewish money."

 

Terror Free Oil's claims are also economic nonsense. It has been forced to admit that its suppliers do in fact buy oil originating in Middle East countries. As oil is a fungible commodity, TFO cannot do anything to reduce income to Middle East oil exporters, unless it reduces the total amount of oil consumed globally.

 

It takes only moments to discover that TFO spokesman Joe Kaufman is founder of a group called "Americans Against Hate," whose main agenda appears to be support for the Israeli extremist right. Its main product appears to be a relentless stream of statements claiming that mainstream American Muslim organizations are terrorist fronts, and labeling anyone who dares to criticise Israel a "radical Islamist" or supporter of terrorism. The whole "Terror Free Oil Initiative" and website appear to be little more than a ploy to steer people towards Americans Against Hate, whose Coral Springs, Florida mailbox serves as the corporate address for both organizations.

 

In a January 4 article on the extreme right-wing website Frontpagemag.com, Kaufman claimed that newly elected Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison "carried much radical Islamist baggage," and he refers to American Muslim groups as "America's live-in enemies." Last December, Kaufman called California Senator Barbara Boxer a "senator for terror" because she bestowed a public service award on a Muslim American community activist who had previously criticized Israeli human rights abuses. Under pressure from Kaufman's organization, Boxer, a staunch supporter of Israel, withdrew the award. ("Sen. Boxer rescinds award to Islamic activist," Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2007).

 

The "Terror Free Oil" initiative was a successful, headline-grabbing stunt by a group of unabashed racists and demogogues. Would it have succeeded in getting so much benign and uncritical attention if its hateful message had been targeted at any other population?

 

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6551.shtml

Met inquiry into Galloway recommended

David Leigh and Rob Evans

The Guardian     Wednesday February 14, 2007

Allegations that George Galloway may have broken UN sanctions by receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein have been sent to Scotland Yard by the Serious Fraud Office. The office has recommended that police open an investigation, and talks are currently taking place with the Crown Prosecution Service.

 

After deliberating for a year, the SFO has decided that the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, who has denied any impropriety, will not be investigated on separate offence of corruption.

 

To prosecute for sanctions-busting, the police would have to find evidence that Mr Galloway knew that money earned from oil sales was being diverted to pay for his political campaigning. Under the UN sanctions, oil sales were only permitted for approved humanitarian purposes.

 

Scotland Yard said yesterday: "The Metropolitan police is in discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service and is seeking its advice. We are considering a request to investigate the matter. We are not investigating at this time." A spokesman for Mr Galloway dismissed the move. "This story is so old, so hoary, so repetitive that it could be on the TV programme Life on Mars. George has been exonerated repeatedly. The SFO must have handed a blank sheet of paper to Scotland Yard. It is a waste of public servants' time."

 

The Volcker report, a 2005 US-backed investigation into abuses of the UN oil-for-food programme, accused Mr Galloway of receiving illicit payments in return for campaigning for the sanctions on Iraq to be lifted. Similar accusations were made by a congressional committee chaired by US Republican senator Norm Coleman.

 

Mr Galloway was a vocal critic of the sanctions in the 1990s through his campaign, the Mariam Appeal. Large donations came from a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat.

 

The Volcker report said Mr Zureikat was given $740,000 (£380,000) by Taurus Petroleum, an oil company which had acquired Iraqi shipments. He then distributed the cash in several ways, the report said, some of it as a kickback to the Saddam's regime.

 

He donated $340,000 to the Mariam Appeal, and another $150,000 allegedly went to a bank account controlled by Mr Galloway's then wife, Amineh Abu Zayyad. The Volcker report claimed that Iraq allocated the selling-rights to 18m barrels of oil "to support Mr Galloway's campaign against the sanctions".

 

Mr Galloway has denied that he asked for these consignments, and says that he never received financial support from Saddam's regime.

 

He says he did not know whether Mr Zureikat was passing kickbacks to Baghdad or whether the Jordanian businessman's donation to the Mariam Appeal came from oil sales made under the oil-for-food programme.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2012540,00.html

Fatah source: Abbas wants Mohammed Dahlan as deputy PM

(see also Who is Mohammad Dahlan? below)

 

By Avi Isscharoff, Haaretz Correspondent

 

Haaretz   14/02/2007

A senior figure in Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement said Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority Chairman wants party strongman Mohammed Dahlan to serve as deputy prime minister in a new unity government headed by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

 

Dahlan, an advisor to late PA chairman Yasser Arafat, is viewed as Fatah's most senior figure in the generally Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip.

 

Haniyeh said Tuesday that it was "too early to talk about the resignation of the [Hamas-run] Palestinian government" in the context of the Mecca agreement on a Palestinian unity government.

 

The prime minister was speaking as he arrived at the PLO office in the Gaza Strip, where he was meeting with representatives of other Palestinian factions.

 

Haniyeh had been slated to submit his resignation on Wednesday, according to a statement made Monday by his political adviser, Ahmed Yusuf.

 

But Palestinian sources said Haniyeh is worried that Abbas will try to prevent him from being appointed head of the unity government, due to heavy Israeli and American pressure to get the new government to recognize Israel.

 

It appears that Haniyeh is waiting for Abbas to make an official announcement assigning Haniyeh the task of forming a new government. Abbas is expected to make the announcement Thursday.

 

Meanwhile, Abbas's adviser, Nabil Amar, said that top European Union officials with whom he met recently in Brussels viewed the Mecca agreement in a positive light but requested more time to examine the new situation.

 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=825609&contrassID=1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0

 

ALSO READ....................

 

Who is Mohammad Dahlan?

Arjan El Fassed,

 

The Electronic Intifada,               20 December 2006

 

Some have called Mohammad Dahlan the Palestinian Ahmad Chalabi, because he reportedly negotiated with the US and Israel about taking control of Gaza after the August 2005 disengagement plan. In April 2002 testifying before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said he had offered control of the Gaza Strip to Dahlan. In exchange, Dahlan, who had control of the most significant military force on the Gaza Strip, would be obligated to ensure complete quiet along the border.[1] He is believed to have drawn up an early agreement at a January 1994 meeting in Rome with senior Israeli military and Shin Bet officials to contain Hamas, and was actively involved in subsequent negotiations with the Israelis.[2]

 

Today, Dahlan has become the face of one side of Fatah as violence increased between Hamas and Fatah. In the past week he has made his way back into Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas' inner circle. Last week, Hamas accused Dahlan of planning an attempted assassination of prime minister Ismail Haniya of the Hamas movement. Haniya was returning from a Middle East tour which raised badly needed funds for Palestinians under occupation, and obtained a promise from the Syrian government to release all Palestinians in its jails, when chaos ensued. The situation at the Egypt-Gaza border crossing was tense as it had not been open long enough for the thousands of people waiting on both sides to pass. The Israelis closed the border when Haniya first tried to enter as he was bringing in funds, prohibited under the US-led economic and political blockade imposed after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in January.

 

Dahlan began a tour of Palestinian towns this week to rally support for Fatah, but it was not a spectacular success. On December 17, while Dahlan toured Jenin refugee camp, gunmen fired in the air over his convoy, shouting at him until he made a hasty exit. He blamed Hamas for sparking the killing of three children in Gaza City and said that Hamas "does not have any political program, leaving the Palestinian people in the predicament they have lived through since this government took responsibility."

 

Meanwhile the United States has accelerated its arms transfers to Fatah, via Israel. Dahlan is now in command of the armed campaign against Hamas from presidential headquarters in Ramallah.

 

Dahlan was a founding member of Shabiba, the youth association of Fatah. In 1994, Dahlan headed the notorious Preventive Security Forces in Gaza. He is known to have good connections with the Egyptian leadership and the US administration, through his connections with the CIA. Dahlan built up a force of at least 20,000 men and received help from CIA officials to train them. Jibril Rajoub, another Fatah strongman, is Dahlan's sworn rival. Dahlan and Rajoub were both jailed by Israel during the first Intifada. Under Oslo they became heads of the Preventive Security Services in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. At that time they were both viewed as pragmatists, representative of a new generation of Palestinians who could live with Israel.

 

Both Dahlan and Rajoub were implicated in financial scandals and human rights violations. Dahlan worked together with Israeli authorities to crack down on opposition groups, most notably Hamas, arresting thousands of members. Dahlan was in command when his Preventive Security Forces arbitrary arrest hundreds of Palestinians. The first violent clashes between his forces and demonstrators erupted on November 18, 1994.The toll of at least fifteen dead and hundreds wounded raised troubling questions about his troops.

 

Throughout the years, Dahlan's forces were involved in acts of violence and intimidation against critics, journalists and members of opposition groups, primarily from Hamas, imprisoning them without formal charges for weeks or months at a time. A number of prisoners died under suspicious circumstances during or after interrogation by Dahlan's forces.[3]

 

In 1996, Dahlan's troops were involved in mass arbitrary arrests of opponents of Fatah. In the aftermath of the February-March suicide bombings in Israel, an estimated 2,000 people were rounded up, often arbitrarily. Most of those detained were never charged with a criminal offense or put on trial. Torture and ill-treatment by his forces occurred regularly during interrogation and led to a number of deaths.

 

In 2000, Dahlan participated in the Camp David negotiations and Israeli leaders saw him as someone they could do business with. As head of one of the main Palestinian security organisations, Mr Dahlan also negotiated with Israeli officials to try to arrange a ceasefire several times after the most recent Intifada erupted in September 2000. With the beginning of the second intifada, Dahlan claimed that he was unable to stop the activities of such militant groups as Hamas.

 

In 2001 he angered the late Palestinian president Yasir Arafat by expressing his dissatisfaction over the lack of a coherent policy during the current uprising. Dahlan resigned in June 2002 over disagreements with Arafat to reform the Palestinian Authority. He attempted to gather support for an electoral challenge to Arafat, but stopped, when the Bush administration demanded a change in PA leadership in July of the same year. Before his resignation from the PA in June 2002, Dahlan was a frequent member on negotiating teams for security issues.

 

In March and April 2002, Dahlan was one of the "Gang of Five" who lead the PA during the siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Although Arafat retained power and named Dahlan as National Security Advisor in July 2002, Dahlan resigned three months later complaining of lack of authority and organization in the Palestinian Authority. Against Arafat's wishes, Mahmoud Abbas, then serving as prime minister, appointed Dahlan as Interior Minister, but when Abbas resigned, Dahlan was left outside the newly formed cabinet.

 

After being left out of the new Palestinian Authority cabinet, Dahlan began gathering support from low-level Fatah officials and former Preventive Security Service officers in response to a perceived lack of democratic reforms among Fatah leaders.

 

In 2004, Dahlan was the driving force behind week-long unrests in Gaza following the appointment of Yasser Arafat's nephew Mousa Arafat, widely accused of corruption, as head of Gaza police forces. Some thought this appointmnt was a deliberate step to weaken Dahlan's position before the disengagement process in the Gaza Strip and sparked massive protests.

 

Dahlan returned to the political forefront and security arena this week. He appeared in a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Jericho, and meetings with the European Union's Javier Solana and the German Foreign Affairs Minister. It seems that for whatever reason, world leaders think Dahlan is the right person for them to deal with.

 

Arjan El Fassed is a cofounder of The Electronic Intifada

 

Footnotes

 

[1] Ha'aretz, Gideon Alon (30 Apr 2002)
[2] Middle East International, 520.
[3] Annual reports of Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights (PICCR); various reports from Addameer, PCHR and LAW; Palestinian Self-Rule Areas: Human Rights under the Palestinian Authority, Human Rights Watch (September 1997); Annual reports Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (1994, 1995, 1996).

 

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6275.shtml

Top US general doubts Iran proof

BBC   Wednesday, 14 February 2007

 

The most senior US military officer has said there is no proof the Iranian government has directly armed Shia groups fighting in Iraq.

 

Gen Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, appeared to contradict claims made by US officers in Iraq.

 

The US presented evidence this week it said proved the "highest levels" of Iran's government were supplying arms used by Shia militants in Iraq.

 

Gen Pace said all it proved was "things made in Iran" are being used in Iraq.

 

"We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran," Gen Pace said while visiting Australia.

 

"But I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

 

In the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Gen Pace repeated his assertions.

 

"What [the evidence] does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers."

 

more http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6360469.stm

UK protesters try to hurt Israeli flower sales

ELLIS WEINTRAUB

 

LAURA RHEINHEIMER,

 

 THE JERUSALEM POST  Feb. 13, 2007

To hurt the high-volume sales of Israeli flowers on Valentine's Day in the United Kingdom, three anti-Israel protesters chained themselves to a fence over the weekend outside the distribution site of Carmel-Agrexco in Middlesex. Police arrested them.

 

The UK-based Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign launched the protest on Saturday as part of a five-day campaign against the sale of Israeli flowers.

 

According to Abraham Daniel, director of the Flower Growers' Association in Israel, Valentine's Day should bring in NIS 11.5 million in sales. This amounts to 10 percent of the NIS 115m. Israel expects to export to England this year.

 

The boycott group hopes to diminish these sales, according to group spokesman Tom Hayes. They aim to damage Carmel-Agrexco's reputation, negatively impact profits and lobby supermarkets to not sell Israeli flowers, he said.

 

No stores have agreed to the boycott yet, Hayes told The Jerusalem Post in a telephone interview. But his group remained in contact with several stores, he added.

 

Saturday afternoon, some 90 demonstrators blocked trucks from leaving Carmel-Agrexco's Middlesex site. According to Amos Or, Agrexco-UK's general manager, the protest lasted from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. and caused a 30-minute delay.

 

"It's a small, noisy group, but the police were well prepared," he told the Post. Most of the trucks carried Coral strawberries grown by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, he added.

 

But according to Hayes, the protesters stopped operations for the whole afternoon. His said his group opposed all Israeli companies, but had specifically targeted those with farms in the Jordan Valley, believing they exploit cheap Palestinian labor. He said Palestinians could not develop their own farms in the area because of security checkpoints.

 

Hayes said his group did not distinguish between flowers grown in the Jordan Valley with those grown elsewhere in Israel.

 

"We are the Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign, so we are against all Israeli flowers," he said.

 

Hayes said his group was against Agrexco for several reasons: It is partially owned by the Israeli government, it operates farms on settlements in the Jordan Valley "at the Palestinians' expense," and it "profits from the apartheid."

 

He said he based his information on a recent visit to Israel in which he met with workers in the Jordan Valley.

 

Daniel said only 1%-2% of the flowers grown in the Jordan Valley were exported.

 

"Most of the flowers from the Jordan Valley are sold in local markets," he said.

 

Jordan Valley Regional Council head Dubi Tal said although Palestinians needed permission to enter the area, they were free to work wherever they want. There were "no complaints from outside [organizations] or the Palestinian side," he said. Palestinians were free to establish farms in the valley, he added.

 

According to B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli, only Palestinians who are prepared to work on a settlement in the Jordan Valley or those who live there may enter the area.

 

Michaeli said Palestinians from outside the Jordan Valley sometimes encountered problems accessing land they own in the region.

 

According Atzmon Meltzer, the general manager of a flower distributor called Aviv, the Jordan Valley exports only 5% of Israel's total flower exports. Israel grows most of its flowers in the Arava, around Beersheba, the North and the Jezreel Valley, he said. Aviv and a European company hope to buy Agrexco from the government, he added.

 

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359844307&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

Guantanamo comes to Morocco for film shoot by South African Gavin Hood

Gavin Hood uses 16th century Marrakesh palace as backdrop for his political film 'Rendition'.

 

Middle East Online   2007-02-13

RABAT - A 16th century Marrakesh palace has for the past three weeks been transformed into the infamous American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay to set the scene for a movie being shot there, Moroccan media reported on Tuesday.

South African director Gavin Hood is using the castle as a backdrop for his political "Rendition", starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard.

The film tells the tale of a CIA analyst in Cairo who witnesses an unorthodox interrogation of an Egyptian chemical engineer suspected of being a terrorist.

The El Badia palace has, according to a set worker quoted by Moroccan daily Aujord'hui, been completely transformed to resemble Guantanamo, even featuring Moroccans walking around in the American camp's notorious orange jumpsuits.

The Moroccan part of the shoot is scheduled to last for eight weeks, and will include a scene shot in the seaside town of Essaouira, formerly known as Mogador.

Hood will also take his cast to South Africa and the United States to shoot other scenes for the film.

 

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=19550

Video : Web of Deceit

Saddam Hussein - The Trial You'll Never See

 

Made for European television this film was never broadcast in North America.

 

Barry Lando and Michel Despratx's documentary

 

The horrifying truth is the extent to which we in the west have been complicit. Check out Lando's new book "Web of Deceit" and his blog at http://barrylando.com/

 

Video here http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17053.htm

Another Case of Injustice

Judy Andreas

 

February 11, 2007

 

I wonder how many Americans are familiar with Sami Al-Arian and the story of injustice that surrounds this man. I wonder how many Americans are aware that Mr. Al-Arian has spent the past four years in prison.

 

"What has he done?" you ask. I wish I knew the answer. Although Sami Al-Arian was found "not guilty" of the 17 charges against him, the Palestinian Professor and activist remains in jail.

 

"How could that be?" you ask. I wish I knew the answer. Sami Al-Arian was a computer science professor at the University of South Florida. In addition, he was a leading member of the Muslim Community and a prominent activist. (Oh oh. Did someone say "activist?" )

 

In February of 2003, Mr. Al-Arian was arrested. He was accused of being a leader of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He received a 50-count indictment by the "Justice" (?) Department. The indictment was against Al-Arian and seven other men. They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, giving material support to terrorists, perjury, and other offenses.

 

The trial ended in December of 2005. THE JURY FAILED TO RETURN A SINGLE GUILTY VERDICT. Al -Arian was acquitted on eight of seventeen counts against him and the jury was deadlocked on the rest.

 

Four months after the verdict, Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges. He did this in exchange for being released and deported. At his sentencing, however, the judge gave him as much prison time as possible under a plea deal - 57 months.

 

Although the release date was scheduled for April 2007, a little over two weeks ago, a judge found him in contempt. The charge was that he refused, a second time, to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank. Because of this ruling, the date of Mr. Al-Arian's release could now be extended by as much as 18 months. And so, in response, Al-Arian, who is a diabetic, began a hunger strike.

 

In an interview from Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, Sami Al-Arian stated that he is being held on contempt charges.

 

On January 22nd, he began his hunger strike. He stated the reason for the strike:

 

"I believe that freedom and human dignity are more precious than life itself. In essence, I'm taking a principled stand, that I'm willing to endure whatever it takes to win my freedom. I'm also protesting the continuous harassment campaign by the government against me because of my political beliefs. This campaign was supposed to have ended when we concluded the plea deal last year, but unfortunately it hasn't... After two-and-a-half years in pretrial detention with Guantanamo-like conditions, mostly under 23-hour lockdowns, followed by a six-month trial with eighty witnesses, including twenty-one from Israel, thousands of documents, phone interceptions, physical surveillance, websites, hearsay evidence, anything and everything they could think of, preceded by twelve years of investigations, tens of millions of dollars, some even say over $80 million spent on this investigation, with ninety-four charges against me and my co-defendants and with my defense only being four words -- 'I rest my case' -- how did the jury see it? They gave them zero convictions. Unfortunately, however, the judge stopped the deliberations, because of a distressed juror, and they ended up with some hung counts, although they were mostly ten-to-two in my favor. What happened was that the government had the power to retry me on these hung counts. My attorneys had prior commitments and would have left, which meant I probably would have to hire a new legal team and wait perhaps for another year or more for a new trial."
Sami Al-Arian was told that he sponsored a researcher in 1994 and '95 to come to the United States to conduct research and edit a magazine. He was told that he wasn't candid or forthcoming when interviewed by a journalist in November '95.

 

"I was told that I helped my brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najiar, to get out of prison when he was detained on secret evidence between '97 and 2000. My main concern with this deal was that the judge got out of hand, because association is constitutionally protected. And everyone kept saying that this was just a face-saving way for the government to end this, and no one was going to object. And, indeed, no one did....Now, they want me to testify before a grand jury in Virginia. We believe that this is either a perjury or contempt trap. Back in August of 2000, I was also subpoenaed before an immigration court, and I was asked if I believe in the freedom of Islam through violence. My answer was one word: no. But this was nonetheless one of the counts against me, which the jury acquitted me of. Now, I have been held in contempt for over a month last year, and then that grand jury expired. Then they reconvened another grand jury this year, and I have been held now in contempt since January 22nd. That's why I'm on a hunger strike."

 

There is an ongoing investigation of some of the think tanks and charities in Virginia and they want to ask Sami about them. He states that he hasn't had any relationship with any of these since '92 or '93, but he believes that this is just a pretext to hold him either in contempt or charge him with perjury.

 

" Whatever I say, they are going to tell me that am lying"

 

Sami has been told that on civil contempt charges, it is really in the hands of the judge who has the power to lift this tomorrow, if he wants to. It is not supposed to be punishment. It's supposed to be coercion. It can go for six months, renewed two more times, which brings it up to eighteen months. And after that, the government can even charge him with criminal contempt. And so, it could go on for years and years.

 

Al-Arian states "I think it's politically motivated, so this might very well be the case. "

 

On September 2001, Al-Arian had been invited to be a guest on "The O'Reilly Factor". He was given the impression that the purpose of the interview was to discuss Arab-American reactions to 9/11. After all, Sami Al-Arian was a prominent member of the Muslim community in south Florida as well as a leading Palestinian academic and activist. ( Perhaps Al-Arian was unfamiliar with the tactics of Shill O'Reilly) True to form, O'Reilly used the interview time to accuse Al-Arian of supporting terrorism and concluded by saying "If I was the C.I.A., I'd follow you wherever you went."

 

The day after the interview, the University of South Florida, where Al-Arian worked, received hundreds of threatening letters and emails. I cannot help but wonder if actual individuals wrote that barrage of letters. Could it be that so many people are fooled by O'Reilly ?

 

Thirty six hours after the interview, the University put Sami Al-Arian on paid leave. A year and a half later, he was arrested.

 

The story of Sami Al-Arian is not over. This is a story that extends far beyond the walls of the prison in Virginia. This is a story that touches more than just the lives of the family and community in which Sami Al-Arian resided. This is a story of injustice. This is a story that touches us all.

 

As you sit down to your dinner tonight, take some time to reflect on what is happening to freedom and dignity in the United States of America.

 

" I believe that freedom and human dignity are more precious than life itself. In essence, I'm taking a principled stand, that I'm willing to endure whatever it takes to win my freedom. I'm also protesting the continuous harassment campaign by the government against me because of my political beliefs." SAMI AL-ARIAN

 

www.judyandreas.com

 

- JUDE10901@AOL.COM

 

www.uruknet.info?p=30564

An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11

By SUE REID

 

Daily Mail   9th February 2007

 

The official story of what happened on 9/11 never fails to shock. Four American airliners are hijacked by Osama Bin Laden's terrorists in an attack on the heart of the Western world on September 11, 2001.

 

Two are deliberately flown into New York's famous Twin Towers, which collapse. A third rams into the United States defence headquarters at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C.

 

The last goes down in rural Pennsylvania, 150 miles north of the capital, after a tussle between the hijackers and some of the passengers onboard, whose bravery was recently portrayed in a Hollywood film, United 93.

 

Nearly 3,000 ordinary, decent Americans die in the attacks, provoking the U.S. President George W. Bush to mount a global war on terror, which leads to the invasion of Iraq, with Britain in tow.

 

Or that's how the official story goes.

 

Yet today, more than five years on, this accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie made for £1,500 on a cheap laptop by three young American men. The film is so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched what is being dubbed the first internet blockbuster.

 

The movie was shown on television to 50 million people in 12 countries on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 last autumn. More than 100,000 DVDs have been sold and another 50,000 have been given away. In Britain, 491,000 people have clicked on to Google Video to watch it on their computers.

 

Called Loose Change, the film is a blitz of statistics, photographs pinched from the web, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, all set to hip-hop music. And it is dramatically changing the way people think about 9/11.

 

A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story of an Al Qaeda attack.

 

The video claims the Bush administration was, at the very least, criminally negligent in allowing the terrorist attacks to take place. It also makes the startling claim that the U.S. government might have been directly responsible for 9/11 and is now orchestrating a cover-up.

 

Unsurprisingly, the film's allegations have been denied, even roundly condemned, by White House sources and U.S. intelligence services.

 

Only this week, the letters page of the Guardian newspaper was full of discourse about Loose Change, which was made by a trio of twentysomethings, including a failed film school student and a disillusioned ex-soldier.

 

Indeed, the movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain - including the former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher - who are questioning the official account of 9/11.

 

Mr Meacher, who last year proposed holding a screening of Loose Change at the House of Commons (he later changed his mind), has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. Some of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis."

 

These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour (a pointed reference to the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to assault the U.S. fleet in 1941, in order to force America into World War II).

 

Griffin, now nearing retirement, is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. While Loose Change is capturing the interest of internet devotees, Professor Griffin's equally contentious theories are receiving standing ovations in book clubs across the U.S.

 

Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: could the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by President Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro?

 

In other words, on a fateful September morning in 2001, did America fabricate an outrage against civilians to fool the world and provide a pretext for war on Al Qaeda and Iraq?

 

This, and other deeply disturbing questions, are now being furiously debated on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Why were no military aircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? Was the collapse of the Twin Towers caused by a careful use of explosives? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pentagon? And who made millions of dollars by accurately betting that shares in United and American Airlines, owners of the four doomed aircraft, were going to fall on 9/11 as they duly did?

 

An extremely high volume of bets on the price of shares dropping were placed on these two airline companies, and only these two. In the three days prior to the catastrophe, trade in their shares went up 1,200 per cent.

 

Initially, like most people in America, Professor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job.

 

It was only a year later, when he was writing a special chapter on American imperialism and 9/11 for his latest academic tome, that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's events based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he changed his mind.

 

And one of the most puzzling anomalies that he studied was that none of the hijacked planes was intercepted by fighter jets, even though there was plenty of time to do so and it would have been standard emergency procedure in response to a suspected terrorist attack.

 

Indeed, it is mandatory procedure in the U.S. if there is any suspicion of an air hijack. In the nine months before 9/11, the procedure had been implemented 67 times in America.

 

Readers of The New Pearl Harbour and viewers of Loose Change are reminded that it was 7.59am when American Airlines Flight 11 left Boston. Fifteen minutes later, at 8.14am, radio contact between the pilot and air traffic control stopped suddenly, providing the first indication that the plane might have been hijacked.

 

Flight 11 should have been immediately intercepted by fighter pilots sent up from the nearby McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. They could have made the journey to the World Trade Centre in three minutes.

 

But, surprisingly, F-15 fighter jets were instead ordered out of an airbase 180 miles away at Cape Cod. They appear to have flown so slowly - at 700mph, instead of their top speed of 1,850mph - that they did not arrive in time to stop the second attack, on the South Tower of the World Trade Centre. They were 11 minutes too late.

 

And this is not the only worrying question. Incredibly, the attack on the Pentagon was not prevented either. The defence headquarters was hit by the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 at 9.38am. But fighter jets from Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles from Washington, weren't scrambled to intercept it.

 

Instead, jets were ordered from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, 100 miles away. By the time they arrived, Flight 77 had already hit the Pentagon.

 

So what of the fall of the Twin Towers?

 

The official version is that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the heat from the fuel fires of the two crashed planes.

 

It is a mantra that has been repeated in White House briefings, official inquiries into 9/11, leaks by the American intelligence services and almost every TV documentary on the attack in the U.S. and Britain.

 

But, according to the allegations of Loose Change (which are endorsed by Professor Griffin), the science does not stand up. Steel does not begin to melt until it reaches around 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, but open fires of jet fuel - such as those in the Twin Towers inferno - cannot rise above 1,700 degrees.

 

Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change are convinced the Twin Towers were deliberately blown up.

 

The film shows clip after clip of the towers coming down in one fell swoop to loud and distinct booms. Were they the sound of detonators being set off?

 

And the Pentagon attack? The hotly disputed theory of the film and Professor Griffin is that a passenger plane never hit the building at all.

 

The terrorist pilot, Hani Hanjour, was so slow to learn the fundamentals at flight school that his tutors reported him to the authorities for his incompetence five times.

 

How could he have guided the huge aircraft in such a complex manoeuvre into the building? And if he did, what happened to the aircraft?

 

The Loose Change narrator says: "The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vapourised the entire plane. Indeed, from the pictures, it seems there was no discernible trace of a fully loaded Boeing 757 at the crash scene.

 

"But if the fire was hot enough to incinerate a jumbo jet, then how could investigators identify 184 out of 189 dead people found at the defence headquarters?"

 

Intriguingly, the narrator adds: "The only visible damage to the outer wall of the Pentagon is a single hole no more than 16ft in diameter. But a Boeing 757 is 155ft long, 44ft high, has a 124ft wingspan and weighs almost 100 tons.

 

"Are we supposed to believe that it disappeared into this hole without leaving any wreckage on the outside? Why is there no damage from the wings or the vertical stabiliser or the engines which would have slammed into the building?

 

"Remember how big the engines were," the film adds persuasively.

 

"If six tons of steel and titanium banged into the Pentagon at 530mph, they would bury themselves inside the building, leaving two very distinct imprints. And yet the only damage to the outer wall is this single hole."

 

And what of the Boeing's 40ft high tail? "Did it obligingly duck before entering the building?" asks Professor Griffin.

 

So if a commercial aircraft did not hit the building, what did? The wildest of all the theories in Professor Griffin's writings - echoed in Loose Change - is that the Pentagon was attacked by a military missile of some kind. Certainly, several onlookers quoted in the film claim that they saw a tiny aircraft piercing the defence HQ.

 

Another witness says it made a shrill noise, quite unlike a giant passenger plane.

 

So if it wasn't hijacked and flown by a terrorist into the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77, last heard of on its way to Ohio?

 

No one knows. But one thing is sure, asserts Professor Griffin. Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice- President, and Condoleezza Rice, at the time President Bush's national security adviser, were in the White House bunker as the drama unfolded.

 

They, and their advisers, knew a hijacked aircraft was heading towards Washington. The obvious target was the White House, not the Pentagon. Yet Cheney and Rice were never evacuated from the White House. Did someone in high places already know that they were safe and that it was the Pentagon that was going to be the target?

 

Of course, no account of 9/11 by the conspiracy lobby is complete without a minute-by-minute observation of President Bush's behaviour.

 

He was hundreds of miles away in Florida, about to read a book to primary school children when the worst terrorist attack of the modern age happened.

 

The President reportedly showed little reaction when an aide told him that the first plane had crashed into the Twin Towers. Why not?

 

He, apparently, told the school's principal: "A commercial plane has hit the World Trade Centre, but we're going ahead with the reading thing anyway."

 

Then President Bush, who is also the commander-in-chief of the American military, settled down to recite My Pet Goat to a group of seven-year-olds.

 

He was interrupted a few minutes later by a whispered message in his ear from an aide that a second aircraft had hit the Twin Towers.

 

The President's face, captured by photographers at the school, remained completely passive. He showed no sign of emotion.

 

Now it must have been obvious a terrorist maelstrom was being unleashed on his country. But three days later, back in the American capital, he was a different man. By now he was certain that Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen were to blame.

 

Surrounded by the Christian evangelist preacher Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi and an imam, the President delivered a sermon in America's national cathedral in Washington.

 

The words he uttered are recounted by both Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change.

 

President Bush announced: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks waged against us by stealth, deceit and murder and rid the world of evil."

 

The scene had been swiftly set for the West's war on terror.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=435265&in_page_id=1811

The new Jewish question

 

A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over the rights and wrongs of criticising Israel. At its centre is a British historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about Israel. His opponents say his views give succour to anti-Semites. One thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been shattered.

 

Gaby Wood

The Observer    Sunday February 11, 2007

On 3 October last year, the distinguished British-born historian Tony Judt was preparing for a public lecture when the telephone rang. He was due to give the talk, entitled 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy', at the Polish consulate in New York in less than an hour. The caterers were already there. But when he picked up the phone he was informed that his lecture had been suddenly cancelled.

 

He was also told that Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was on the phone to the Polish consul. Whether the call from the ADL was the cause of the cancellation would become the subject of heated debate in the days and months to come. Foxman labelled such accusations 'conspiratorial nonsense'; however, the Polish consul, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, later acknowledged that he had been contacted by a number of Jewish groups - including the ADL and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) - who were concerned about Judt's anti-Israel message.

 

'The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,' Kasprzyk said. It didn't take him long to see how it might look for Poland, given its history, to be fostering arguments that in certain spheres of American intellectual life have been conflated with anti-Semitism.

 

'They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to do in late Communist society,' Tony Judt says of the ADL when I speak to him from his home in New York. 'They point out how foolish it is to associate with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: Did you know that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or giving comfort to anti-Semites?'

 

In the New York Jewish press, the episode was dubbed - with a debatable degree of sarcasm - 'l'Affaire Judt'. Certainly, not everyone felt Judt was a latter-day Dreyfus. The New York Review of Books published an open letter to Abraham Foxman in Judt's defence, which was signed by 114 intellectuals, many of whom disagreed with Judt on the Middle East yet felt that his right to free speech had been indefensibly curbed. But Christopher Hitchens, reminiscing about an occasion when a talk of his own was cancelled for similar reasons, cried out: 'What a chance I missed to call attention to myself!' - not the sort of opportunity Hitchens is in the habit of passing up - 'Once again, absolutely conventional attacks on Israeli and US policy are presented as heroically original.'

 

In the past two weeks, the Judt Affair has entered an entirely new gear. In an essay written by the Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld and published by the American Jewish Committee, Judt's views - and those of other 'progressive Jews' such as the American playwright Tony Kushner and the British academic Jacqueline Rose - were expressly linked to anti-Semitism. That row was reported in the New York Times, giving it an unprecedented prominence, and since then the story has opened the floodgates of a debate that until now has been shrouded in fear. Americans have long been in the grip of a cultural taboo that is characterised by Judt as follows: 'All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject.'

 

Philip Weiss, a bold polemicist whose New York Observer blog, MondoWeiss, has been besieged by posts on the subject since he addressed it last week, has even gone so far as to declare a new movement. His account of it embraces the new forum for dissent, Independent Jewish Voices, which was launched in Britain last week by an eminent group that includes Eric Hobsbawm and Harold Pinter. In launching its manifesto, Independent Jewish Voices has taken the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an occasion to create 'a climate and a space in which Jews of different affiliations and persuasions can express their opinions about the actions of the Israeli government without being accused of disloyalty or being dismissed as self-hating.' One of its founding principles is: 'The battle against anti-Semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-Semitic.'

 

'A lot of people, like Tony Judt, have been doing brave work here in the US for a while,' Weiss tells me. 'What has happened specifically is that for once, the mainstream is paying attention.'

 

He dates the beginning of this back to last March, when an explosive article about the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy, written by two American political scientists, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, was published in the London Review of Books (having originally been turned down by the Atlantic Monthly). The response to the piece was so overwhelming - and so coloured by accusations of anti-Semitism - that the LRB decided to host a debate on the subject in New York last September. That debate was sold out; Tony Judt, one of the speakers, gave an exceptionally eloquent performance, in the course of which he said it was significant that the event had been hosted by a London publication. Public conversation on the issue had been so absent in America, he suggested, that it could only be opened up by importation.

 

'When Walt and Mearsheimer were published in London,' Philip Weiss continues, 'I said: something's changing.' Since then, the publication of former president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and the attention given to Rosenfeld's accusations in his AJC article, have proved, in Weiss's view, that 'there's no question that something has changed. One of the excitements of what's going on right now is that people who have had feelings about this and have not expressed them are popping up all over. It's personally very stirring to me that this is happening. I can't believe it.'

 

In fact, the debate is so current that the online magazine Slate has come up with a quiz entitled 'Are You A Liberal Anti-Semite?' (Sample question: 'Which state's offences against humanity bother you most? a) Sudan b) Israel c) Massachusetts'.) One of the prizes is dinner with Tony Judt.

 

Tony Judt is, in the words of a fellow historian, 'one of our most dazzling public intellectuals'. As a prominent professor at New York University and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and The Nation, he has a strong and widely heard voice. His latest book, Postwar - a magnificent, opinionated and vast history of Europe since 1945 - was voted one of the 10 best books of last year by the New York Times. A talented forger of links between thinkers from countries all over the world, Judt worked tirelessly after 1989 to bring together eastern European and American intellectuals, and he solidified these efforts by founding the Remarque Institute at NYU in 1995 to promote the study and discussion of Europe in America. A natural polemicist, he brought with him to New York an Oxbridge tradition more pugnacious than is generally characteristic of American academic life, and found himself - after years spent concentrating on European history - drawn back into an engagement with the Middle East.

 

In 2003, Judt wrote an articulately provocative piece for the New York Review of Books entitled 'Israel: The Alternative', in which he argued, among other things, that Israel was 'an anachronism' that was 'bad for the Jews' and should be converted into a binational state. The offices of the New York Review were inundated with letters as a result. Last year, Judt wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he argued that America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel wrought tremendous damage. As the page was about to go to press, the editor rang him up. 'Just one thing,' he said, 'You are Jewish, aren't you?'

 

Judt was born in London in 1948. Growing up Jewish in 1950s Britain, as he has said, he came to know a thing or two about anti-Semitism. His mother was from London and his father, who was born in Belgium, had come there as a stateless person. Judt was brought up in what he describes as 'a fairly standard left-wing Jewish secular political environment', but with close links to his Yiddish-speaking grandparents, all of whom were eastern European Jews, from Romania and Russia and Lithuania and Poland. As a teenager, he joined a left-wing Zionist organisation and became very active in the kibbutz movement, living in Israel on and off for a large part of the early 1960s.

 

'What changed for me,' he says now, 'was that in 1967 I went out as a volunteer at the time of the Six Day War; after the war was finished I volunteered for auxiliary military service and I ended up as a sort of informal translator for other volunteers up on the Golan Heights. And there for the first time I began to see another face of Israel that had been camouflaged from me by my enthusiasm for the idealism of the kibbutz movement.' He became, he recalls, quickly very detached from Israel. 'And in fact when I was a student in Paris I became involved in 1970 with Palestinians and young Israelis, trying to organise groups to talk about peace settlements and ending the conflict.'

 

Last week, as he looked over the list of signatories of the new British network, Independent Jewish Voices, Judt says he was struck by how many of them are people who have not in the past identified themselves publicly as Jewish. 'Of course they're Jewish,' he clarifies, 'but it was not part of their public identity tag. And now they feel - and I would share this sentiment - a need to say, look: if it helps you understand just how bad things have got in the Middle East, I am willing to act not as a freestanding historian but as a Jew. I don't normally like to act as though being Jewish was who I am, but it's a kind of inverse moral blackmail that forces you to go the other way.'

 

Speaking from Bloomington, Indiana, where he is a director of Indiana University's Jewish Studies Program, Alvin Rosenfeld tells me that his essay 'does seem to have struck a raw nerve'. 'I've been accused of wanting to shut down debate and stifle free speech,' he says, 'and none of that is true. I stand strongly for vigorous debate and open discussion. What in the past was said behind the hands and on the margins of society has been coming into the mainstream of discourse,' Rosenfeld adds, echoing the sentiments of those he attacks, 'Now one can deal with it. And that's one of the things I set out to do.'

 

Though Rosenfeld is careful not to say in his essay that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are identical, he does state that 'Anti-Zionism is the form that much of today's anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present-day desires to get rid of the Jewish state.' He labels the work of Judt, Rose, Kushner et al 'This Jewish war against the Jewish state.' I ask him if he would say that an increase in anti-Zionist sentiment might be caused by Israeli policy. 'I doubt it,' he replies. 'As I read these people, it strikes to the heart, not of particular policies, but the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East. I think it goes to the question of Israel's origins and essence.'

 

'Oh that's nuts,' Judt counters, 'I've never said Israel doesn't have a right to exist. I'm not actually sure that anyone in what we would call the respectable political mainstream ever has.'

 

'He says that,' says Rosenfeld, 'but it's not true. In his writings he calls not for a two-state solution but for the dissolution of the state of Israel and a one-state solution, and everyone knows that in no time at all, were such a scenario to come about, Jews would be a minority within this newly configured state, and would be at the mercy of a population that's not likely to treat them gently. Tony Judt is a kind of political fantasist, it strikes me.'

 

'The issue is not whether Israel has a right to exist,' Judt says plainly, 'Israel does exist. It exists just like Belgium or Kuwait or any other country which was invented at some point in the past and is now a fact. The question is what kind of a state Israel should be. That's all.'

 

Anti-Zionism has, like Zionism itself, a long and complicated history. 'The thing that we tend to forget,' Judt explains, 'is that until the Second World War, Zionism was a minority taste even within Jewish political organisations. The main body of European Jews was either apolitical or integrated, and voting within the existing countries they lived in. So to be anti-Zionist, at least until the late 1930s, was to be lined up with most Jews. It would make no sense to think of it as anti-Semitic.

 

'After the Second World War, for a fairly brief period - from let's say 1945 to about 1953 - the overwhelming majority of Jews who were politically thinking were Zionists, either actively or sympathetically, for the rather obvious reason that Israel was the only hope for Jewish survivors. But then many of them, like Hannah Arendt or Arthur Koestler, both of whom were Zionists at various points, took their distance, on the grounds that it was already clear to them that Israel was going to become the kind of state that as a cosmopolitan Jew they couldn't identify with.

 

'Ever since then, there has been an unbroken tradition of non-Israeli Jews who regard Israel as either unrelated to their own identity or something of which they sometimes approve, sometimes disapprove, sometimes totally dislike. This range of opinion is not new,' Judt concludes. 'The only thing that's new - and it's a product of the post-Sixties - is the insistence that it's anti-Semitic.'

 

Judt tells a story about an Israeli journalist who was in Washington in the 1960s. 'The Israeli ambassador was retiring, and the journalist asked him what he thought was his biggest achievement. The ambassador said: "I've succeeded in beginning to convince Americans that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism." There has been a progressive emergence of a conflation,' Judt explains. 'It didn't just happen naturally. And it was pushed quite actively in the Seventies and Eighties, to the point at which it became so normal in this country that it was for a while the default assumption. It's really only in the last five to eight years that it's started to be questioned.'

 

The actions of very pro-Israel Jewish organisations - for instance, making carefully placed phone calls relating to certain public speakers - are, Judt believes, now born of panic rather than confidence.

 

'They've lost control of the debate,' he says. 'For a long time all they had to deal with were people like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky, who they could dismiss as loonies of the left. Now they're having to face, for want of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and certainly not on the crazy left on most issues, saying very critical things about Israel. They're not used to that, so their initial response has been to silence people if they could, and their second response has been to ratchet up the anti-Semitic charge.' Judt thinks it's telling that the New York Times 'is willing to report these issues and let reporters quote both sides. In the past, you would have had silence.'

 

Whether this will have any effect in Washington is another matter. The political influence of AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobby, American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is as strong as it ever was, and Judt argues that since it's not worth going out on a limb on Israel from Congressmen's point of view, change has to happen at a presidential level. Hillary, he says, 'is pretty gutless on this'; she has already given two gung-ho speeches to AIPAC. It's not a topic Barack Obama has yet picked up on, Judt adds, but Obama was brave enough to oppose the Iraq war from the outset, so it's possible that he would take a courageous stance elsewhere in the Middle East. 'A presidential candidate has to feel that once he or she gets into office - they wouldn't dare open their mouths while they're running for election - they don't stand to lose very much in public opinion if they put pressure on Israel,' Judt says

 

In Postwar, Judt writes of Europe that 'After 1989, nothing - not the future, not the present and above all not the past - would ever be the same.' Is there a moment like that, I ask him, in this situation? 'I think so,' he replies. 'It's not as tidy a moment as 1989 in Europe. But I think one could say that after the Iraq war, for want of a better defining moment, the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East was broken. The shell broke and conversation - however uncomfortable, however much slandered - became possible. I'm not sure that will change things in the Middle East, but it's changed the shape of things here. Even five years ago, I don't think it would have looked the way it does now.'

 

He sounds almost optimistic.

 

'Well,' he sighs, 'I do my best.'

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,2010302,00.html