For Arrest of Kissinger at Bilderberg

From: lefana@shaw.ca [mailto:lefana@shaw.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 9:15 AM
Subject: For Arrest of Kissinger at Bilderberg





Prominent Swiss Politician Calls For Arrest of Kissinger at Bilderberg






http://hamsayeh.net/society/790-prominent-swiss-politician-calls-for-arrest-of-kissinger-at-bilderberg.html



Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com June 6, 2011

A prominent member of Switzerland’s largest political party has called upon federal authorities to arrest Henry Kissinger as a war criminal if he attends the 2011 Bilderberg conference of global power brokers which is set to begin on Thursday at the Hotel Suvretta House in St. Moritz.

Swiss People’s Party representative Dominique Baettig wrote a letter to the General Prosecutor of the Swiss Federation in which he asked, “In the name of Cantonal Sovereignty and independence, but especially of the Justice’s independence from executive power – may it be Federal or Cantonal – I ask you to check abroad for Arrest Warrants delivered by various Courts, Judges and also for all valid criminal complaints against the persons who were, amongst others, cited as mere examples in my (enclosed) letters to Mrs. Simonetta Sommaruga, Federal Counselor and Mrs. Barbara Janom Steiner, Cantonal Counselor and of course, to arrest them before diligent extraditions.”

Baettig is no fringe figure, he’s the equivalent of a US Congressman, representing the Canton of Jura on the National Council of Switzerland. His party, the Swiss People’s Party, is the largest party in the Federal Assembly, with 58 members of the National Council and 6 of the Council of States.

Baettig’s letter also calls for the apprehension of George W. Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, but neither are likely to be attending the conference. However, Kissinger is a regular Bilderberg attendee and is almost certain to be present in St. Moritz.

Kissinger, National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State for President Nixon and President Ford, has been accused of being complicit in a number of war crimes in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor. Numerous activists have attempted to arrest him over the years under the Geneva Conventions Act.

In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, author Christopher Hitchens documents how Kissinger personally approved bombing campaigns that resulted in thousands of civilian casualties as well as signing off on the use of the deadly chemical Agent Orange. United States General Telford Taylor, the former chief prosecuting officer at the Nuremberg trials, stated that Kissinger committed war crimes by giving the nod to bomb Vietnamese villages during the war.

Although Bilderberg’s primary confab will take place in St. Moritz, other associated meetings will also occur in Zurich and Geneva. Unlike the small group of independent journalists who will travel to the location to do the job that the castrated establishment media refuses to undertake, Bilderberg elitists can rely on private jets and helicopters to transport them between the different locations.

In recent years, Bilderberg luminaries have decried the increasing number of demonstrators and independent journalists who descend on the scene of each annual meeting, which is the primary reason why members will be hopping around to different locations within the small country of Switzerland to escape the glare of reporters and the unwanted attention of protesters.

Claims by apologists that Bilderberg is merely a talking shop that has no influence on setting policy have been vehemently debunked in recent years. Bilderberg chairman Étienne Davignon last year bragged about how the Euro single currency was a brainchild of the Bilderberg Group.

“A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group- an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr. Davignon- could also ‘improve understanding’ on future action, in the same way it helped create the Euro in the 1990s, he said,” reported the EU Observer in March 2009.

The foundations for the EU and ultimately the Euro single currency were laid by the secretive Bilderberg Group in the mid-1950’s. Bilderberg’s own leaked documents prove that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency was formulated by Bilderberg in 1955.

As we first reported in 2003, a BBC investigative team were allowed to access Bilderberg files which confirmed that the EU and the Euro were the brainchild of Bilderberg.

During an interview with a Belgian radio station last year, former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes admitted that those who attend the conference are mandated to implement decisions that are formulated during the confab within their respective spheres of influence.



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Israel Cohen, taken from "A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century", and entered into the US Congressional Record, 1957, page 8559:

"We must realize that our Party's most powerful weapon is racial tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by the whites, we can mold them to the program of the communist party. In America, we will aim for subtle victory. While inflaming the Negro minority against the whites, we will instill into the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the Negroes. We will aid the Negroes to rise in prominence in every walk of life, in the professions and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige, the Negroe will be able to intermarry with the whites, and begin a process which will deliver America into our hands."




http://theforbiddentruth.net/12711-prominent-swiss-politician-calls-arrest-kissinger-bilderberg.html

U.S. Institute of Peace-STOP THE WARS TO SAVE AMERICA

August 31, 2011

U.S. Institute of Peace
2301 Constitution Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20037

Dear Friends of the U.S. Institute of Peace:

As long as the USA continues to become involved in foreign wars, its economy will continue to disintegrate to the point of collapse, following the footsteps of every major power in history.

The US financial crisis does not stem, as Republicans claim, from health care, social security, educational programs and other necessities of life. This crisis stems from the US involvement into two useless and needless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to MSNBC the US is spending $900 billion dollars a week on the war in Afghanistan alone.

Since the USA is run by big corporations headed by the weapons and the military industries, and since weapons and wars have become a lucrative business, this trend of continued draining of the US economy is bound to continue. The US government, for all practical purposes, has become the "puppet" of such corporations, with no virtual power to reverse this trend.

Let us keep in mind the fear expressed by President Eisenhower in his last speech to the US Congress expressing his fear that the military industry would go out of control. Also, let us keep in mind what this US General and President said emphatically to the same US Congress: "Remember that for every dollar you spend on weapons and wars is a theft from the hungry an the poor."

Unless the US Institute of Peace will do its best to get out all Americans from Afghanistan and Iraq and to make it clear with the US government that waging of wars means self stabbing and suicide, our financial problems will keep deteriorating to the point of our nation's collapse.

Dr. Charles Mercieca, Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University
President, International Association of Educators for World Peace

==============================================================================

----- Original Message -----
From: U.S. Institute of Peace
To: mercieca@knology.net
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 8:42 AM
Subject: Event - Asst. Sec. Brimmer on U.S. Priorities at the U.N.



To view this email as a web page, go here.




Sustaining America's Global Leadership: U.S. Priorities at the United Nations

September 7, 2011, 2:00pm-3:00pm

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Location:
U.S. Institute of Peace
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Washington, DC 20037 | Directions

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The United States faces increasing global challenges while at the same time grappling with pressure to decrease the foreign affairs budget. This has reinvigorated debates about how to promote U.S. global interests most effectively and efficiently. How central should formal multilateral diplomacy be to U.S. foreign policy? How much should the United States invest in the United Nations and other international organizations?

The U.S. Institute of Peace is pleased to host Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer to discuss the multilateral side of U.S. foreign policy and the Obama administration's efforts at the U.N., including the administration's priorities for the upcoming General Assembly session. Dr. Brimmer will address important challenges - from integrating the growing influence of emerging powers, to ensuring the U.N. is strong enough to bear the burden placed on it - and is expected to make the case that working with international organizations pays dividends for the United States and benefits the American people, by providing a means for addressing shared global challenges.










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KALI YUGA REPORT 110830

PROVIDING INFORMATION NOT FOUND IN THE ZIONIST CONTROLLED MEDIA,
MONITORING THE AGE OF DARKNESS, IGNORANCE, GREED AND STUPIDITY,
& THE ZIONIST WAR FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE.
SETTING STRAIGHT THE RECORDS OF HISTORY




KALI YUGA REPORT 110830


1 - The "Liberation" of Libya: NATO Special Forces and Al Qaeda Join Hands - Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
2 - Officially Declared Nuclear Nightmare - Dr. Mark Sircus
3 - Making Wars Is Biggest Industry In U.S. - William Rivers Pitt
4 - Exposing Israel’s Most Dangerous BioWeapon Secrets - SALEH EL-NAAMI
5 - How Corporate and Political Forces Have Almost Neutralized All Avenues of Resistance in US Culture - Chris Hedges
6 - Honduras : Aguán Massacres Continue to Support Production of Biodiesel - Annie Bird
7 - Must-Read Krugman : GOP is Now 'Aggressively Anti-Science, Indeed Anti-Knowledge,' Which Should 'Terrify Us' - Joe Romm
8 - How Israel Takes Its Revenge on Children Suspected of Throwing Stones - Catrina Stewart
9 - Gunmen kill Baghdad University professor - Laith Jawad


10 - The reason why Egyptians hate Israel - Dr. Ashraf Ezzat
11 - Egypt Prevented Large-Scale Israeli Operation Against Gaza - Dr.Ashraf Ezzat
12 - On Al-Quds Day, marches in Middle East call for liberating all of Palestine
13 - Exploiting Norway’s Terror - Maidhc Ó Cathail
14 - Indicted war criminal on payroll of UK Israel lobby - David Cronin
15 - Swedish chain kicks out drink machines made in Israeli settlements - Stephanie Westbrook
16 - Rothschild Reuters and Jerusalem Post pushing lies to justify killing of Palestinians - Madison Ruppert
17 - It’s Still Occupied Territory - Philip Giraldi
18 - Campaign to end US aid to Israel expands to San Francisco cable cars - HENRY NORR


19 - The greatest elected body that money can buy (UPDATED) - Stephen M. Walt
20 - British teachers undergo training at Yad Vashem - JEREMY SHARON,
21 - QUOTES FOR A PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY - ADDITION 110830
22 - Rick Perry Abuses His Office for Israel - Philip Giraldi
23 - ARTICLE LINKS INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE
24 - ELLEN BROWN : S&P and the Bilderbergers : All Part of the Plan ?
25 - A soldier is a human being, isn’t he ? - Aya Kaniuk and Tamar Goldschmidt
26 - Elderly farmer murdered in Israeli airstrike
27 - Silwan committee unveils Israeli scheme to take over Al-Bustan zone in Jerusalem


28 - Western press and addressing grievances in Gaza - Mohammed Suliman
29 - Don’t look away from Kashmir’s mass graves and people’s struggle - Ali Abunimah
30 - GAZA : ISRAELI Soldiers shoot 75 year old woman along with ten goats
31 - Venezuela Says U.S. Lacks “Moral Authority” to Judge Antiterrorism Efforts - Franklin Rosales
32 - Australia 60 Minutes - Fukushima Radiating Everyone on Earth & OTHER VIDEOS
33 - Where’s Hoffman ? + Death threat e-mailed to Hoffman
34 - IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century
35 - 'Extermination' Camp Propaganda Myths - Mark Weber
36 - Earth Changes Bulletin Weekly Update As Of August 29, 2011 - MICHAEL WELLS MANDEVILLE
37 - OTHER QUOTES




All articles are reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and are for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. The material presented underneath does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor. Then : everybody should do research of his own and check for deception or some 'agenda'. As always it is : 'Caveat Lector'!


Thanks to : Debbie Menon (http://mycatbirdseat.com/,http://www.intifada-palestine.com), Alex James, Vatic Project (http://vaticproject.blogspot.com) , "Information Clearing House'', Antiwar.com , DAILY CENSORED, VETERANS TODAY, REDRESS INFORMATION & ANALYSIS, PAK ALERT PRESS, INTIFADA PALESTINA, Global Research, Electronic Intifada, Sabbah Report, RADIO ISLAM, ET AL.




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THE HISTORIAN WEBSTER TARPLEY THIS EVENING ON THE IRANIAN CHANNEL PRESS TV : ''BELHAJ/HASSADI/HASSIDI, A MAN WITH MANY ALIASSES, WHO JUST BECAME MILITARY COMMANDER OF TRIPOLIS, WAS A CLOSE FRIEND OF OSAMA BIN LADEN, HE IS A MASS MURDERER AND IMPLICATED IN THE ASSASSINATION OF GEN.YOUNIS, A FEW WEEKS AGO ............''




1 - The "Liberation" of Libya : NATO Special Forces and Al Qaeda Join Hands -
"Former'' Terrorists Join the "Pro-democracy" Bandwagon


By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26255

Global Research, August 28, 2011


Extensive war crimes have been committed. NATO has blood on its hands. The heads of government and heads of state of NATO member countries are responsible for extensive war crimes


The "pro-democracy" rebels are led by Al Qaeda paramilitary brigades under the supervision of NATO Special Forces. The "Liberation" of Tripoli was carried out by "former" members of the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

The jihadists and NATO work hand in glove. These "former" Al Qaeda affiliated brigades constitute the backbone of the "pro-democracy" rebellion.

NATO special forces with "boots and the ground" pass unnoticed. Their identity is not known or revealed. They blend into the Libyan rebellion landscape of machine guns and pickup trucks. They are not highlighted in the photo ops.

Special forces composed of US Navy SEALS, British Special SAS Forces and French legionnaires, disguised in civilian rebel garb, are reported to be behind major operations directed against key government buildings including Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in central Tripoli.

Reports confirm that British SAS were on the ground in Eastern Libya prior to the onset of the air campaign. Special Forces are in close coordination with NATO air operations. "Highly-trained units, known as ‘Smash’ teams for their prowess and destructive ability, have carried out secret reconnaissance missions to provide up-to-date information on the Libyan armed forces." (SAS 'Smash' squads on the ground in Libya to mark targets for coalition jets, Daily Mirror, March 21, 2011)

NATO special forces and the CIA sponsored Islamic brigades under the command of "former" jihadists constitute the backbone of combat capabilities on the ground, supported by the air campaign, which now includes Apache helicopter raids.

The remainder of the rebel forces include untrained trigger happy gunmen (including teenagers) (see photo below), which serve the function of creating an atmosphere of panic and intimidation.

What we are dealing with is a carefully planned military intelligence operation to invade and occupy a sovereign country.


-------
Killing the Truth. The Role of the Western Media

The Western media constitutes a major instrument of war. NATO war crimes are obfuscated. Popular resistance to the NATO led invasion is not mentioned.

A narrative of "liberation" and "opposition pro-democracy rebel forces" is instilled in the inner consciousness of millions of people. Its called the "NATO Consensus".

"The NATO Consensus" which upholds the "humanitarian mandate" of the Atlantic alliance cannot be challenged. The bombings of civilian areas as well as the role of a terrorist militia are either trivialised or not mentioned.

Killing the truth is an integral part of the military agenda.

Realities are turned upside down.

The lie becomes the truth.

Its an inquisitorial doctrine. The NATO consensus dwarfs the Spanish Inquisition by a long shot.

The criminal invasion and occupation of Libya is not mentioned. The lives of independent journalists in Tripoli who report on what is actually happening are threatened. The catch words are "Liberation" and "Revolution" with NATO's mandate limited to R2P ("Responsibility to Protect").

Liberation or Invasion? By camouflaging the nature of the military operation, not to mention NATO atrocities, the Western media has contributed to providing the Transitional Council with a semblance of legitimacy and international recognition. The latter would not have been forthcoming without the support of the Western media.

NATO special forces and intelligence operatives on the ground are in permanent liaison with military planners involved in coordinating NATO strike sorties and bombing raids on the Libyan capital.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Towards a World War III Scenario.
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- by Michel Chossudovsky - 2011-06






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Intensive Bombing Raids over Tripoli

On August 27, NATO acknowledged the conduct of 20,633 sorties since March 31st, and 7,768 strike sorties. (These figures do not include the intensive bombing raids conducted in the two weeks prior to March 31st). Each fighter jet or bomber carries numerous missiles, rockets, etc. depending on the ordnance specification of the aircraft.

Multiply the number of strike sorties (7768 since March 31) by the average number of missiles or bombs launched by each of the planes and you get a rough idea of the size and magnitude of this military operation. A French Dassault Mirage 2000, for instance, can transport 18 missiles under its wings. America's B-2 Stealth bombers are equipped with bunker buster bombs.

USAF Stealth B-2 Bomber used in Operation Odyssey Dawn

Pursuant to NATO's humanitarian mandate, we are informed by the media that these tens of thousands of strikes have not resulted in civilian casualties (with the exception of occasional "collateral damage").

Not surprisingly, already in mid April, three weeks into bombing campaign, the Atlantic Alliance announced that "NATO planes flying combat missions over Libya are starting to run out of bombs" (UPI, April 16, 2011);

"The reason we need more capability isn't because we aren't hitting what we see -- it's so that we can sustain the ability to do so," one NATO official told the Post. "One problem is flight time, the other is munitions." (Ibid)

The bombing raids over Tripoli were intensified in the course of the last two weeks. They were intended to support ground operations led by NATO special forces and the Islamic paramilitary brigades. With limited NATO ground force capabilities, NATO strategists decided to intensify the bombing raids.

Global Research's Correspondent in Tripoli, whose life is threatened for revealing NATO war crimes described a shift in the pattern of bombing, starting in mid-July, with increasingly intensive air raids leading up to the ground invasion on August: 20th:

"Until approximately 2:35 a.m EET [July 17], the strident noises of fighter jets over Tripoli could be heard. The bomb blasts triggered an atmosphere of fear and panic over the entire city, a poignant psychological and emotional impact on tens of thousands of people, from the young to the elderly. It also alerted people and brought them out onto their balconies while they witnessed the bombing of their country.

One of the explosions resulted in a huge mushroom cloud, pointing to the possible use of bunker buster bombs. ... There was something unusual in the pattern of this NATO bombing operation.

The bombings tonight were not like other nights. The sounds were different. The smoke plumes were different. In previous bombings the smoke would usually go up vertically like a fire, but tonight the smoke plumes were horizontal and hovering above Tripoli with a white cloud in the horizon.

People who were not directly affected by the bombs, within a radius of 15 kilometres experienced burning eyes, lower back pain, headaches." (Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, NATO Launches Bombing Blitzkrieg over Tripoli hitting Residential Areas , Global Research, July 17, 2011)

The mass killing of civilians in a Blitzkrieg environment as well as the creation of a generalized atmosphere of panic is intended to curtail the population's resistance to the NATO-led invasion.

The Death Toll

According to sources from our correspondent in Tripoli, the death toll in the course of the last week (20-26 August) is of the order of 3000. The hospitals are in a state of turmoil, unable to come to the rescue of the wounded. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirms that medical supplies are in short supply throughout the country.

In recent developments UNICEF has warned of shortages of water due to the NATO bombing of water infrastructure throughout the country. "This could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic “ said Christian Balslev-Olesen of UNICEF's Libya Office.

NATO warplanes deliberately targeted the peaceful vigil of tents in front of the Gadhafi compound in a gruesome massacre. The mainstream media acknowledges the massacre, while stating that gun wounds are the cause of death in crossfire between loyalist and rebel forces. The victims are :

"The identities of the dead were unclear, but they were in all likelihood activists who had set up an impromptu tent city in solidarity with Gadhafi in defiance of the NATO bombing campaign. (Forbes.com, August 25, 2011)

We are not dealing with collateral damage. Extensive war crimes have been committed. NATO has blood on its hands. The heads of government and heads of state of NATO member countries are war criminals.

The Central Role of Al Qaeda Operatives in the "Liberation of Tripoli"

According to CNN, in a twisted logic, the terrorists have repented: "former terrorists" are no longer "terrorists".

The LIFG is said to have been disbanded.

Following their disavowal of violence, these former LIFG leaders created a new political organization called the Islamic Movement for Change, which according to CNN "is committed to working within a future democratic process". "The Libyan Islamic Movement for Change (Al-Haraka Al-Islamiya Al Libiya Lit-Tahghir), is made up of former members of the now defunct [CIA supported] Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)" (Reuters, August 26, 2011)

In a contradictory about turn, former "bad guys" (terrorists) are heralded as "good guys" committed to "combating terrorism". The "former" members of the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) are now portrayed as "pro-democracy activists" who "have assumed leadership positions in several rebel brigades".

Labels have been switched: the CIA supported Al Qaeda affiliated LIFG has been transformed into the CIA sponsored Islamic Movement for Change (IMC), which supports the pro-democracy rebellion.

When was the LIFG disbanded?

In a bitter irony, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was listed until June 2011 by the United Nations Security Council as a bona fide terrorist organization. On June 21 2011, The Listing of Terrorist Organizations, conveniently vanished from the UN Security Council website pending the revamping of the website. (See annex below)

The LIFG entry was included in the (updated March 24, 2011, accessed April 3, 2011) United Nations Security Council "terror list" as follows

QE.L.11.01. Name: LIBYAN ISLAMIC FIGHTING GROUP

Name (original script):

A.k.a.: LIFG F.k.a.: na Address: na Listed on: 6 Oct. 2001 (amended on 5 Mar. 2009)

(The LIFG Listing is on p. 70, http://www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/pdf/consolidatedlist.pdf, (accessed April 3, 2011, no longer accessible)

Other information: Review pursuant to Security Council resolution 1822 (2008) was concluded on 21 Jun. 2010. The website is down and is currently being revamped


Who Leads Libya's Islamic Brigades?

Recent reports confirm what was known and documented from the outset of the "rebellion" in mid-March: The key military command positions of the rebellion are held by the "former" commanders of the Libya Islamic fighting Group (LIFG)".

The commander of the assault on Tripoli is Abdel Hakim Belhadj, (also known as Abu Abdullah al-Sadeq, Hakim al-Hasidi). He has been entrusted, with NATO's approval, of "one of the most powerful rebel brigades in Tripoli [which] took charge of successful rebel efforts earlier this week to storm Gadhafi's Bab al-Azziziyah compound, further bolstering his prominent position in rebel ranks." (CNN, op cit)

"Sadeeq was a well-known figure in the jihadist movement. He fought the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan and helped found [with the support of the CIA] the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group there." (Ibidt)

But Saddeeq, according to CNN has repented. He is no longer a terrorist (i.e. a bad guy) "but a powerful voice against Al Qaeda's terrorism". (Ibid, emphasis added)

"In 2009, Sadeeq and other senior LIFG leaders formally repudiated al Qaeda style terrorism and disbanded their campaign to overthrow the Libyan regime.

The breakthrough was the result of a two-year dialogue with the regime brokered by Benotman [a former LIFG commander now in the employ of the London based Quilliam Foundation with a mandate in conflict resolution. CNN interviewed leading figures of the LIFG in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in September 2009, shortly before the group's leaders were released. Although they were then behind prison bars, the leaders' disavowal of violence appeared genuine. (Ibid)

According to DebkaFile (Israeli intelligence online report), the "pro-Al Qaeda brigades "led by LIFG Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj constitute the dominant force of the rebellion, overriding the authority of the Transitional Council. They are in control of strategic buildings including Gadhafi's compound.

"The LIFG chief [Abdel Hakim Belhadj] now styles himself "Commander of the Tripoli Military Council." Asked by our sources whether they plan to hand control of the Libyan capital to the National Transitional Council, which has been recognized in the West, the jihadi fighters made a gesture of dismissal without answering. (Debka, Pro-Al Qaeda brigades control Qaddafi Tripoli strongholds seized by rebels, August 28, 2011 )

Abdul Hakim Belhhadj received military training in CIA sponsored guerrilla camp in Afghanistan. He constitutes a CIA "intelligence asset" in the Lybian war theater. An earlier report suggests that he has some 1,000 men under his command. (Libyan rebels at pains to distance themselves from extremists - The Globe and Mail, March 12, 2011)

The US-NATO coaltion is arming the Jihadists. Weapons are being channelled to the LIFG from Saudi Arabia, which historically, since the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war, has covertly supported Al Qaeda. The Saudis are now providing the rebels, in liaison with Washington and Brussels, with anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles. (See Michel Chossudovsky "Our Man in Tripoli": US-NATO Sponsored Islamic Terrorists Integrate Libya's Pro-Democracy Opposition, Global Research, 3 April 2011)

A "Democracy" run by Terrorists

Reports also confirm that large numbers of terrorists imprisoned in Abu Salim jail were released by rebel forces. They are now being recruited by the former LIFG Islamic brigades, led by "former" jihadists pro-democracy commanders.

So all ends well in the smooth transition towards a democracy run by terrorists.

NATO's Islamic Jihad

There is indications that NATO, in coordination with Western intelligence agencies (including Israel's Mossad), is involved in recruiting Islamist fighters. Israeli intelligence sources confirm that NATO in cooperation with Turkey, is now directly training and recruiting in several Muslim countries a new jihadist generation of "Freedom Fighters". The Mujahideen after undergoing training are slated to participate in NATO's "pro-democracy" "humanitarian" military campaigns. The Israeli report by Debka pertains to Syria, which is next in line on the NATO military roadmap:

"Our sources report, is a [NATO] campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels... " (Debka File August 15, 2011 http://www.debka.com/article/21207/ )

The NATO led invasion and occupation of Libya is using Islamic fighters as the backbone of an alleged transition to democracy.

Concluding Remarks

The tragic events of 9/11 have played a key role in developing a massive propaganda campaign geared towards justifying a "war on terrorism" directed against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

In a bitter twist, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, the Western military alliance is using Islamic brigades, trained and groomed by the CIA, MI6 and Mossad, to wage its "Global War on Terrorism".

The war on terrorism constitutes a broad consensus instilled in the minds of millions of people, What is not known to Western public opinion is that the West's holy crusade against Islamic terrorism rather than targeting terrorists actually includes terrorists in his ranks, i.e Al Qaeda "freedom fighters" have been integrated into the ranks of US-NATO led military operations.

Rest assured, in the case of Libya, the rebels are "the good guys": they are "former" rather than "active" members of Al Qaeda.

The Western media has not reported on NATO war crimes. It has casually dismissed NATO atrocities: 8000 strike sorties represents more than 50,000 missiles and bombs dropped on the Libyan people.

There are various ways of concealing the truth. From the outset of the air campaign, the media has denied the existence of a war. Its causes and consequences are distorted. In turn, an effective propaganda campaign requires targeting people's mindset in newspapers, network TV and online.

People must be distracted from an understanding of the war on Libya. Atrocities committed by NATO with the support of the United Nations is rarely frontpage news. How best to camouflage the truth? By redirecting news coverage on Libya towards a number of trivial "talking points", including the size of Gadhafi's swimming pool, his female bodyguards, his cosmetic plastic surgery, etc. The Guardian, August 23, 2011)

Not included in the journalist's "to do list" is the coverage of the three thousand men, women and children who lost their lives in the course of a weeklong Blitzkrieg bombing of Tripoli using the most advanced weapons systems in human history.

Against this background of lies and fabrications, the lives of several independent journalists including Global Research's Correspondent Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya trapped in Tripoli were threatened, for saying the truth.

Related Article

"Our Man in Tripoli": US-NATO Sponsored Islamic Terrorists Integrate Libya's Pro-Democracy Opposition
- by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky - 2011-04-03


Concepts are Turned Upside Down: The US-NATO military alliance is supporting a rebellion integrated by Islamic terrorists, in the name of the "War on Terrorism"..


Note

The Libya Islamic Fighting Group was listed until June 10th as a terrorist organization.

The United Nations Security Council, confirmed that the LIFG is a bona fide terrorist organization.

The LIFG entry was included in the (updated March 24, 2011, accessed April 3, 2011) United Nations Security Council "terror list" as follows

QE.L.11.01. Name: LIBYAN ISLAMIC FIGHTING GROUP

Name (original script):

A.k.a.: LIFG F.k.a.: na Address: na Listed on: 6 Oct. 2001 (amended on 5 Mar. 2009)

Other information: Review pursuant to Security Council resolution 1822 (2008) was concluded on 21 Jun. 2010

(The LIFG Listing is on p. 70, http://www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/pdf/consolidatedlist.pdf, (accessed April 3, 2011) Under the UNSC rules disbanded terrorist organizations are removed from the list in conformity with a delisting procedure. The LIFG has not been removed from the list).United Nations Security Council: Consolidated List established and maintained by the 1267 Committee with respect to Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden, and the Taliban and other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with them (updated March 24, 2011).

The above entry was on the UN Security Council's list of terrorist organizations until June 10th. A new UNSC resolution was passed on June 10 and The Listing of Terrorist Organizations updated on March 24, 2011, conveniently vanished from the UN Security Council website pending the revamping of the website:

IMPORTANT CHANGES TO THE COMMITTEE WEBSITE PURSUANT TO SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1989 (2011)

On 17 June 2011, the Security Council unanimously adopted resolutions 1988 (2011) and 1989 (2011) as successor resolutions to resolution 1904 (2009). By adopting these resolutions, the Security Council decided to split the Al-Qaida and Taliban sanctions regime. Resolution 1989 (2011) stipulates that the sanctions list maintained by the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1267 (1999) will henceforth be known as the “Al-Qaida Sanctions List” and include only names of those individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with Al-Qaida.

Pursuant to these decisions by the Security Council, this website is in the process of being updated. In this interim period, any remaining references to the Consolidated List on this website should be considered as references to the Al-Qaida Sanctions List.





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Webster Tarpley : Syria is next on NATO list after Libya
The NATO is getting ready for Syria , the Libya war may go for several years and the NATO could lose it , it is not an Arab spring it is a CIA rampage , Turkey could become a kamikaze puppet for the NATO in its attack against Syria , somebody in the foreign office is playing on the ambition and the vanity of Turkey to become a world power …


http://www.pakalertpress.com/2011/08/29/webster-tarpley-syria-is-next-on-nato-list-after-libya/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pakalert+%28Pak+Alert+Press%29
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2 - Officially Declared Nuclear Nightmare
Posted on Pakalert on August 30, 201








Dr. Mark Sircus, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Nothing good about the nuclear news at the end of August as we have official recognition (finally) of what is going on in Japan and thus what is threatening the rest of the world, especially the northern hemisphere. It is now being said that the amount of radioactive cesium that has leaked from a tsunami-hit nuclear plant is about equal to 168 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, Japan’s nuclear agency said Friday the 26th.

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That’s like dropping one nuclear weapon a day since the beginning of this disaster and this is what they have been calling safe, no problem, don’t worry about it, go home and go to sleep. Dr. Chris Busby tells us in the above video that he himself went to Japan with very sophisticated equipment and found areas in Tokyo that were 1,000 times higher than the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

The report said the damaged plant has released 15,000 tera becquerels of cesium-137, which lingers for decades and could cause cancer, compared with the 89 tera becquerels released by the U.S. uranium bomb.

Now tell me who in their right mind would be comfortable being downwind of that? The answer to that one is very tragic and sad—millions are too comfortable and many more millions are simply unaware because they are not being told by their governments or the mainstream press. But today that finally changes!

A person can still squirm around this one with all their rationalizations, but you can now count them—eachnuclear explosion worth of radiation being pumped into the environment day after day after day.

The National Institute for Environmental Studies said its simulation of aerial flow, diffusion and deposition of the two isotopes released from the tsunami-hit plant showed their impact reached most of Japan’s eastern half, ranging from Iwate in the north to Tokyo and central prefecture (state) of Shizuoka. Both Iwate and Shizuoka are more than 180 miles (300 kilometers) away from the plant.

Tokyo is Finished
Time is running out for the 35 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area and, in fact, in a year or two all of northern Japan will become quite uninhabitable for there is no way for them to stop the process once the fissioning materials work their way down into the earth and the water table below, which they have already done. (See my recent essay “The China Syndrome”.)

As radiation levels rise, some sanity has surfaced in Japan as the government lowered back down the radiation exposure limits for children to below one millisievert per year while at school. Following the accident, in a move that prompted outrage, Japan raised the exposure limit for both adults and children from one to 20 millisieverts per year, matching the maximum exposure level for nuclear industry workers in many countries.

Parents in Fukushima have since been calling on the government to lower limits at school, claiming that children face a higher risk from radiation-linked cancers and other diseases than adults, which of course is absolutely true. Radiation experts agree that children are at greatest risk from cancers and genetic defects because they are still growing, are more prone to thyroid cancers, and because they will have more time to develop health defects.

The news services continue to misrepresent the situation. “Areas surrounding Japan’s crippled Fukushimanuclear plant could remain uninhabitable for decades,” Reuters reported, when in reality it will be thousands of years at best. A brutal way of saying this is that the nuclear lobby is, all by itself, proving to be the undoing of the human race. But the British are still going to sing hail to the queen and the royal family, who are deeply wed to the uranium industry.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex “is still leaking low levels of radiation,” when it is still leaking high levels of radiation. “It could take more than 20 years before residents could safely return to areas with current radiation readings of 200 millisieverts per year, and a decade for areas at 100 millisieverts per year.” Someone is having a nuclear wet dream with these assumptions. Too many have swallowed hook, line and sinker the “safe, low-level, no harm, nothing to worry about” pronouncements in the press, so much so that they actually believe it. Humanity is stuck with Fukushima and all by itself it will badly pollute the north and, perhaps after some time, the south of our world as well.


Newly released neutron data from three University of California San Diego scientists confirms Fairewinds’ April analysis that the disaster continues to contaminate the surrounding environment and upper atmospherewith large doses of radioactivity.

In a new revelation, the NRC claims that the plutonium found more than one mile offsite actually came from inside the nuclear reactors! If such a statement were true, it indicates that the nuclear power plant containments failed and were breached with debris landing far from the power plants themselves.

The bad idea of burning the radioactive materials (building materials, trees, lawn grass, rice straw) by the Japanese government will cause radioactive cesium to spread even further into areas within Japan that have been previously clean and across the Pacific Ocean to North America. Until very recently we in the West were considered barbarians by the Japanese. Perhaps when they burn these materials, knowing where some of that radiation is going, they are thinking of the old days. The real point here is that we are in trouble—serious trouble and we have not even begun to deal with this in our minds or hearts. We let the politicians lead us and now we see how high the price for that will go.

Governments Do Not Serve the People
Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan has announced his resignation. Mr. Kan has been criticized for failing to show leadership after the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and ensuing nuclear crisis. The 64-year-old’s resignation had been widely expected, and comes amid tumbling public support. Kan is responsible more than anyone else for the government’s actions. As the disaster continues to unfold through the months and years to come it would not surprise me if Kan is shamed to the point of being invited to commit ritual suicide in Japanese fashion for his betrayal of the Japanese people.

Early on in the disaster, Toshiso Kosako, a Tokyo University professor, became senior nuclear adviser to Kan, then quickly resigned saying the government had ignored his advice and failed to follow the law, and had only taken ad hoc measures to contain the crisis at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The Japanese government has yet to grasp the severity of the contamination within Japan, and therefore has not developed a coherent plan to protect its people from harm. Some say that without a cohesive plan, the radioactivity will continue to spread throughout Japan and around the globe further, but then again we might have to face the reality that there is nothing governments and industry can do now to mitigate the disaster.

Are People Dying Already?
I have already reported on increasing death rates for children under one year of age both on the east and west coasts of America and in western Canada. Some authorities have been bragging and waggling about the lack of deaths from this overblown disaster. But anyone who believes the authorities about anything these days needs to have his head examined.

A Japanese medical doctor recently sent me a translation of a blog in Japanese that talked about someone who lost three of his colleagues in two days. His translation stated that, “They were all involved in moving cars out of the evacuated areas early on at the request of evacuated families before the area became restricted. They were 32, 34, and 44, and first two died on August 9 and the third on August 10, all of heart attacks. (Not sure if it was really heart attacks or arrhythmia, since there was no autopsy done and the bodies were cremated.) There has been a middle-aged woman who was involved in a pet rescue, and she died of acute leukemia about a week after diagnosis in early August. She went to Fukushima at least once to pick up her relative’s dog that had been rescued, and she has a lot of family from Fukushima, so she might have been exposed to radioactive particles carried by those who had been exposed. She also seemed like the type of person who did not have good health to begin with.”

It is like vaccine deaths—so many of the sudden-infant and shaken-baby deaths can be blamed on anything but the real cause, which stems from the totally obnoxious toxins in vaccines. With the multiple vaccines given to children today, for them it’s like stepping into a boxing ring and having a hailstorm of punches delivered to their vulnerable young bodies.

Dr. Mark Sircus is a natural health expert and self-sufficiency advocate. He is the author of several must-read books including titles such as Survival Medicine For the 21st Century, Winning the War on Cancer, and Humane Pediatrics. You can find all of Mark’s informative articles at his website IMVA.

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3 - Making Wars Is Biggest Industry In U.S.
Posted on Pakalert on August 30, 2011




Taiwan Sun
Monday 29th August, 2011
((Op-ed) William Rivers Pitt -Truthout)

• Time for Iraq withdrawal of U.S. troops to extend
• Afghanistan withdrawal to be put back to 2012
• Major U.S. corporations to benefit by hundreds of billions

A pair of vitally important news reports were lost recently amid a blizzard of stories about the gyrating stock market and a rogue East Coast earthquake.The first came from US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who announced that a deal had been struck to keep US forces in Iraq beyond the oft-publicized December 31st withdrawal deadline and into 2012, contrary to Mr. Obama’s promises. Not long after, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki came forward to say hold on, wait a minute, nothing along these lines has been agreed upon as yet, and negotiations are still ongoing.Got that? Negotiations are still ongoing, which in all likelihood means that, sometime before December 31st, a deal will be struck between Al-Maliki and the US to keep American forces right where they’ve been for the last three thousand days. In fact, Panetta let it be known that the Pentagon is already laying plans to do exactly that. Panetta made sure to draw a line between “combat forces,” which he claims will be withdrawn, and “training forces,” which appear poised to remain into the foreseeable future. This will come as a great comfort to the troops who will not be coming home, as insurgent leaders have made it clear that any American on Iraqi soil after the withdrawal deadline will live life with a bullseye taped to their back…but who won’t live long, if the insurgents have anything to say about it.

A few days after this announcement came a report from the UK-based Daily Telegraph that is nothing short of staggering:

America and Afghanistan are close to signing a strategic pact which would allow thousands of United States troops to remain in the country until at least 2024.



The agreement would allow not only military trainers to stay to build up the Afghan army and police, but also American special forces soldiers and air power to remain.

Both Afghan and American officials said that they hoped to sign the pact before the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in December, the Telegraph reported. Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai agreed last week to escalate the negotiations and their national security advisers will meet in Washington in September, the article added.

2024.

More than twelve years from now.

Seven congressional elections and three presidential elections from now.

I will be 52 years old before any consideration is given to withdrawing American military forces from Afghanistan, according to the elements of this “strategic pact.”

America’s war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, more than ten years ago. America’s war in Iraq began on March 20, 2003, almost nine years ago. Toss in the six months we have been engaged in the Libyan conflict, and what you have is theUnited States at war for a combined total of nineteen years…and now, according to reports, the Iraq withdrawal deadline has become thoroughly elastic, and the Afghanistan withdrawal timeline is about to be punted so far over the horizon as to become thoroughly meaningless.

Back when George W. Bush was in office, plenty of people were aware of how rich his family, friends and allies were getting off these conflicts. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, KBR, the Bush-affiliated Carlyle Group,Blackwater/Xe and many others were raking in the cash thanks to a harshly simple economic algorithm: every day of these wars, every ration eaten, every uniform donned, every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every missile launched, every helicopter shot down, and every body bag filled translates directly into extreme profits for someone.

Mr. Bush is gone now, but that algorithm remains ruthlessly in place. War-oriented companies like DynCorp,Washington Group International, Aegis Defense Services, URS Corporation, BAE Systems, Renco, CACI, Bechtel, General Dynamics, General Electric, and Titan, along with oil giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron, have profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars off these conflicts, and are poised to continue doing so well into the future.

Think about that.

Nineteen combined total years of war, amounting to approximately seven thousand consecutive days of profiteering off the blood, bone and flesh of soldiers and civilians.

We have heard much about the idea that certain financial institutions are “too big to fail,” and thus have been bailed out of the economic disaster zone they themselves helped to create, with little or no punishment for the perpetrators in the aftermath. While there can be no doubt that the actions of these essentially criminal enterprises have done great and lasting damage to the American economy, scant notice has been paid to the unimaginable expenditures we have thrown into a decade of largely fruitless warfare, and the brutal cost levied against the American people – most especially the soldiers and civilians who have borne the brunt of combat – all of which means obscene profit for a select few who you nor I will ever meet.

War profiteering is nothing new.

The Roman who invented the gladius forged the weapon that carved out a lasting empire, and probably died a very wealthy man. Here in 21st century America, however, the empire is crumbling not for lack of our war-making abilities, but because war-making appears to be the only healthy industry left in our economy. We are collapsing not despite war, but because of it.
We are eating ourselves, and if the powerful ones behind Mr. Obama and Mr. Panetta get their way, we will be continuing to do so for years to come.War in America is too big to fail, it seems.In this, we forge our common doom.

The writer William Rivers Pitt is a Truthout editor and columnist. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence” and “House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation.” He lives and works in Boston.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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4 - Exposing Israel’s Most Dangerous BioWeapon Secrets
Posted on Pakalert on June 26, 2011














By SALEH EL-NAAMI

Drivers will only dart a glance at that mammoth structure nestled in the dunes south of Rishon Litsion southeast of Tel Aviv as they speed on their way. It is forbidden to turn off the Tel Aviv-Rishon Litsion highway onto the side road leading up to that building, which is barricaded by cement walls equipped with state-of-the-art surveillanceand warning systems developed by Israel’s military industries.

That fortress-like structure is the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) where Israel develops its biological and chemical weapons and prepares for any eventuality of biological or chemical warfare. It is the most top-secret military installation in Israel. So tightly is it guarded by military censorship that the Israeli press has to turn to Western sources for scraps of information made available to them, very intermittently, by special contacts inside the institute.

Only once has the Israeli press been given leeway to discuss what goes on behind those high security walls. That was last month when Avisha Klein filed a suit against the IIBR administration for harassment and emotional abuse. A long-term employee at the institute, Klein has served in various positions, one of which was as part of a team to develop an ointment to protect the skin from mustard gas. But this is only one of the many details that have come to light in the course of the proceedings, which have shed considerable light on the nature and scope of the institute’s work.

The IIBR is staffed by some 300 scientists and technicians employed in one or more of its many departments, each of which specialises in a specific area of chemical or biological research generally aimed at the production of chemical or biological weaponry. One of these departments, for example, is reported to have developed the poison that was used by the notorious Mossad assassination unit, Kidon, in its botched attempt to eliminate Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal in 1997. Nevertheless, if there remains some question over the accuracy of this information, which was reported in Haaretz, no one disputes that the first time the institute’s products were used in an assassination operation was in late 1977 when then prime minister Menachem Begin ordered Mossad to eliminate Wadie Haddad.

A leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Haddad was accused by Israel of responsibility for several terrorist operations, the last of which was the hijacking of an Israeli passenger plane en route to Entebbe in 1976. According to a recently published book by the Israeli journalist Aharon Klein, Haddad had a great fondness for Belgian chocolates. Mossad obtained some of these special chocolates, coated them with a slow-acting poison, and had them delivered to Haddad, who was then living in Baghdad, by an Iraqi official who was a Mossad agent and who had struck up a friendship with Haddad. Klein relates that the deadly substance was first developed in the IIBR and that its slow-acting and undetectable properties ensured that the agent and the instrument of death would not be discovered.

And indeed, following a gradual but severe deterioration in his health, Haddad was flown to a hospital in EastGermany where he was diagnosed with leukaemia and eventually died on 28 March 1978. It was not until 32 years later that the truth came to light: that the real cause of death was a poison produced by IIBR.

It is not unlikely that Mossad conducted many assassination operations in this way, so as not to leave its fingerprints. In other words, the seemingly accidental deaths of many individuals that Israel regarded as a threat may have actually been caused by substances produced by IIBR. Most likely, the poison that Mossad agents injected into Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai in February 2010 came from IIBR.

According to information that has recently come out, the institute contains a department specialising in the production of vaccines against biological weapons. One of the chief focuses of research and development, here, was anthrax, which Israel fears the Arabs and resistance organisations will use against it in a confrontation. The institute also has a department for developing remedies to minimise and counter the effects of chemical weaponry. The whole presents a gruesome picture of a curious chemical and biological race, with the institute virtually competing with itself to produce antidotes to weapons that it, itself, is producing, or that it fears others will use against Israel in an eventual confrontation.

The IIBR works closely and in full coordination with the Israeli army and intelligence, which furnish the institute with their lists of priorities in light of their strategic threat forecasts. For example, information that has come to light during the coverage of Klein’s suit reveals that many years ago the Israeli military establishment was concerned that Arab states might use such chemical agents as mustard gas in an potential assault against Israel and, therefore, instructed the institute to develop a chemical substance to minimise the effects of the gas. Not surprisingly, the institute coordinates closely with the Israeli army’s medical corps, which receives the antidotes and distributes them to its branches in the military in accordance with demand.

The institute also works closely with Mossad and Shin Bet, the agencies primarily responsible for most of the assassination and liquidation operations against Arab and Muslim targets. Also, since Mossad and the military intelligence unit “Aman” are responsible for gathering enemy intelligence and presumably monitor nonconventional weapons programmes in Arab countries, they would instruct IIBR to develop the necessary biological or chemical responses to these programmes.

However, the IIBR has another purpose on top of developing and producing biological and chemical weapons and antidotes. It is also a major hard currency income-generator. The Hebrew Haaretz website reports: “The institute has received a grant of hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an anthrax vaccine.” The grant followed an attack in the US by a home-grown terrorist group that developed a concentrated strain of anthrax spores and delivered them to several individual targets in US; the vaccines that IIBR was commissioned to develop were destined for use in the US.

More importantly, we learn from the website that Israeli soldiers have been used to test the vaccines, causing some permanent physical damage. Reports of the internationally banned use of human guinea pigs raised moral hackles in Israel and sharpened suspicions that the lives of Israeli soldiers had deliberately been put to risk for the sake of financial gain received for promoting the security of another country, namely the US in this case.

The IIBR has a live animals department, where rabbits, pigs, monkeys and other animals are used in experiments. And perhaps human beings as well, judging by the suits soldiers filed against the Israeli Ministry of Defence after they were used in the anthrax experiments. The soldiers demand that they be officially recognised as disabled veterans and receive compensation accordingly. The case remains in the courts, but the IDF, caving into pressure from the families of the soldiers and public opinion, recently announced that it would no longer conduct experiments on soldiers.

It was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who ordered the construction of the IIBR on the basis of the advice of a number of Jewish scientists. Throughout his rule, from 1948 to 1963 (with the exception of the years 1953-1955 when �Moshe Sharett served as prime minister), Ben-Gurion was directly responsible for the institute and every detail in it. The staff were forbidden to disclose to anyone even the smallest tid-bit of data or information without first obtaining Ben-Gurion’s approval. That continued to apply even during that interstice when Sharrit was in power, for when this prime minister visited the institute in 1954 scientists had to apologise for not being able to show him the programmes they were working on at the time.

Although many scientists have taken a turn to direct the IIBR, it is generally believed that the one to have left the greatest imprint is its current director, Avigdor Shafferman. Shafferman, who has been named in Klein’s suit, has the reputation of being something of a powerhouse but also being very strict and quick to fire staff members on disciplinary grounds.

Nevertheless, as significant as the details that have come to light in this rare glimpse into the workings of the IIBR may be, little attention has focussed on a larger truth. As the international community hounds a host of countries for pursuing conventional weapons programmes that pale in scale next to Israel’s, it refuses to budge an inch to deter Israel, which only encourages Tel Aviv’s belligerent and tyrannical behaviour.

Saleh El-Naami writes for Al-Ahram, where this article originally appeared.

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5 - How Corporate and Political Forces Have Almost Neutralized
All Avenues of Resistance in US Culture


By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

Posted on August 29, 2011, Printed on August 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152205/how_corporate_and_political_forces_have_almost_neutralized_all_avenues_of_resistance_in_us_culture

We have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity—the 2012 presidential election. Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalists.

The only commodity the troll state offers is fear. The corporate trolls, such as the Koch brothers, terrify the birthers, creationists, militia lovers, tea party militants, right-to-life advocates, Christian fascists and God-fearing red-white-and-blue patriots by proclaiming that, unless they vote for Perry or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann or some other product of the lunatic fringe of our political establishment, the American family will be destroyed, our children will be corrupted and the country will turn socialist. Barack Obama, who they whisper is a closet Muslim, will take away their guns, raise their taxes and bring homosexual couples into kindergartens.

For those, usually liberals, still rooted in a reality-based world, one that believes in evolutionary science, the corporate trolls offer a more refined, fear-based message of impending doom. If you abandon the Democrats we will be governed by Bible-thumping idiots who will make us chant the Pledge of Allegiance in mass rallies and teach the account of Genesis as historical and biological fact in our nation’s schools.

And underneath it all runs the mantra chanted in unison by all the trolls—terror, terror, terror. The troll establishment spins us like windup dolls and laughs all the way to the bank. What idiots, they think. And every election cycle we prove them right.

“The only people who grasp the distinction between reality and appearance, who grasp the laws of conduct and society, are the ruling groups and those who do their bidding; scientific, technical elites who elucidate the laws of behavior and the functions of society so that people might be more effectively, albeit unconsciously, governed,” wrote James W. Carey in “Communication as Culture.”

The trolls dominate or have neutralized every major institution in the country on behalf of their corporate paymasters. The press, education, Wall Street, labor and our political parties are managed by trolls or have been destroyed by them. Sometimes these trolls speak like liberals. Sometimes they speak like conservatives. Sometimes they are secular. Sometimes they are Christians. But the language they use is a cover for the relentless march toward a totalitarian capitalism and a kingdom where the trolls, if not the rest of us, live happily ever after. Rick Perry and John Boehner overtly make war on Social Security. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi say they would like to save Social Security but are sadly powerless before the decisions of a congressional super committee they helped form. The result, of course, is the same. We get to choose the rhetoric and manner in which we are deceived and disempowered. Nothing more.

All cloying appeals to the Obama administration to use stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, public transit and reclaiming dams, as well as to create jobs, are about as effective as writing heartfelt appeals in the era of the old Soviet Union to Uncle Joe Stalin. The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.

A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. These forces demand that we serve the dictates of the marketplace. They are destroying all legal impediments to corporate exploitation and profit, as well as dismantling the regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen. They defend torture, offshore penal colonies, black sites and kidnapping (they call it “extraordinary rendition”) of state enemies. They protect and abet financial fraud. They wage pre-emptive war. They refuse to restore habeas corpus. Without warrants, they monitor, eavesdrop on and wiretap tens of millions of citizens. They order the assassination of U.S. citizens. They deny due process. They give corporations the status of persons. They ignore the suffering of the unemployed and the poor, slashing basic social service programs while doling out hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds to corporations. On these key issues, the only ones that really matter, there is no disagreement among trolls from either the self-identified left or the self-identified right. All their public disputes in the election cycle are a carnival act.

All conventional forms of dissent, from electoral politics to open debates, have been denied us. We cannot rely on the institutions that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. The only route left is to disconnect as thoroughly as possible from the consumer society and engage in acts of civil disobedience and obstruction. The more we sever ourselves from the addictions of fossil fuel and the consumer society, the more we begin to create a new paradigm for community. The more we engage in physical acts of defiance—as Bill McKibben and others did recently in front of the White House to protest the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico—the more we can keep alive a new, better way of relating to each other and the ecosystem.

Most important, we must stop being afraid. We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president. We have to defy all formal systems of power. We have to listen closely to the moral voices in our society, from McKibben to Noam Chomsky to Wendell Berry to Ralph Nader, and ignore feckless liberals who have been one of the most effective tools of our disempowerment. We have to create monastic enclaves where we can retain and nurture the values being rapidly destroyed by the wider corporate culture and build the mechanisms of self-sufficiency that will allow us to survive. The corporate coup is over. We have lost. The trolls have won. We have to face our banishment.

In William Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus” the Roman consul is deposed by the mob. Coriolanus, whatever his faults, turns on those who thrust him from power to declare a valediction we should deliver to our class of ruling trolls and all those who remain in their embrace.

Brutus:
There’s no more to be said, but he is banish’d,
As enemy to the people and his country:
It shall be so.

Citizens:
It shall be so, it shall be so.

Coriolanus:
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.





Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column forTruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

© 2011 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152205/
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6 - Honduras : Aguán Massacres Continue to Support Production of Biodiesel
aletho | August 29, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7Uf

ARMED FORCES "TRAIN" PRIVATE SECURITY FORCES

By Annie Bird | Rights Action | 28 August 2011
Witnesses report that African palm plantation security forces are trained at the 15th Battalion of the Honduran Armed Forces and in private African palm plantations by men in Honduran military uniforms.

There are reports that 40 to 60 Colombians, who wear Honduran army uniforms, are training the paramilitaries. There are reports that US Army Rangers have engaged in training activities, and that the US donated military equipment that has been used in the repression.

Poor campesinos in the Aguán region, in need of a means of survival, are reclaiming lands that have been illegally and violently taken from them by wealthy land-owners backed by the regime. These campesino communities are thus in direct conflict not only with police, military and paramilitary forces, but also organized crime networks (including drug traffickers) who reportedly maintain close collaboration with the police, military, and private security forces.

Extreme corruption of the justice system has not only helped create the conflicts that exist today, by not resolving the legal actions through which campesinos have attempted to regain land rights for over 15 years, but also contributes to the repression through the criminalization of land rights defenders and enforcing total impunity for killers.

According to reports, around noon on Saturday, August 20, 2011 Secundino Ruiz Vallecillo, vice president of the Movimiento Campesion Unificado del Aguan del a Margen Derecha (MUCA-MD), and president of the San Isidro Empresa Campesina Cooperative, was shot and killed while in a taxi in the town of Tocoa by a masked gunman aboard a passing motorcycle.

That afternoon Arnoldo Portillo, member of the 5 de Enero Empresa Campesino Cooperative, of the La Concepcion community, left his home, and did not return. His neighbors began a search early the morning of August 21, 2011. His badly brutalized body was found in the dump of the La Lempira campesino community; he had been killed by machete strikes and gunfire.

Later on August 21, 2011, at approximately 8pm, Pedro Salgado, the president of the 5 de Enero cooperative and his wife, Irene Licona, were murdered in their home by machetes and gunfire. Salgado, like the presidents of all the cooperatives claiming rights to land used by African palm oil businessmen in the Aguan, had been subject to constant death threats. Salgado had recently met with the commander of the Xatruch operation, asking for protection.

OVER 50 CAMPESINOS KILLED, & counting ...

These killings occurred amidst a military occupation, called the "Xatruch II" operation, that was launched after two massacres on August 14th and August 15th that left 11 dead.

Since training of African palm oil company paramilitary security forces reportedly began in January 2010, over 50 campesinos have been killed, the majority in drive-by shootings.

COMPLICITY

On July 21, 2011 it was reported that the United Nation's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) board "undertook an investigation and after full consideration found that the consultation met the CDM requirements under the parameters of its mandate. It's a matter for Honduras to deal with outstanding land disputes and responsibility for violence in the region."

This decision is a complete abdication by the United Nations of the United Nations' mandate to protect human rights - the UN is complicit in violence in the Aguán.

The complicity - direct or indirect - extends to the governments of Canada and the US. Just days before the August 14 massacre, Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper signed a so-called "free" trade agreement on August 12th with Honduras, ignoring the systemic repression carried out by the Honduran regime since the June 2009 military coup. The newly appointed US ambassador to Honduras, Lisa Kubiske, has focused her career on promoting biofuel investment and free trade agreements.

Contact Rights Action to plan educational presentations in your community, school, place of worship, home (info@rightsaction.org)

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7 - Must-Read Krugman : GOP is Now 'Aggressively Anti-Science,
Indeed Anti-Knowledge,' Which Should 'Terrify Us'


Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.






Paul Krugman had a terrific column in the New York Times Sunday, “Republicans Against Science.” He discusses not just the anti-science nature of the GOP as it applies to global warming, but their anti-knowledge approach as it applies to economic theory.

By Joe Romm | Climate Progress
Posted on Monday, August 29




Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

In a AAAS presentation last year, the late William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

I was just at a conference of some of the top climate scientists in the world, and their projections are considerably more dire than the IPCC, as I’ll report later this week.

But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.




© 2011 All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews//

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8 - How Israel Takes Its Revenge on Children Suspected of Throwing Stones


By Catrina Stewart, The Independent UK
Posted on August 27, 2011, Printed on August 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152194/how_israel_takes_its_revenge_on_children_suspected_of_throwing_stones

The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. "Lift up your head! Lift it up!" shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him. But the boy by now is past caring, for he has been awake for at least 12 hours since he was separated at gunpoint from his parents at two that morning. "I wish you'd let me go," the boy whimpers, "just so I can get some sleep."

During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.

This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.

Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the occupation tell a very different story.

"The problems start long before the child is brought to court, it starts with their arrest," says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during their interrogation where their "fate is doomed", she says.

Sameer Shilu, 12, was asleep when the soldiers smashed in the front door of his house one night. He and his older brother emerged bleary-eyed from their bedroom to find six masked soldiers in their living room.

Checking the boy's name on his father's identity card, the officer looked "shocked" when he saw he had to arrest a boy, says Sameer's father, Saher. "I said, 'He's too young; why do you want him?' 'I don't know,' he said". Blindfolded, and his hands tied painfully behind his back with plastic cords, Sameer was bundled into a Jeep, his father calling out to him not to be afraid. "We cried, all of us," his father says. "I know my sons; they don't throw stones."

In the hours before his interrogation, Sameer was kept blindfolded and handcuffed, and prevented from sleeping. Eventually taken for interrogation without a lawyer or parent present, a man accused him of being in a demonstration, and showed him footage of a boy throwing stones, claiming it was him.

"He said, 'This is you', and I said it wasn't me. Then he asked me, 'Who are they?' And I said that I didn't know," Sameer says. "At one point, the man started shouting at me, and grabbed me by the collar, and said, 'I'll throw you out of the window and beat you with a stick if you don't confess'."

Sameer, who protested his innocence, was fortunate; he was released a few hours later. But most children are frightened into signing a confession, cowed by threats of physical violence, or threats against their families, such as the withdrawal of work permits.

When a confession is signed, lawyers usually advise children to accept a plea bargain and serve a fixed jail sentence even if not guilty. Pleading innocent is to invite lengthy court proceedings, during which the child is almost always remanded in prison. Acquittals are rare. "In a military court, you have to know that you're not looking for justice," says Gabi Lasky, an Israeli lawyer who has represented many children.

There are many Palestinian children in the West Bank villages in the shadow of Israel's separation wall and Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. Where largely non-violent protests have sprung up as a form of resistance, there are children who throw stones, and raids by Israel are common. But lawyers and human rights groups have decried Israel's arrest policy of targeting children in villages that resist the occupation.

In most cases, children as young as 12 are hauled from their beds at night, handcuffed and blindfolded, deprived of sleep and food, subjected to lengthy interrogations, then forced to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language few of them read.

Israeli rights group B'Tselem concluded that, "the rights of minors are severely violated, that the law almost completely fails to protect their rights, and that the few rights granted by the law are not implemented".

Israel claims to treat Palestinian minors in the spirit of its own law for juveniles but, in practice, it is rarely the case. For instance, children should not be arrested at night, lawyers and parents should be present during interrogations, and the children must be read their rights. But these are treated as guidelines, rather than a legal requirement, and are frequently flouted. And Israel regards Israeli youngsters as children until 18, while Palestinians are viewed as adults from 16.

Lawyers and activists say more than 200 Palestinian children are in Israeli jails. "You want to arrest these kids, you want to try them," Ms Lalo says. "Fine, but do it according to Israeli law. Give them their rights."

In the case of Islam, the boy in the video, his lawyer, Ms Lasky, believes the video provides the first hard proof of serious irregularities in interrogation.

In particular, the interrogator failed to inform Islam of his right to remain silent, even as his lawyer begged to no avail to see him. Instead, the interrogator urged Islam to tell him and his colleagues everything, hinting that if he did so, he would be released. One interrogator suggestively smacked a balled fist into the palm of his hand.

By the end of the interrogation Islam, breaking down in sobs, has succumbed to his interrogators, appearing to give them what they want to hear. Shown a page of photographs, his hand moves dully over it, identifying men from his village, all of whom will be arrested for protesting.

Ms Lasky hopes this footage will change the way children are treated in the occupied territories, in particular, getting them to incriminate others, which lawyers claim is the primary aim of interrogations. The video helped gain Islam's release from jail into house arrest, and may even lead to a full acquittal of charges of throwing stones. But right now, a hunched and silent Islam doesn't feel lucky. Yards from his house in Nabi Saleh is the home of his cousin, whose husband is in jail awaiting trial along with a dozen others on the strength of Islam's confession.

The cousin is magnanimous. "He is a victim, he is just a child," says Nariman Tamimi, 35, whose husband, Bassem, 45, is in jail. "We shouldn't blame him for what happened. He was under enormous pressure."

Israel's policy has been successful in one sense, sowing fear among children and deterring them from future demonstrations. But the children are left traumatised, prone to nightmares and bed-wetting. Most have to miss a year of school, or even drop out.

Israel's critics say its policy is creating a generation of new activists with hearts filled with hatred against Israel. Others say it is staining the country's character. "Israel has no business arresting these children, trying them, oppressing them," Ms Lalo says, her eyes glistening. "They're not our children. My country is doing so many wrongs and justifying them. We should be an example, but we have become an oppressive state."

Child detention figures

7,000 [Figure corrected, with apologies for earlier production error.] The estimated number of Palestinian children detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts since 2000, shows a report by Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP).

87 The percentage of children subjected to some form of physical violence while in custody. About 91 per cent are also believed to be blindfolded at some point during their detention.

12 The minimum age of criminal responsibility, as stipulated in the Military Order 1651.

62 The percentage of children arrested between 12am and 5am.





© 2011 The Independent UK All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152194/



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MOSSAD .. WHO ELSE ?






9 - Gunmen kill Baghdad University professor
aletho | August 29, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7Us

By Laith Jawad - Azzaman - August 26, 2011
Unidentified gunmen have killed another university professor in Baghdad, the latest victim of a bloody campaign targeting the cream of Iraqi intelligentsia.

Baghdad University’s Professor Hussein Kadhem was shot dead by a silencer gun as he left his home for work in Baghdad’s al-Adel neighborhood.

Scores of university professors have been killed in Baghdad since the 2003 U.S. invasion, most of them in al-Adel, a neighborhood inhabited mainly by university faculty members.

There are no exact figures on the number of Iraqi intellectuals and scientists who have been killed since the U.S. invasion. But conservative estimates put the number at more than 300, among them highly qualified doctors, nuclear scientists and physicists.



The violence targeting Iraqi scientists has forced many of them to flee the country. Iraqis with higher degrees from top Western universities make a large portion of faculty at universities in Jordan and Arab Gulf states. Hospitals and research centers in the Gulf welcome Iraqi scientists.




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10 - The reason why Egyptians hate Israel
by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat on August 30, 2011
“Peace with Egypt, which is considered an asset, only when it is at risk, was a peace that Israel toyed with and breached from the beginning.”


Gideon Levy, Haaretz


Israeli embassy in Cairo
The Israeli flag that was taken down by a young Egyptian from the window of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo was faded and worn, flying from an old, nondescript office tower, invisible from the street to the naked eye.

A great deal of murky water has flowed through the Nile since the flag was first unfurled; people who think that the hatred for Israel that is now boiling over is a divine edict, fate or the wrath of nature, should think back to the early days of peace between Israel and Egypt.

Then, in the carefree 1980s, tens of thousands of Israelis streamed to Egypt and were welcomed with open joy. It was a pleasure to be an Israeli in Cairo in those days; sometimes even a great honor.

The masses demonstrating against Israel now are the same masses who once welcomed the Israelis. Even if Friday’s “million-man rally” against Israel only became a thousand-man march, the hatred has sparked. But it does not have to be this way.

The fact that it has not always been this way should be food for thought in Israel.

But as usual, the question of why does not come up for discussion here. Why is there terror? Because. Why is there hatred? Because. It is much easier to think that Egypt hates us and that’s that, and divest ourselves of responsibility.

Peace with Egypt, which is considered an asset only when it is at risk, was a peace that Israel toyed with and breached from the beginning.

It required recognizing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and granting it autonomy within five years. Israel conducted ridiculous negotiations, headed by its interior minister (Yosef Burg ) with the intention of making the negotiations go away, and never met its obligations. The invasion of Lebanon the day after the treaty was completed in 1982 was dangerous and impertinent. Against all odds, Egypt withstood this baiting.

People who ask why Egyptians hate us should think back to these two pivotal actions by Israel.

Public memory may be short-lived, but hatred is not. Its flames have been fanned since then.

People who want to understand why the Egyptians hate us should recall the scenes of Operations Cast Lead and Defensive Shield, the bombing of Beirut and the shelling of Rafah. If Israelis were exposed to scenes in which some country acted in the same way toward Jews, such hatred would burn within us toward that country as well. The Arab masses saw terrible pictures and its hatred increased.

New game ahead with brand new rules



Thousands of Egyptians rallied in front of Israel emabassy in Cairo calling for the expulsion of the ambassador
That hatred had fateful significance with the arrival of the Arab Spring. The rules of the game in the new Middle East changed. Peace and cease-fire agreements to which the tyrants in the old Egypt, Syria and Jordan held with much gnashing of teeth, could no longer be preserved in democratic or partially democratic regimes.

From now on, the people are speaking; they will not stand for violent or colonialist behavior toward Arabs, and their leaders will have to take this into consideration. The occupation, and Israel’s exaggerated shows of force in response to terror attacks are now being put to the test of the peoples, not just their rulers.

There is a positive side to this in that it may rein Israel in, as has already recently been seen with regard to Gaza: If not for the new Egypt, perhaps we would already be in the throes of Operation Cast Lead 2. But in the long-term, this will not be enough to hold back our forces and hold our fire.

It is becoming exhausting to reiterate this, but it is now truer than ever: Israel no longer has the option of living only by the sword.

The dangers inherent in the new reality that is emerging before our very eyes are not of the type that military prowess alone can overcome for years. We cannot gird ourselves forever, no matter how protected and armed we are.


The Arab Spring has placed the Arab-Israeli conflict on new grounds
The new Arab leaderships will not be able to ignore the desires of their peoples, and their peoples will not accept Israel as a violent occupier in the region. Not only does an Operation Cast Lead become almost impossible, the continued occupation endangers Israel – the longer it lasts, the stronger the resistance to Israel’s very existence.

It is not difficult to imagine how things could be different. It’s enough to recall the first days of peace with Egypt, or the early days of Oslo – until the Arabs recognized the fraud.

It is not difficult to imagine peace agreements that would lead to the end of the occupation and a response to the Arab peace initiative.

The only way is to create a new Israel in the eyes of the new Arab world. Only if this happens can we return to Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili market and be accepted there.

Let us not waste words over the alternative; it does not exist for Israel.

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11 - Egypt Prevented Large-Scale Israeli Operation Against Gaza
by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat on August 26, 2011
“Israeli-Egyptian relations still tense” Says Egyptian ambassador to the Palestinian authority



Yasser Othman, Egypt ambassador to Palestinian authority
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Yasser Othman, the Egyptian ambassador to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, said Wednesday that there is still tension in Egyptian-Israeli relations after the killing of five Egyptian soldiers last week.

“We want a clear, strong apology and a pledge to not to repeat such acts in the future,” he said.

It was not enough that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres expressed regret for the incident, Egypt’s cabinet said.

The Eilat attacks had nothing to do with Egypt, Othman said, and investigations are ongoing on both sides.

Egypt had “forbidden” Israel from launching a large-scale operation in the Gaza Strip, he added.

“The Egyptian side has felt after the Eilat operation that Israel intends to [get] revenge,” so Egypt has sent a strong message to Israel saying it won’t allow an operation to take place.


Massive Egyptian protests calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador over the border killing of 5 Egyptian policemen
Israel did not launch a large-scale operation because they fear the Egyptian people’s reaction, Othman added.

His remarks echoed reports in the Israeli media that Egyptian officials had conveyed messages to Israel that a large-scale military operation could lead Cairo to the point of suspending relations.

In talks held this week between a senior Egyptian official and a very high-placed official in Jerusalem, the latter told him: “We stopped the escalation in Gaza because of you,” according to the report in Maariv.

This was preceded by talks held between Defense Minister Ehud Barak with Gen. Hussein Tantawi and intelligence Chief Murad Muwafi, who conveyed messages in a similar vein, the report said.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian-brokered halt to recent violence appeared to be holding despite sporadic rocket fire from Gaza and an airstrike that killed a member of Islamic Jihad’s military wing late Tuesday.

The truce was announced Sunday evening following four days of violence sparked by a series of shooting ambushes near Eilat in southern Israel on Thursday in which eight Israelis died.

Israel launched a series of airstrikes in the aftermath of Thursday’s attack, killing 15 Palestinians and injuring more than 50. Among those killed was Popular Resistance Committees chief Kamal Al-Nayrab.

Also Wednesday, Israel’s army chief Benny Gantz ordered increased measures along the border with Egypt due to intelligence about new attacks being planned, according to a report in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Armed groups are planning attacks similar to the ones last Thursday, the report said.
The new defensive measures include putting in place additional means of electronic and visual intelligence gathering as well bolstering navy capabilities in the south, according to the report.

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12 - On Al-Quds Day, marches in Middle East call for liberating all of Palestine
aletho | August 26, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7SG

Al-Manar | August 26, 2011
Massive rallies for commemorating International Al-Quds Day have taken place Friday in various countries including Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, as well as Gaza and the West Bank in occupied Palestine.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, massive marches took place in various provinces, where people raised slogans like “Death to America”, “Death to Israel”, as well as pictures for Leader of the Islamic Revolution Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, and Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistances’ flags.

They chanted in support of Al-Quds and against all the Judaization conspiracies that the Zionist entity is executing against the sacred city.

For his part Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad delivered a speech before a crowd of commemorators in Tehran, in which he assured that Al-Quds Day is a day that revives human dignity, indicating that the Zionist entity is the axis of the unity of thieves in the world.

“The Zionist entity’s role is to spread incitement in the region and blocking any kind of development,” Ahmedinejad added.

Regarding the regional situation, the Iranian President emphasized that the right of self-determination, freedom, and spreading justice could not be attained with the assistance of the NATO forces or American military tanks. He further reassured that the West or the Zionist Entity will fail to have any Power in the new Middle East.

In Iraq, thousands of Iraqis, regardless of sect or affiliation, rallied in commemoration of Al-Quds Day. The Marchers called for the liberation of Al-Quds, and assured that it is the central cause for the region. Iraq furthered witnessed various conferences about Al-Quds and the importance of unity in order to defeat the Zionist entity and regain the Islamic Sanctity.

In parallel, millions of Egyptians demonstrated Friday near the Israeli embassy in response to Egyptian political and youth parties’ invitations for marches of millions, calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from their country.

The protestors raised Palestinian flags, pictures of late Egyptian President Jamal Abdul Nasser, and slogans against the occupying entity, including “We take part in Al-Quds Day to liberate Palestine”. They further called for ending diplomatic relations between Egypt and the Zionist entity, and reconsidering the application of the Camp-David accord.

In addition, Media reports have pointed out that demonstrators will return to the streets after the Iftar dinner and prayers, and will continue to protest until an official decision is issued regarding their demands.

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13 - Exploiting Norway’s Terror
aletho | August 29, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7Uw

Mr. and Mrs. Sikorski’s War on “Dangerous Emotions”

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | August 29, 2011
In the wake of any major terrorist event, it’s generally worth noting who is especially quick off the mark to exploit the tragedy.

Within hours of planes striking the World Trade Center on 9/11, the then former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak was in the BBC’s London studios calling for a “war on terror” against “rogue states” which just happened to be enemies of Israel (none of whose agents, unlike Israel’s, were seen filming and celebrating as the twin towers collapsed into their own footprint). And soon after ICTS International, an Israeli security firm established by former intelligence officers, allowed a young Nigerian without a passport to “slip through” Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to board Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day two years ago, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, the son of a suspected Mossad operative, was on CNN touting one of his client’s full-body scanners as the answer to America’s airline security problems.

In the case of the July 22 twin terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya Island, however, some of Israel’s more provocative propagandists appear to have been wrong-footed by Anders Behring Breivik’s apparent admiration for their Islamophobic rants. While the likes of Bat Ye’or, Daniel Pipes and Pamela Geller were seen scrambling to distance themselves from Breivik, Norway’s massacre has indeed been seized upon by others with their own, albeit less transparent, ties to the Jewish state.

During visits to two European capitals over the following week, Poland’s staunchly pro-Israel foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, appeared to be particularly exercised by the tragedy. While in London for discussions about the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the EU’s Eastern European policy, Sikorski took a swipe at some of his critics in Poland, where he claimed “there is no lack of people who think like Behring Breivik, a man who shot at his own people in order to bring down a government he believed had lost its political and legal right to govern.” The foreign minister, one of the highest-ranking Polish leaders not on board the plane that crashed killing much of Warsaw’s political and military leadership last year, said that his country also has “groups who believe that the democratically elected president and government are traitors who have no real interest in Poland or the Polish people. These are very dangerous emotions which, if stoked, could have unpredictable consequences.” As an example of such “dangerous emotions,” Sikorski cited an ongoing court case in which he is suing a couple of Polish newspapers for failing to remove readers’ anti-Semitic comments about his wife, Anne Applebaum.

Later in Brussels, before an emergency meeting of counter-terrorism officials on how to combat attacks such as Norway’s, the Polish foreign minister repeated his allegations during a press conference with his British counterpart, William Hague. Claiming that “certain political parties had expressed their approval of the terrorist,” Sikorski went on to cite the internet as “a potentially sinister tool for those bent on propagating agendas of hate.” Referring again to the remarks made online about his wife, he described the net as a “cesspool.”

The Polish foreign minister’s legal crusade against “dangerous emotions” had already received a significant endorsement in a May 11 op-ed piece in The Economist magazine from someone writing under the pseudonym “E.L.,” who described Sikorski as “an old friend of mine.” Reproducing one such comment in Polish which was considered “simply too unpleasant to translate,” E.L. cited “another rather milder one” which “merely accuses Mr Sikorski of being the ‘husband of an orthodox Jew, an enemy of Poland controlled by his father-in-law,’ bent on the ‘the destruction and destabilisation of Poland’ and a ‘hidden, ruthless traitor.’” Having disclosed that Sikorski was an “old friend,” E.L. somehow neglected to mention that the Polish foreign minister’s wife accused of betraying Poland to foreign interests is a former editor of The Economist. As for the op-ed writer’s own identity, it may be more than a coincidence that the name of the holding company owned by Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and his wife, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, which manages its investments in The Economist Group, owner of The Economist magazine, is E.L. Rothschild.

Sikorski’s allegedly influential father-in-law, Harvey Applebaum, is a partner in Covington and Burling, an international law firm which advises multinational corporations on significant transactional, litigation, regulatory, and public policy matters. Among its more controversial clients are Chiquita, the first major U.S. corporation to be convicted of financing terrorism; and Halliburton and Xe Services (formerly Blackwater), two of the biggest beneficiaries of the “war on terror.” Its current and former attorneys include such proficient pro-Israeli warmongers as John Bolton, senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (a former employer of both Mr. and Mrs. Sikorski); Stuart Eizenstat, Special U.S. Envoy for Holocaust Issues during the Clinton administrations; and the aforementioned Michael Chertoff.

Having covered the demise of the Soviet Union as a Warsaw-based correspondent for The Economist during the late 1980s,
Anne Applebaum has long been one of the most prominent anti-Russian advocates of economic and political “liberalisation” in the former Soviet Bloc and beyond. In a 2004 op-ed in The Washington Post, she dismissed as “Freedom Haters” those who saw “insidious neocon plots” behind the supposedly disinterested “democracy promotion” of George Soros and what she sarcastically referred to as “the evil triumvirate” of the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, which she praised for “diligently training judges, helping election monitors and funding human rights groups around the world for decades, much of the time without getting much attention for it.” Prefiguring her husband’s current concerns, Applebaum bemoaned “the international echo chamber that the Internet has become” in which such cynical ideas “have traction.”

In the wake of Norway’s terror, Anne Applebaum’s response was as swift as it was revealing. Within 48 hours, she had an op-ed piece in The Washington Post entitled “Norway massacre and anti-government obsession.” Sounding a similar note to Sikorski, she opined that Breivik’s obsessions “sprang from an insane conviction that his own government was illegitimate.” Applebaum, however, seemed more concerned about Americans who might think like Breivik. Coining the term “illegitimists” to describe Breivik’s supposed American analogues, she cited Birthers, who claim that Barack Obama isn’t American-born, as the contemporary right-wing manifestation. “It is not accidental,” Applebaum observed, “that the one note of sympathy for Breivik in the U.S. media came from the birtherist and illegitimist Glenn Beck, who helpfully compared the young Norwegians murdered by Breivik to Hitler youth. Presumably if they are Hitler youth, then they deserved to die?”

It is hardly accidental either that Applebaum, who has lauded Daniel Pipes as “one of the best” American analysts of the Middle East, omitted to mention that the Birther movement is spearheaded by Orly Taitz, a Soviet Jewish emigré and pro-Israel activist who had lived in Israel for years prior to her inciting Americans against their president; or that Glenn Beck — whose over-the-top exposés of influential figures such as George Soros conveniently serve to discredit more measured critiques — is engaged in a mutual love affair with the Israeli right-wing, whose backing has been crucial to his lucrative career of demagoguery.

After the Norway massacre, of course, it’s going be even harder for genuine critics of government to publicly express their displeasure. From now on, anyone who questions the bona fides of such avid “freedom lovers” as the Sikorskis and their powerful transnational associates risks being labelled a potential “Breivik” whose “dangerous emotions” need to be kept in check.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst.

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14 - Indicted war criminal on payroll of UK Israel lobby
aletho | August 22, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7PR

By David Cronin - The Electronic Intifada - 08/22/2011
On Friday, I wrote about how Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli brigadier general, is working for one of the most influential Zionist lobby outfits in London. After doing some more research, I realized that as well as being a “senior visiting fellow” with the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM), Herzog is the subject of war crime proceedings in Spain.

In January 2009, Spain’s national court decided to open an investigation into Herzog and six other Israeli political and military figures over their involvement in the 2002 bombing of a residential area in Gaza.

The attack was supposedly a “targeted assassination” of Salah Shehadeh, commander of Hamas’ military wing the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades. Along with Shehadeh, 14 other Palestinians died. They included a two month old infant, seven other children and two elderly men. Numerous others were injured in the blast from the 2,000 pound bomb used by Israeli forces; 11 houses in the al-Daraj district of Gaza City were irreparably damaged.

Herzog was an adviser to Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, then Israeli defense minister, at the time of the attack. On 29 January 2009, both men (and their co-accused) were ordered to present themselves in Spain within 30 days.

The case has been taken by four Spanish lawyers and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. The lawyers have invoked a law on universal jurisdiction, which allows the Spanish judicial authorities to investigate crimes against humanity throughout the world.

Fugitive from justice

This morning I called BICOM to ask if it was aware of the proceedings against Herzog when it decided to put him on its payroll. “I have no idea”, BICOM’s spokesman Dermot Kehoe told me, explaining that he was not yet working for BICOM when Herzog was appointed.

Kehoe promised to examine my query further and get back to me. If he does (and has anything of substance to say), I’ll happily update this blog post.

In the meantime, it is fair to surmise that BICOM was perfectly aware of the proceedings against Herzog, just as it was aware that he counselled Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defense minister, on the conduct of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

It is true that Herzog probably will not be held accountable for his crimes by a Spanish court. Miguel Moratinos, then Spain’s foreign minister, gave an undertaking to his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni in early 2009 that the Spanish universal jurisdiction law would be watered down. Directly as a result of Israeli pressure, the law (which has been in force since 1985) was amended last year.

Spain’s capitulation to Israel does not provide BICOM with any excuse for hiring an indicted war criminal. It should be noted, in particular, that the Spanish national court reprimanded the state of Israel for refusing to cooperate with its handling of the case against Herzog and his co-accused.

It can, therefore, be concluded that BICOM has hired a fugitive from justice.

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15 - Swedish chain kicks out drink machines made in Israeli settlements
aletho | August 29, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7UB

Sodastream lists pressure on companies to leave the West Bank as a “risk factor” in its SEC filing

By Stephanie Westbrook | The Electronic Intifada | 29 August 2011
The summer of 2011 has been a long, hot one for Israeli and international companies complicit in human rights violations in the occupied West Bank.

Facing an intense Europe-wide boycott campaign, Israel’s largest produce exporter, Agrexco, filed for bankruptcy. French multinational Veolia, an urban systems corporation contracted with the Israeli government to provide light rail services for Israeli settlers in the West Bank, announced massive losses due to sustained pressure by activists around the world.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, the Israeli maker of home carbonation devices, Sodastream, took a direct hit when the Coop supermarket chain announced on 19 July that it would stop all purchases of its products due to the company’s activity in illegal Israeli settlements. This marked another important victory for theboycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, as Sweden is Sodastream’s largest market, with an estimated one in five households owning a Sodastream product (“Coop Sweden stops all purchases of Soda Stream carbonation devices,” 21 July 2011).

The Israeli company has been the target of a two-year campaign by Swedish activists who seek to highlight the company’s complicity with the Israeli occupation. The main production facilities for Sodastream are located at Mishor Adumim, the industrial zone of the Israeli settlement Maaleh Adumim in the occupied West Bank.

Sodastream, whose products are sold in 41 countries, has repeatedly attempted to deflect attention from the factory in the occupied West Bank, claiming that it is just one of many around the world.

In an interview last March with the Israeli financial daily The Marker (published by Haaretz), Sodastream CEO Daniel Birnbaum went so far as to say that “all Sodastream products sold in Sweden are made in China, not Israel” (“Sodastream setting up plant within Green Line,” 3 March 2011).

Sodastream’s documents disprove its claims

Sodastream’s own annual report demonstrates Birnbaum’s claims to be patently false. On 30 June, the company filed a report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as required for publicly traded companies (Sodastream is listed on NASDAQ). That report describes that the 164,214-square-foot facilities at Mishor Adumim include “a metal factory, plastic and bottle blowing factory, machining factory, assembly factory, cylinder manufacturing facility, CO2 refill line and cylinder retest facility,” while two subcontractors in China produce nothing more than “certain components” for Sodastream products (“Sodastream International Ltd.; Annual report,” 30 June 2011 [PDF]).

The widely-trumpeted “factories around the world” — namely Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and the United States — are shown in the annual report to be limited to carbon dioxide refilling services.

Coop Sweden initially tried to defend its ties with Sodastream, repeating claims that the products on Swedish retailer shelves were made in China. However, as highlighted in a report presented to Coop by the Palestine Solidarity Association of Sweden (PGS) last January, the main issue was that the company had partnered with Israeli firms complicit in violations of international law (“PGS urges Coop to stop supporting the occupation,” 14 January 2011 [Swedish]).

As the PGS report emphasizes, “[A] product is part of a firm, and if you buy a product from a firm with an unethical operation, then you support the firm’s operation.”

The decision by Coop Sweden, with 21.5 percent of the Swedish grocery retail sector, came after a nationally televised report covering Sodastream’s ongoing operations in Mishor Adumim aired on 4 July. Using information from Israeli journalists and human rights organizations as well as Sodastream’s own corporate data, the TV4 report showed that despite claims to the contrary by both Sodastream and its Swedish distributor, Empire, products sold in Sweden were produced in an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. Promises had been made by Empire three years ago that production in the settlement would cease (“TV report: Continued production on occupied land,” 4 July 2011 [Swedish]).

Sodastream taxes finance settlement

Sodastream was a natural choice for the case study in corporate activity in illegal Israeli settlements in the detailed report released in January 2011 by theWho Profits project of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel (“Sodastream: A case study for Corporate Activity in Illegal Israeli Settlements,” January 2011 [PDF]).

The report underscores how purchasing Sodastream products directly supports the Maaleh Adumim settlement. In its report Who Profits states that the municipal taxes the company pays are used exclusively to “support the growth and development of the settlement.”

Created in 1974, the illegal industrial park at Mishor Adumim was integral to the establishment of the Maaleh Adumim settlement. The ministerial committee tasked with executing the plan to create the industrial park expropriated an area seven times that originally recommended, stealing lands from the surrounding Palestinian towns of Abu Dis, Azarya, al-Tur, Issawiya, Khan al-Ahmar, Anata and Nabi Moussa. The Who Profits report notes this is “considered the largest single expropriation in the history of the Israeli occupation.”

In addition to the industrial park, the ministerial committee also added a camp to the plan “for workers whose work is in the area.” One year later, the workers’ compound was erected and declared the settlement of Maaleh Adumim, and in 1977 as the Likud party gained power, the Israeli government officially recognized Maaleh Adumim as a “civilian community,” according to a report by Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Bimkom (“The Hidden Agenda: The Establishment and Expansion Plans of Ma’ale Adummim and their Human Rights Ramification,” December 2009 [PDF]).

Today, it is Israel’s largest settlement in terms of geographical area and, with 35,000 settlers, third in population. Strategically positioned to link settlements in East Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, Maaleh Adumim effectively bisects the West Bank, cutting off the north from the south.

Sodastream whitewashes exploitation of Palestinian workers

Meanwhile, the company’s leadership has attempted to paint Sodastream as an attractive place at which Palestinians would be lucky to work.

Sodastream Italy’s marketing director, Petra Schrott, responded with corporate talking points to a question posted on Yahoo Answers last June regarding the company’s West Bank location. Schrott described Sodastream as “a wonderful example of peaceful coexistence” where “160 Palestinians are employed and receive full social and health services” not to mention “daily hot meals” (“A question about Sodastream“ [Italian]).

As the Who Profits report points out, Palestinian workers, left with few choices other than working in settlements due to high unemployment in the West Bank, are “occupied subjects and thus they do not enjoy civil rights, and depend on their employers for work permits.” Efforts by Palestinian workers to organize and demand their due rights often result in the revocation of work permits, leading few to make any requests of their employers at all.

According to the Israeli workers rights organization Kav LaOved, Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements are underpaid, subjected to extensive security checks, exposed to workplace hazards and are left to fend for themselves if injured on the job (“Palestinian Workers in Israeli West Bank Settlements - 2009,” 13 March 2010).

Kav LaOved has assisted workers at the Sodastream factory in their struggle to obtain improved working conditions, better salaries and, at times, unpaid wages.

In 2008, workers complaining of pay far below the required minimum wage and twelve-hour workdays organized a protest at the factory after their appeals for better wages had met with no results. Seventeen workers were fired. It was only after Kav LaOved intervened via letters and meetings with Sodastream management and after Sodastream earned itself unflattering publicity in the Swedish press that the company — begrudgingly — rehired the Palestinian workers and granted them their due rights. However, as Kav LaOved noted, they remain “at the bottom of the hierarchy in the factory and constantly fear their dismissal.”

The story repeated itself in April 2010, when 140 Palestinian workers were fired and not paid their wages for the previous month. Kav LaOved again succeeded in obtaining back pay and in having the workers rehired, except for the two who led the struggle. Since that time, Kav LaOved has been unable to gather any information on working conditions at the Sodastream factory (“Employees at Soda Club fired without wages (follow up report),” 27 April 2010).

Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian workers at the Sodastream factory come from some of the very villages whose land was stolen to create Maaleh Adumim, including Abu Dis and Azarya — Azarya alone lost 57 percent of its village lands.

Greenwashing the occupation

Sodastream markets its products as “eco-friendly.” That’s an idea that is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the very settlement the company financially supports is responsible for “managing” the infamous Abu Dis landfill. That landfill is built on expropriated land from the village of the same name, where garbage from areas in Jerusalem and the surrounding settlements is dumped.

In June 2011, the Jerusalem municipality finally agreed to comply with an order from the Ministry of the Environment filed in October 2010 to reduce the 1,100 tons of waste per day being sent to Abu Dis because the dump was “polluting nearby streams and land” (“J’lem trash crisis solved, Abu Dis dump to be phased out,” The Jerusalem Post, 17 June 2011).

The Abu Dis landfill sits atop the Mountain Aquifer, the primary water source in the occupied West Bank. Under the Oslo accords, the agreement signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, Israel is granted four times more of the water from the aquifer than are Palestinians.

Furthermore, Palestinians are required to obtain approval for the development and maintenance of their own water resources from the Joint Water Committee. This joint Israeli-Palestinian committee, however, deals only with water and sewage-related issues within the West Bank, effectively giving Israel exclusive veto power on all decisions on water resource and infrastructure development, including in Oslo-designated areas A and B, areas of the West Bank ostensibly under Palestinian administrative control.

Since Oslo, not one new permit for agricultural wells has been issued and 120 existing Palestinian wells are not functioning for lack of approval for repairs, according to water rights organization Ewash. Palestinians are forced to purchase their own water from the Israeli water utility, Mekerot (“Water resources in the West Bank“ [PDF]).

Settlement investment a “risk factor”

In disclosing risk factors as required in SEC filings, Sodastream listed both remaining in and transferring from Mishor Adumim as potential liabilities. The risks associated with staying include “negative publicity, primarily in Western Europe, against companies with facilities in the West Bank” and “consumer boycotts of Israeli products originating in the West Bank.”

Complying with international law and leaving the illegal settlement, on the other hand, would “limit certain tax benefits” enjoyed by companies in industrial parks in illegal settlements.

However, for more and more companies, those tax incentives fail to compensate for the negative publicity. On 19 July, the multinational corporation Unilever, after unsuccessfully attempting to sell its shares in the company, formally announced plans to move its Bagel and Bagel pretzel factory from the Barkan industrial zone in the Ariel settlement bloc to within the green line, Israel’s internationally-recognized armistice line with the occupied West Bank (“Bagel Bagel leaving territories,” 19 July 2011).

And while the Israel Lands Administration announced tenders for six new factories in Mishor Adumim, Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now points out that this is a recycled tender issued under the Olmert administration in 2008, which failed to find any takers (“Boycott Law Passes Knesset - Now Govt Establishes New Factories in Settlements,” Peace Now, 14 July 2011).

Sodastream itself has exhibited signs of bowing to international campaigns against the company. A press release on 6 July announced the groundbreaking of a new factory within the green line. The new facility is expected to begin operations in 2013, the same year the lease on the Mishor plant is due to expire (“SodaStream Announces the Groundbreaking of a New Primary Manufacturing Facility,” 6 July 2011).

In the press release, CEO Birnbaum says the company looks forward to leveraging “free trade agreements with the EU and North America.” In 2010, Sodastream was at the center of a European Court of Justice ruling that declared products originating in the settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories ineligible for preferential trade tariffs under the EU-Israel Agreement. Though several other legal actions were included in Sodastream’s SEC filings, this particular case was conspicuously missing.

Sodastream looking to expand but meets protest

Sodastream is largely an export company with only three percent of sales made in Israel, according to an article published last February on the Israeli promotional site Israel 21c (“Putting the ‘pop’ back into soda pop,” 22 February 2011).

While Sweden is currently Sodastream’s largest market, the advertising blitz taking place in several European countries and the US indicates the company is looking to expand. On 12 July Sodastream announced a 3.4-million euro ($4.9 million) TV ad campaign in the UK, and in Italy a 1.8-million euro ($2.6 million) campaign was announced in June.

Sodastream’s annual report shows its advertising budget more than doubled from 10.5 million euros ($15 million) in 2009 to 21.5 million euros ($31 million) in 2010.

Sodastream identifies the US as its “most important target market” in its annual report and US activists are gearing up to meet the challenge. In a coordinated action last March, a petition with more than 2,500 signatures calling on Bed Bath & Beyond to stop selling Sodastream products (as well as products from Ahava, the settlement-based cosmetics company), was delivered to 15 locations up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to Los Angeles (“Tell Bed Bath & Beyond to Stop Carrying Illegal Settlement Products!”, CodePink).

Earlier this month, a group of activists dressed as brides held a mock wedding inside Bed Bath & Beyond in Los Angeles calling on concerned brides everywhere to strike Sodastream (and Ahava) off their bridal registries (“BDS Brides Boycott SodaStream and Ahava Sales at Bed Bath & Beyond,” YouTube, 12 August 2011).

The recent decision by Coop Sweden, as well as the financial woes of occupation-complicit companies, will give BDS campaigns around the world a boost. And the comments sections for online Sodastream promotional pieces provide a prime space for activists to get the word out on Sodastream’s complicity in human rights violations.

Stephanie Westbrook is a US citizen based in Rome, Italy. Her articles have been published on Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Electronic Intifada, In These Times and Z Magazine. She can be reached at steph AT webfabbrica DOT com.

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16 - Rothschild Reuters and Jerusalem Post pushing lies to justify killing of Palestinians

Israeli "Heron" Drone
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

In the past days, multiple news agencies have been deliberately pushing a false narrative in order to justify the most recent Israeli murder of Palestinians, including civilians and children.

This deliberately falsified narrative surrounds a purported Hamas broadcast that declared an end to the ceasefire that was declared post-Cast Lead in 2009, the operation in which Israel systematically slaughtered Palestinian civilians.

Amnesty International characterized Operation Cast Lead as “22 Days of Death and Destruction” and Hamas is more than aware of the fact that Israel would relish the ability to conduct another operation in the same vein.

While Hamas militants have not taken responsibility for any of the rocket attacks and have, in fact, been arresting suspected militants, Reuters published that, “A Hamas radio station announced the group’s armed wing had decided 'there is no longer any truce with the enemy,' alluding to a 2009deal that ended a three week Israeli offensive targeting militants firing rockets at the Jewish state.”


When they acknowledge the fact that an official spokesperson for the Qassam brigades, the military arm of Hamas,completely denied Hamas support for this statement they spin it by characterizing the official statement as “an apparent attempt to ease tensions later”.

Apparently a broadcast on a purported Hamas station is a completely reliable and authoritative source, even when it is directly contradicted by the official party leadership.

This caliber of “journalism” from Reuters is appalling, especially given their status as a supposedly balanced news service.

Not surprisingly, the Jerusalem Post didn’t even bother publishing all of the facts and instead opted for publishing only that which justifies their aggression.

The Jerusalem Post reports, “Hamas announced early on Saturday they were no longer committed to a more than two-year de facto truce with Israel since the end of a war in early 2009.

The statement was broadcast over a Hamas radio station in Gaza after Israel pounded the Strip for two days with air strikes in response to rocket fire and terror attacks on Thursday that killed eight people.

“There is no longer any truce with the enemy,” the statement said in a move seen as paving the way for Hamas to escalate the violence with Israel.”

It is interesting how these news outlets choose to make a wide range of suppositions based upon nothing other than their preconceived notions.

These so-called journalists seem to think themselves experts on everything from the legitimacy of aradio broadcast over an official statement to the intentions behind such a statement regardless of the complete lack of validity to drawing conclusions based on illegitimate statements.

Israel Radio reports that since Thursday afternoon 35 rockets have landed in Israel.

It is not clear if this includes the occupied territories (which are no more Israel than your house is my backyard) and the Jerusalem Post article manages to mention the attack that killed eight yesterday twice in the brief article.

The number of Palestinians killed in the past 24 hours alone dwarfs the Israeli deaths, although I am by no means trying to minimize the sadness of any loss of life.

Unlike the Jerusalem Post reporter, I consider the death of any human being to be a tragedy. Therefore, one must take note of the fact that at least 15 Palestinians were murdered in the past day alone, not to mention another 30 injured in the Gaza Strip by Israeli airstrikes.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not try to conceal the fact that they are disproportionally slaughtering Palestinians and will continue to do so.

The level of brazenness with which Netanyahu speaks of slaughtering innocent people should make any human being sick to their stomach.

Reuters reports that he said, “We have a policy of exacting a very heavy price of anyone who attacks us and this policy is being implemented,” when he visited wounded Israelis on Friday.

While the Jerusalem Post and Reuters seem to be trying to project the false notion that Hamas is behind and in support of the rocket attacks and recent terrorist strike, the reality of the situation is a bit different.

As I reported yesterday, the Popular Resistance Committee, or PRC, was initially blamed for the attack that resulted in the death of eight Israelis near the Eilat resort near the Red Sea.

However, the PRC adamantly denied any involvement in the ambushes while claiming responsibility for some of the rocket attacks on Friday.

Currently, I do not think it is unreasonable to posit that Thursday’s attack could very well be a false flag which has already been used to justify renewed bombing runs.

In the coming days I am going to write an in-depth analysis of the increasing tensions between Egypt and Israel, including the multiple instances of Israeli spying and what appears to be a large-scale effort to sterilize the Egyptian population.

Egypt has been visibly angered by the murder of Egyptians at the hands of Israel in the wake of Thursday’s attacks and Israel has accused Egypt’s new military dictatorship of losing control of the Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt has reported that one army officer and two security officials were killed on the Egyptian side of the Israel-Egyptian border but have not given lucid details on how they were murdered.

The Israeli Defense Force alleged that there was a firefight between IDF troops and “militants” along the Israeli-Egyptian border and has claimed in an official statement that they “will investigate the matter thoroughly and update the Egyptians.”

Not surprisingly, the United States Department of State has only condemned the possible false flag attack on Israel while remaining silent on the disproportionate murder of Palestinians and the killing of Egyptians.

Stay tuned in the coming days and weeks for our exclusive coverage and analysis of the developing tensions between Cairo and Jerusalem, as well as the emerging evidence of the possible false flag attack.


Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at admin@EndtheLie.com

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17 - It’s Still Occupied Territory

By Philip Giraldi

August 09, "AmConservative" -- That twenty per cent of the House of Representatives will be spending its recess holiday on American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) paid tours of Israel does not seem to have made the mainstream news. The tours, one consisting of 26 Democratic congressmen headed by House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, and two others of 55 Republicans, one led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, are ostensibly intended to provide congress with a “deeper understanding” of the situation in the Middle East. Sure it will, but one suspects the understanding will be in one direction only.

Cantor is trying hard to replace John Boehner as Speaker of the House by moving to the right on both the economy and on foreign policy, where his views are strictly Israel-first wrapped in the usual neocon packaging incorporating assertive projection of US national power. In November 2010, he met privately with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged that the Republican Party would serve as a “check” against any unwelcome initiatives by President Obama. At the time Cantor was not yet Majority Leader of the House but his offer to support a foreign leader against the president of his own country went unchallenged and did not in any way impede his march onward and upward. Cantor is now also setting himself up as a darling of the tea partiers in the wake of the recent government debt ceiling debacle.

Meanwhile back on Capitol Hill, other friends of Israel were busy prior to recess, also without any mainstream media coverage. Two congresswomen from Florida, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have introduced legislation that will allow Holocaust survivors living in the United States to receive federal funds to help them stay in their homes, rather than having to move to an institution. The bipartisan bill places survivors on a special list of elderly citizens receiving preferred treatment through a grant program to help them with their transportation and other needs.

“As a nation that upholds the values of freedom, liberty and justice, we have a moral obligation to acknowledge the plight and uphold the dignity of Holocaust survivors to ensure their well-being,” Wasserman Schultz said. “We must do all we can to honor their struggles and their lives by improving their access to transportation to get them where they need to go, and improve their home-care options so that they can have peace of mind. This bill does just that, and it’s time to make it happen.”

Americans who really like Israel and everything that pertains to it are certainly free to express their views, but there is something unseemly and even grotesque about the continuous promotion of foreign and ethnic group interests ahead of those of the United States and other American citizens. AIPAC is a lobby dedicated to maintaining uncritical US government support for a foreign country and it can be argued that Washington entered into at least one foreign war because of it. The congressmen who accept the junkets should be asking themselves whose interests they are really serving. At a time when both Democrats and Republicans are openly discussing cutting medical benefits for ordinary Americans, it is also difficult to understand what twisted thinking supports allocating additional taxpayer provided special medical benefits to some medicare recipients based on events that took place thousands of miles away from the US more than sixty-six years ago.
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18 - Campaign to end US aid to Israel expands to San Francisco cable cars
by HENRY NORR on AUGUST 25, 2011


















































































































































































































































































































































































































AD CALLING FOR END TO U.S. AID TO ISRAEL ON A SAN FRANCISCO CABLE CAR































































A new series of ads calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel now greets commuters, tourists, students, and shoppers traveling on the San Francisco Bay Area's public transit systems.The ads, part of a growing national campaign, went up this week on the Powell Street cable car, a popular tourist attraction in downtown San Francisco; in three of the busiest stations on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) - San Francisco's Civic Center, 12th St. Oakland, and Downtown Berkeley; and on the Muni level of the Embarcadero station in San Francisco. Next week the same ad will be posted in the 16th St./ Mission station in San Francisco.

Chief sponsor of the local ad campaign is Northern California Friends of Sabeel, the local affiliate of an international peace movement initiated by Palestinian Christians to bring justice and peace to the Holy Land through non-violence and education. Co-sponsors include Jewish Voice for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, the Middle East Children's Alliance, and Bay Area Women in Black.

The new ads now feature photos of Jeff Halper, a Minnesota-born Israeli professor; Salim Shawamreh, a Palestinian construction supervisor born in Jerusalem; and a grandchild of each. Halper is co-founder and coordinator of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD); Shawamreh's Jerusalem home has been destroyed by Israeli wrecking crews, then rebuilt by volunteers organized by ICAHD, four times since 1998. The two men and their families have become close friends. They have toured the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom, speaking out against Israel's 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.

A previous round of similar ads in BART stations not only garnered considerable coverage in the local media, but also provoked a series of counter-ads sponsored by an Israel Lobby organization called Stand With Us. In response to complaints about those ads, BART removed them on the grounds that they appeared "disparaging or demeaning to Palestinians as a whole" and violated the district’s advertising standards; they were then replaced with new ads accusing the Palestinian leadership of "teaching hate and violence."

Shortly afterwards, a group of anonymous activists surreptitiously posted unofficial - i.e., not paid for - ads in several BART stations calling on passersby to help "Stop Israeli Apartheid" and to "Boycott Israel."

Northern California Friends of Sabeel's campaign is part of an initiative launched in October 2010 by a Chicago-area community group called the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine. Since then similar ads have appeared in transit stations, on buses, or on billboards in Washington, DC; Boston, MA; Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ; and Albuquerque, NM. More cities are planning their own campaigns soon.
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19 - The greatest elected body that money can buy (UPDATED)


Posted By Stephen M. Walt

Just when you think your contempt for Congress could not get any higher, our elected representatives manage to do something to ratchet it up another notch. After congressional shenanigans helped spark a major market sell-off and sparked fears of a double-dip recession, you'd think every single one of them would be heading back to their districts to figure out what their constituents wanted and to try to explain how they were going to help make things better. Or maybe a few of them would even spend the recess taking a crash course in macroeconomics and public finance, so that they could start exercising their public duties more responsibly.

But what did 81 of them decide to do instead? You guessed it: they are off on junkets to Israel, paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC spinoff that has been funding such trips for years. That's right: during the August recess nearly a fifth of the U.S. Congress will visit a single country whose entire population is less than that of New York City.

Such behavior is especially disturbing in light of our current woes; even Greta Van Susteren of Fox News found it appalling (h/t Mondoweiss here and here). But it's not really a new pattern: in recent decades about 10 percent of all Congressional trips overseas have been to Israel, even though it is only one of the nearly 200 countries in the world.

Why do Congresspersons do this, especially at a moment when it is obvious that they ought to be worrying about conditions here at home? Mostly because such junkets burnish a legislator's ‘pro-Israel' credentials and facilitate campaign fundraising. Such trips also expose these visitors to the policy preferences and basic worldview of Israel's leaders, which is of course why AIEF pays for them.

I suppose I ought to be grateful that AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to work overtime to prove me and my co-author right. But there are bigger issues at stake here, which is why I hope that every one of those eighty-plus Congressmen faces a lot of nasty questions from their constituents upon their return.

And in a related story, the Israeli government has just announced a new round of settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem. (For apt commentary, see Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress here.) If you've been wondering why most people have lost faith in U.S. stewardship of the peace process and are turning to other strategies--such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement or the push for a Palestinian state at the UN --well, I think you have your answer. And if "two states for two peoples" is never achieved and Israel ceases to be either a Jewish majority state or a true democracy, you'll know exactly which misguided or feckless Americans helped bring that about.

UPDATE: American taxpayers will be pleased to know that Representative Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) has reassured Israelis that financial challenges "will not have any adverse effect on America's determination to meet its promise to Israel." Translation: we may be cutting Medicare and Social Security for U.S. citizens, but Israelis--whose country has the 27th highest per capita income in the world--will continue to get generous subsidies from Uncle Sucker.

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20 - British teachers undergo training at Yad Vashem


By JEREMY SHARON
08/14/2011 01:32


Twenty high school teachers learn to make the Holocaust more accessible to children as part of three-week course.Twenty high-school teachers brought to Israel by the UK-based Holocaust Education Trust will complete on Sunday a 10-day education training seminar at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem.

The group, which arrived in Israel on August 5, participated in a series of workshops and lectures conducted by leading academics and experts, covering issues such as 19th-century anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish life between the world wars in Poland, the Final Solution, and Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust.

RELATED:
Israel observes 2 minute silence to honor Shoah victims
Yad Vashem collecting personal items from Holocaust

“The Holocaust is a heavy and complex topic, and it’s hard to make it accessible to children,” Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Education Trust, told The Jerusalem Post on Friday. “High-school students aren’t going to gain an understanding and appreciation of the Holocaust over night, but the course really empowers the teachers who come back from it to make it as meaningful as possible and to teach it in a sensitive manner.”

Now in its sixth year, the 10-day course at Yad Vashem is part of a three-week Holocaust Education Trust program involving a week-long introductory course in the UK, the visit to Israel, and a final week back in Britain to integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during the entire course.

“We must never shy away from facing up to humanity at its worst, said Emma Mckean, a history and religious studies teacher from Fife in Scotland. “Historical truth has to be the foundation of what we do and facing up to the truth is the best defense against those who would deny it or passively accept that it happened without learning anything from it.”

Lisa Hagan, an English teacher from Coventry, spoke of the importance of studying those who carried out atrocities during the Holocaust and the capability of humans to harm each other.

“Many of the perpetrators were normal people and they weren’t just a small section of the population,” Hagan said. “This is the most dangerous aspect of the Holocaust and it tells us something very disturbing about the nature of humanity. Genocide has not been removed from our landscape, and as long as humans have the capability to commit such crimes, an event like the Holocaust needs to be studied and examined.”

Speaking about the impact and effectiveness of current Holocaust education in the UK, Karen Pollock said that although most young people do have a comprehension of the basic facts and details of the Holocaust, broader understanding of the historical processes leading up to it and the affect it had on individual lives is harder to judge. It is for precisely this reason that the Holocaust Education Trust continues to provide educational services for as many teachers in the UK as possible.

“We want to get students to think about the issues and reflect on them. It’s not simply about passing an exam or knowing a date,” she said.

More broadly, Pollock says the Holocaust Education Trust tries to educate students not only about the historical event but about its implications and lessons for the future.

“Our aims are to teach about the people who died, but also to try to get young people to examine how and why it happened and what message they can take from it in their own lives. We see students who have studied the Holocaust in a serious manner become much sensitized to issues of contemporary prejudice, whether it’s anti-Semitism, racism or general hatred toward the other.”
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21 - QUOTES FOR A PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY - ADDITION 110830

1790 - MEYER AMSCHEL ROTHSCHILD
“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

1800 - NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
“The hand that gives is among the hand that takes.
Money has no motherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.”
In France, the Bank of France is set up and Napoleon realizes that a free France, would mean a country free of debt.


1807 - THOMAS JEFFERSON, THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE USA (1801-1809)
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.
Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.”
President Jefferson provides one of the first honest insights into the dishonesty and corruptibility of the media.


1815 - NATHAN MAYER ROTHSCHILD
“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England, to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets.
The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire.
And I control the British money supply.”

1827 - SIR WALTER SCOTT
The French Revolution was planned by the, “Illuminati,” (Adam Weishaupt, A CRYPTO-JEW) and financed by the money changers of Europe (The Rothschilds’).

Sir Walter Scott in volume 2 of his nine volume set, “The Life of Napoleon”.




1832 - JACKSON, 7th PRESIDENT OF THE USA (1829-1837) ON THE SECOND (ROTHSCHILD) BANK OF THE USA
“It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our Government.
More than eight millions of the stock of the Bank are held by foreigners...
Is there no danger to out liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country?
Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence ... would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy. If government would confine itself to equal protection and, as Heaven does its rains, shower the favor alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.”


1833 - JACKSON, 7TH PRESIDENT OF THE USA (1829-1837) ON THE ROTHSCHILDS AND THE SECOND BANK OF THE USA
“You are a den of thieves’ vipers, and I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out.”
President Jackson has removed the government’s deposits from the Rothschild controlled Second Bank of the United States and deposited them into banks directed by democratic bankers. The Rothschilds’ reacted by doing what they do best : They contract the money supply and cause a depression.

1834 - JACKSON, 7TH PRESIDENT OF THE USA (1829-1837) ON THE SECOND (ROTHSCHILD) BANK OF THE USA
He vetoes the decision of Congress to extend the charter of the Second (Rothschild) Bank of the USA and takes his argument directly to the people. The slogan for the campaihn of his second term is “Jackson And No Bank!”
President Jackson is re-elected by a landslide in November, but knows the battle is only beginning. Following his victory he states :
“The hydra of corruption is only scorched, not dead !”


1858 - LORD HARRINGTON
“They are the great moneylenders and loan contractors of the world...
The consequence is that the nations of the world are groaning under heavy systems of taxation and national debt.
They have ever been the greatest enemies of freedom.”
July 12th, 1858, Lord Harrington in his speech in the House of Lords, opposing the admission of Jewish immigrants to England.


1910 (?) - PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR JESSE HERMAN HOLMES
“It can hardly be an accident that antagonism directed against the Jews is to be found pretty much everywhere in the world where Jews and non-Jews are associated. And as the Jews are the common element of the situation it would seem probable, on the face of it, that the cause will be found in them, rather than in the widely varying groups which feel this antagonism.”
Professor Jesse H. Holmes (1864-1942), a Quaker philosophy professor at Swarthmore College, writing in “The American Hebrew”.


1939 - GEORGE VAN HORN MOSELEY, BRIGADIER GENERAL
The war now proposed is for the purpose of establishing Jewish hegemony throughout the world.
Brigadier General George Van Horn Moseley, The New York Tribune, March 29, 1939.


1935 - VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY
There is only one power which really counts.
The power of political pressure.
We Jews are the most powerful people on earth, because we have this power, and we know how to apply it.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, Jewish Daily Bulletin, July 27, 1935 (ex ''THE JEWS DECLARE WAR ON GERMANY'').


1945 - JAMES FORRESTAL
Played golf with Joe Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to Britain). He says that Chamberlain stated (despairingly) that America and world Jewry forced England into World War II.
James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy (later Secretary of Defence), Diary, December 27, 1945 entry. Forrestal was suicided by zionists s few years later.
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22 - Rick Perry Abuses His Office for Israel

Posted By Philip Giraldi On August 3, 2011

Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the reciprocal relationship between a government and its people as a “social contract.” Even from the first legal code by the Babylonian Hammurabi, one learns that the principal benefit that government bestows on the people is the promise of justice. By the time of the Roman Republic, the principle of equal justice under the law for all citizens was enshrined as a fundamental right, even though it might sometimes be abused by the rich and powerful. When that abuse became the norm because of corruption, the Republic fell. The framers of the U.S. Constitution carefully studied the demise of the ancient experiments in representative government. They sought to create a system with checks and balances and a Bill of Rights that would guarantee fundamental fairness in the way that the law was applied, without fear or favor.

In the federal republic that is the United States, there are 51 chief executive officers. They are the president and the 50 state governors. They all swear an oath to uphold their respective constitutions and to see that justice is administered impartially to all the people. In a certain sense, it is their principal responsibility, because the law is the cornerstone of respect for individual liberties. Any abuse of the judicial system will inevitably produce many other evils.

To be fair, most governors take the responsibility to ensure equal justice seriously, even if presidents of the United States since 2001 have not. Unfortunately, when a governor chooses to make a run for the presidency, a type of amnesia compounded by political triangulation sets in. Not wishing to be seen as someone whose view is restricted to one state or region, the gubernatorial presidential candidate expands his horizons by taking on an international role and begins to reach out to constituencies that have nothing to do with his or her state. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has done so by moving to the right of fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachmann as the “hawk” among the Republicans candidates, out-George-W.-Bushing George W. Bush in his embrace of overseas interventions. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who has yet to declare his candidacy but who is seen by many as a potential front-runner, is apparently also sharpening his foreign policy credentials. And he is doing it in the traditional way by cozying up to the Israel Lobby.

On June 28, 2011, Perry wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder regarding “Violations of U.S. Law by Organizers of Gaza Flotilla.” The letter is on official state letterhead, and Perry signed it as governor, not as a private citizen. Now you might well express surprise that such a communication even exists; after all, what does the Gaza flotilla have to do with the governance of Texas? Perry does not exactly answer that question except by noting that he is an “American citizen and governor of one of its largest states.” His letter claims that the flotilla would “interfere with Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip,” and it calls on Holder to prevent “these illegal actions” and “prosecute anyone who may elect to engage in them.”Citing “additional information provided … by Shurat HaDin,” the letter asserts that “a coalition of violent anti-Israeli organizations” is behind the flotilla.


To strengthen his case, Perry further maintains that the flotilla is a “naval expedition against a people with whom the United States is at peace … with the intent that it be employed to commit hostilities” and that it constitutes, under the PATRIOT Act, “provision of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” He then reminds Holder that last year’s Gaza flotilla ended with the “deaths of nine people and serious injury to numerous IDF SEALs and other Israelis.” Perry concludes by calling on Holder to “bring to justice all parties found to be in violation of U.S. law by their participation in these efforts.”

Where to start? First of all, Perry is a governor who is acting in his official capacity on behalf of a foreign country in criminalizing a peaceful protest by U.S. citizens taking place 7,000 miles away and in which his state has no possible interest. It is by no means clear who exactly egged the governor on to write the letter, but he does cite the assistance of Shurat HaDin, the Israeli lawfare center, which is dedicated to using lawsuits to silence any and all criticism of Israel. You might reasonably conclude that Perry is engaged in pandering to the many friends of Israel in the media and elsewhere and is making sure that he is in the good graces of the Israel Lobby in case he decides to make his presidential run, but it is also possible that he believes what he has written. He is an evangelical who has visited Israel a number of times, pledged his undying loyalty to the government of that country, and on a 2007 visit received the Friend of Zion award.

Perry is wrong in every citation of “fact” with which he makes his case. It is Israel’s blockade of Gaza, not the flotilla, that is generally considered illegal under international law. The flotilla participants all signed nonviolence pledges and had the cargoes of their ships meticulously inspected before the planned departure so there would be no question about whether they were carrying potentially lethal or contraband materials. The suggestion that the ships constituted a “naval expedition” or planned to “commit hostilities” is completely delusional, coming straight out of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s playbook, and the recommendation that the Americans on board should be prosecuted for aiding terrorism is something that Joseph Stalin would be proud of.

And the alleged results of last year’s flotilla? Nine dead to be sure, all unarmed Turks, one of whom also happened to be an American citizen, which does not appear to interest Perry at all. At least one of the dead was shot in the head at close range, but Perry’s recalls only the “numerous” injuries to the heavily armed Israeli commandos “and other Israelis.” Maybe he is referring to an IDF storm trooper breaking a fingernail while rifling through flotilla participants’ personal possessions to steal money, cellphones, and cameras.

Perry calls on the United States government to prosecute as criminals and terrorist supporters a group of American citizens who had, at that point, broken no law, were clearly intending not to break any laws, and were in any event incapable of engaging in any violent or subversive act. And he does so on behalf of a foreign government, Israel, uncritically using information provided by that government to make his case. If Eric Holder had been foolish enough to heed Perry’s advice, a number of American citizens might well have to risk spending the rest of their lives in a federal prison for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

I have to question how a man of so little moral character as Rick Perry gets to be governor of a large state in the first place, but that is perhaps a discussion for another place and another time. If the people of Texas were seriously concerned about the Constitution and civil liberties, they would remove him from office for his attempt to criminalize the actions of a group of innocent citizens. When a government believes itself to be empowered to go after its own people on trumped-up charges, watch out. When it does so on behalf of a foreign government, all kinds of warning flags should be going up. That no one in the media or punditry seems to care is a tribute to the grip that Israel and its friends have over politics in the United States. And that is precisely why I and other contributors to Antiwar.com keep raising the issue of Israel. Its tight embrace and the policies that it forces on the sheep in Washington are central to what is wrong with us as a nation. Until we loosen that hold, we will continue to stumble and fall, and we will have the presidents that we deserve, possibly including Rick Perry.

Read more by Philip Giraldi
Whose Congress and State Department? – August 24th, 2011
Rick Perry and the Neocons – August 17th, 2011
Big Brother Has Arrived – August 10th, 2011
Terrorism Experts on Parade – July 27th, 2011
Hillary Cracks the Whip – July 20th, 2011

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Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/08/03/rick-perry-abuses-his-office-for-israel/



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23 - ARTICLE LINKS INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE


In Case You Missed It
Libyan Rebel Leader Spent Much of Past 20 Years in Langley Virginia (WHERE THE CIA IS)


Must read/watch - By Chris Adams


Hifter lived in suburban Virginia outside Washington, D.C. Badr said he was unsure exactly what Hifter did to support himself.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27795.htm




CIA's Bay of Pigs Foreign Policy Laid Bare


By Carol Rosenberg


A once-secret CIA history detail how the American spy agency came to the rescue of and cut deals with authoritarian governments in Central America.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28978.htm





The Decade's Biggest Scam


By Glenn Greenwald


So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28983.htm





9/11: Ten Years Later
Americans Still Stupid and Vulnerable


By Ted Rall


In fairness to Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld and Bush's other leading war criminals, everyone else went along with them. The media refused to question them. Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, cast votes in favor of Bush's wars.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28975.htm




First Federal Reserve Audit Reveals Trillions in Secret Bailouts


By Matthew Cardinale


The first-ever audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve has revealed 16 trillion dollars in secret bank bailouts and has raised more questions about the quasi-private agency's opaque operations.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28979.htm



NATO's dirty plan in Libya:


It is the obvious success of traitors promoting NATO's interests, selling Libya to foreign powers. Many traitor regimes have established themselves by serving enemies interest. This is another such case. We should not be among the first fools to extend recognition to the NATO surrogates. Another country falls to western imperialism.
http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=111418






Anger simmers among pro-Qaddafi Libyans in Tripoli:


"You media don't tell the truth, you're all traitors, spies," shouted a taxi driver, his face contorted in anger, not caring that nearby were armed and zealous rebels.
http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article495241.ece






Unseen face of the Libyan conflict:


Peel back the veneer of 'objectivity', and the media's record on the Libyan conflict is laid bare.
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/187159/unseen-face-libyan-conflict.html





What I Learned About Libya:


Video
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28982.htm


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Gaza teen dies from injuries sustained in Israeli airstrikes:


A teenager in Gaza died on Monday after being seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike on Beit Lahiya 10 days earlier, medics said.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=416937






Palestinian Authority condemns Tel Aviv terror attack:


Palestinian Authority releases statement condemning 'all attacks against civilians,' including Tel Aviv attack and IDF strikes on Gaza.
http://bit.ly/oAnMXC



Russia disagrees with western resolution on Syria:


The draft resolution of the UN Security Council on Syria submitted by the USA and the EU lacks objectivity, declared Russia's permanent representative in the UN Vitaly Churkin in his interview for the Russia Today TV channel.
http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/08/29/55353534.html






Manufacturing Consent For Attack On Syria:
Calls in Syria for weapons, NATO intervention:


Protesters in recent days have carried banners calling for a no-fly zone over Syria akin to the one that facilitated the Libyan revolt. "We want any [intervention] that stops the killing, whether Arab or foreign," said one banner held by protesters in the beleaguered town of Homs.
http://wapo.st/nEaLZZ

Syria would be a quagmire for NATO, Iran says : -


Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has said that NATO will get bogged down in a quagmire if it launches a military campaign against Syria.
http://bit.ly/n1Q5PD





DEMOCRACY AT LAST




Female Trafficking Soars in Iraq:


Prostitution and sex trafficking are epidemic in Iraq, where the violence of military occupation and sectarian strife have smashed national institutions, impoverished the population and torn apart families and neighbourhoods. Over 100,000 civilians have been killed and an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis displaced since 2003
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104911


Revolution is a Potluck


By Cindy Sheehan


Back in the days of the Great Depression in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, "community" wasn't a concept, it was a reality-with longevity in residence, no TV box, and multi-generational homes-for better, or worse, we needed each other.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28981.htm



What's Going On With The Economy?


By Mike Whitney


Monday's report on consumer spending is a perfect example of how the media distorts the news to create a cheery narrative of "economic recovery".
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28985.htm




Powell: Cheney's Book Is Full of 'Cheap Shots':


A visibly angry Colin Powell used an appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday to blast former Vice President Dick Cheney for using "cheap shots" and "barbs" to drive up sales of his new memoir
http://bit.ly/nOilMI
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24 - ELLEN BROWN : S&P and the Bilderbergers : All Part of the Plan ?

Become a Fan

opednews.com


S&P downgrade by KansasCity.com


What just happened in the stock market? The week of 8-8-11, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose or fell by at least 400 points for four straight days, a stock market first.

The worst drop was on 8-8-11, when the Dow plunged 624 points. That was the first day of trading after US Treasury bonds were downgraded from AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poor's.

But the roller coaster actually began on Tuesday, 8-2-11, the day after the last-minute deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling -- a deal that was supposed to avoid the downgrade that happened anyway five days later. The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions after that, another first.

The volatility was unprecedented, leaving analysts at a loss to explain it. High frequency program trading no doubt added to the wild swings, but why the daily reversals? Why didn't the market head down and just keep going, as it did in September 2008?

The plunge on 8-8-11 was the worst since 2008 and the sixth largest stock market crash ever.According to Der Spiegel, one of the most widely read periodicals in Europe:


"Many economists have been pointing out that last week's panic resembled the fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

"Then as now, banks stopped lending each other money. Then as now, banks' cash deposits at the central bank doubled within days."

On Tuesday, August 9, however, the market gained more points from its low than it lost on Monday. Why? A tug of war seemed to be going on between two titanic forces, one bent on crashing the market, the other on propping it up.

The Dubious S&P Downgrade

Many commentators questioned the validity of the downgrade that threatened to collapse the market. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in astatement:

"The Treasury Department revealed that S&P's decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in a ccounting. However, even after this enormous error was corrected, S&P went ahead with the downgrade. This suggests that S&P had made the decision to downgrade independent of the evidence." [Emphasis added.]

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, was also skeptical, stating:

"[E]verything I've heard about S&P's demands suggests that it's talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation. The agency has suggested that the downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit reduction over the next decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic number. Yet US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs . . . .

"In short, S&P is just making stuff up -- and after the mortgage debacle, they really don't have that right."

In an illuminating expos� posted on Firedoglake on August 5, Jane Hamsher concluded:

"It's becoming more and more obvious that Standard and Poor's has a political agenda riding on the notion that the US is at risk of default on its debt based on some arbitrary limit to the debt-to-GDP ratio. There is no sound basis for that limit, or for S&P's insistence on at least a $4 trillion down payment on debt reduction, any more than there is for the crackpot notion that a non-crazy US can be forced to default on its debt. . . .

"It's time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political agenda is and whom it serves."

Who Drove the S&P Agenda?

Jason Schwarz shed light on this question in an article on Seeking Alpha titled "The Rise of Financial Terrorism" . He wrote:

"[A]fter the market close on Friday August 5th, we received word that S&P CEO Deven Sharmah ad taken control of the ratings agency and personally led the push for a U.S. downgrade. There is a lot of evidence that he has deliberately tried t o trash the U.S. economy . Even after discovering that the S&P debt calculations were off by $2 trillion, Sharma made the decision to go ahead with the unethical downgrade. This is a guy who was a key co ntributor at the 2009 Bilderberg Summit that organized 120 of the world's richest men and women to push for an end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.

"[T]hrough his writings on 'competitive strategy' S&P CEO Sharma considers the United States the PROBLEM in today's world, operating with what he implies is an unfair and reckless advantage. The brutal reality is that for 'globalization' to succeed the United States must be torn asunder . . ."


Also named by Schwarz as a suspect in the market manipulations was Michel Barnier, head of European Regulation. Barnier triggered an alarming 513-point drop in the Dow on August 4, when he blocked the plan of Hans Hoogervorst, newly appointed Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, to save Europe by adopting a new rule called IFRS 9. The rule would have eliminated mark-to-market accounting of sovereign debt from European bank balance sheets. Schwarz writes:

"We all should be experts on the dangers of mark-to-market accounting after observing the U.S. banking crisis of 2008/2009 and the Great Depression in the 1930s. Mark-to-market was repealed at 8:45 a.m on April 2, 2009, which finally put a stop to the short term liquidity crisis and at the same time ushered in a stock market recovery. Banks no longer had to raise capital as long term stability was brought back to the system. The exact same scenario would have happened in 2011 Europe under Hoogervorst's plan. Without the threat of failure by those banks who hold high amounts of euro sovereign debt, investors would be free to move on from the European crisis and the stock market could resume its fundamental course."

Schwarz notes that Barnier, like Sharma, was a confirmed attendee at past Bilderberger conferences. What, then, is the agenda of the Bilderbergers?

The One World Company

Daniel Estulin, noted expert on the Bilderbergers, describes that secretive globalist group as " a medium of bringing together financial institutions which are the world's most powerful and most predatory financial interests." Writing in June 2011, he said:

"Bilderberg isn't a secret society. . . . It's a meeting of people who represent a certain ideology. . . . Not OWG [One World Government] or NWO [New World Order] as too many people mistakenly believe. Rather, the ideology is of a ONE WORLD COMPANY LIMITED."

It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than in owning the world. The "world company" was a term first used at a Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The world company was to be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military coercion. The company would extend across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.

Estulin continues:

"The idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what they themselves call THE ARISTOCRACY OF PURPOSE between European and North American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other words, the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity.

". . . This explains what George Ball . . . said back in 1968, at a Bilderberg meeting in Canada: 'Where does one find a legitimate base for the power of corporate management to make decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they have only limited responsibility?'"

"The problem with today's system is that the world is run by monetary systems, not by national credit systems. . . . [Y]ou don't want a monetary system to run the world. You want sovereign nation-states to have their own credit systems, which is the system of their currency. . . . [T]he possibility of productive, non-inflationary credit creation by the state, which is firmly stated in the US Constitution, was excluded by Maastricht [the Treaty of the European Union] as a method of determining economic and financial policy."
That base of power was found in the private global banking system. Estulin goes on:

The world company acquires assets by preventing governments from issuing their own currencies and credit. Money is created instead by banks as loans at interest. The debts inexorably grow, since more money is always owed back than was created in the original loans. (For more on this, see here.) If currencies are not allowed to expand to meet increased costs and growth, the inevitable result is a wave of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and sales of assets at firesale prices. Sales to whom? To the "world company."

Battle of the Titans

If that was the plan behind the market assaults on August 4 and August 8, however, it evidently failed. What turned the market around, according to Der Spiegel, was the European Central Bank, which saved the day by embarking on a program of buying Spanish and Italian bonds . Sidestepping the Maastricht Treaty, the ECB said it would engage in the equivalent of "quantitative easing," purchasing bonds with money created with accounting entries on its books. It had done this earlier with Greek and Irish sovereign debt but had resisted doing it with Spanish and Italian bonds, which were much larger obligations. On Tuesday, August 16, the ECB announced that it was engaging in a record $32 billion bond-buying spree in an attempt to appease the markets and save the Eurozone from collapse.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also expected to come through with another round of quantitative easing, but his speech on August 9 made no mention of QE3. As blogger Jesse Livermore summarized the market's response:

". . . [T]he markets sold off rather rapidly as no announcement was made about QE3. . . . It wasn't until . . . the last 75 min of market activity [that] the DJIA gained 639 pts to close at a day high of 11,242. That begs the question, where did that injection of capital come from? The President's Working Group on Financial Markets? Or did the "policy tools" to promote price stability by any chance include the next round of Quantitative Easing unannounced?


"Was that QE3 Incognito, Ben?"

Titanic Battle or Insider Trading?

There could be another explanation for the suspicious downgrade that was announced despite the fact that the government had just made major concessions to avoid default, and despite the embarrassing revelation that S&P's figures were off by $2 trillion. On August 12, MSN.Money reported that the downgrade "wasn't much of a surprise":

"Wall Street had heard a rumor early on that the downgrade was coming. News sites reported the rumor all day.

"Unless it was all a huge coincidence, it's likely that someone in the know leaked the information. The questions are who and whether the leak led to early insider trading."

The Daily Mail had the story of someone placing an $850 million bet in the futures market on the prospects of a US debt downgrade:


"The latest bet was made on July 21 on trades of 5,370 ten-year Treasury futures and 3,100 Treasury bond futures, reported ETF Daily News.

"Now the investor's gamble seems to have paid off after Standard and Poor's issued a credit rating downgrade from AAA to AA+ last Friday.

"Whoever it is stands to earn a 1,000 per cent return on their money, with the expectation that interest rates will be going up after the downgrade."

The Securities Exchange Commission announced on August 8 that it is investigating the downgrade. According to the Financial Times, the move is part of a preliminary examination into potential insider trading.

Whatever was going on in the market in the first two weeks of August, it was unprecedented, unnatural, and bears close observation.



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25 - A soldier is a human being, isn’t he ?
aletho | August 28, 2011 | URL:http://wp.me/pIUmC-7U3

By Aya Kaniuk and Tamar Goldschmidt | Mahsanmilim | August 27, 2011
Ali Khalifa Mu'tasem Udwan
On Monday, August 1st, 2011, at dawn, the Occupation soldiers murdered Mu'tasem Udwan and Ali Khalifa and seriously wounded Ma’amun Awad.



It was the first morning of Ramadan.

Murder is always shocking. And because afterwards there is nothing. But what shocked me in particular was how Mu'tasem’s mother saw him very soon after he was murdered, lying on the ground by his house door, his brain splashed on the asphalt. This is how she saw him, her son, and somehow this is what shocks me most of all. Because as soon as he is dead, he is already gone and my thoughts go to the holes that he has left behind. But this particular hole, of Mu'tasem’s mother, is what turns off all the lights for me.

On the one hand, what happened that dawn in Qalandiya refugee camp is not extraordinary. Such things happen all the time. The Occupation soldiers invade one Palestinian locality or another, especially at night, under this or that pretext, and then they break doors, and after breaking in they smash things inside the house, closets and plate glass and television sets, and usually pick up one or another youth, about whom this or that has been said, some truth or some falsehood, usually taken as testimony from another boy under some pressure or other, whereby it is reasonable to assume that he would say anything he was told to say and confess anything he was ordered to confess, and usually there are also stones hurled at the Occupation soldiers and mostly the Occupation soldiers shoot at the stone throwers who are usually mere children, and they also fire rubber or teargas ammunition and even live bullets into homes and on the streets just like that, and here and there at the end of all of this people are wounded or killed, and all this is not that extraordinary. Not in the Qalandiya refugee camp, not throughout the Occupied West Bank.

Still, the murders of Ali Khalifa and Mu'tasem Udwan were cast in the camp as a unique event and different from all the other events that have become routine with the dripping of the years.

Again and again people have been saying, “how could they possibly do this”, and “why of all days on the first day of Ramadan”, the religious and the secular ask alike.

And not because the blood of a person murdered during Ramadan is more precious than that of a victim on any other day. But perhaps it is only that people cannot complain to the same extent at any given moment and shout ‘No!’ and that it is unbearable, unacceptable. For if they did that, no joy would be left, no endurance and the ability to exert oneself and bring up one’s children properly in spite of it all, and live in spite of everything, and also it is normally too dangerous to revolt, and involves tremendous effort.

But there are such moments when the truth, always present, emerges and is heard, and time stops.

Ramadan is such a symbolic moment. Perhaps because in Ramadan the shops remain open at night, too, and one has the duty of doing good deeds, and because people need such moments of shift away from the everyday, and this is provided by religion and tradition, and not only for Palestinians under Occupation.

“This is what happened that night”, says Haitham Hamed, our friend. A gentle, special man from Qalandiya refugee camp. “This is what I heard happened”.

“They came for Wajih. Wajih Haitham Khatib. He is a 15-year old boy. More than 200 soldiers came. 200 soldiers to catch a 15-year old boy. 200 soldiers came for one kid and killed two adults. That’s what happened. They always come, all the Israeli soldiers, to the camp. They bring with them all those forces just to pick up a kid or two… And the Border Patrol and… They keep coming from a thousand ways. From down here, from outside, from the settlement above. They come down, or up, and around the camp where the airplanes were (what used to be the Atarot airfield) and from the main road, from lots of roads. This time, too. They came from near the settlement.

And he’s accused - this I heard in the camp - do you know of what? Are you familiar with the settlement next to the camp? Not Psagot, what’s it called? Kochav Hashachar. He’s accused of having burnt the mountain. Burnt the mountain? With all those soldiers and Border Patrol and the guys with the guns and jeeps and fence and guards and cameras all around. He came to them and burnt a mountain there?

What a story. Just doesn’t enter one’s head. But that’s what his parents told me. That this is what he is accused of. That this 15-year old kid went near the settlement and burnt the mountain. The soldiers didn’t know his real address. So they entered more than one house. And in every house they broke stuff. That’s what I heard. And it’s normal for them to break stuff. They don’t know any other way. First they break the doors with their special machines that they bring. They don’t knock. Only this way, without saying a word, they place the device on the door and press a button and - pow - it opens the door. Always. Not once or twice. Like they did at our home, remember? People replace doors a lot in our camp.

In short, they came to the camp, and didn’t find the boy. They didn’t find the boy. So if you don’t find the boy, you raise such hell? Right, Tammi? You don’t find the boy so you go ahead and kill two people? And then what did they do? What they did was to pick up his cousin. 22-years old. They didn’t find Wajih so they took his cousin, and said that they were taking him until the kid’s father would turn him in.”

And Tamar said: “It’s shocking, Haitham. Shocking. Not only do they kill them, they take in his nephew… kidnap…”

“Yes,” said Haitham. “And his dad brought him to Ofer prison the next day, I think. So his nephew would be released… Under what kind of law do they do this? Taking his cousin, telling his dad if you bring your own son, you can take back your nephew… What law has such words… For the father to hand in his own child. In his own hands he takes his child to prison. And the child knows he’s going… I can’t lie to you, stones have been thrown at them. They left Wajih’s house on the way to another one, and stones were thrown at them. But often they entered the camp and picked the people up, and every time stones were thrown at them. But they didn’t always do this. So why did you come this time, in Ramadan? For a boy no older than 15 or 16? And you knew there were people in the street because of Ramadan. And you knew stones would be thrown at you. And I want to say something about the stone-throwing thing. Throwing stones, that’s the maximum. For who in the camp would have the heart to pick up a gun and shoot at soldiers? So maximum they throw stones. Say a Molotov cocktail, right, Tammi? At most, a Molotov cocktail or stones. So a stone was thrown, so what. They don’t kill you with a stone, right? A stone doesn’t kill, only wounds you. So for this you came and killed two?”

“Mu'tasem, Mu'tasem Udwan, the first fellow they killed. He is my neighbor,” says Majdi from the camp, whom we have just recently met. “He lives just 10 meters away. We were all woken up by the shooting… it was war… I went up to the roof. And there was this soldier down in the street. His rifle placed on a tripod… And Mu'tasem opened his door to take a look outside because of the shooting and the noise. Terrible noise… and teargas and lots of shooting. Mu'tasem who looked down didn’t notice the soldier. The soldier shot him in the head, and he fell to the floor. He opened the door of his home and the soldier shot him with a live bullet to the head… and his brain spilt on the ground. And he didn’t have a head anymore. He didn’t have a head…I saw all that from my roof. I’ll never forget this as long as I live. He had no more head… and his brain spilt on the floor. Abu Ali, Ali Khalifa the second one, he lives down hill. But that night he was at the camp. With his friends. That’s how it is during Ramadan. A bit like your Thursday and Friday nights. People hanging out together. All night. And guys beating traditional drums to wake people up before dawn so they might still get bread or other things for the house before the fast....... And then it all began.... When the shooting got really heavy he wanted to go back home. To get away. His car was parked near my house. He may have come there because he wasn’t as familiar with the camp as we are, so he came back for his car. And he saw Mu'tasem lying on the ground. All alone. It was just 6 minutes after he was shot. And he went over, to Mu'tasem, he may have thought he was wounded, and wanted to help him. He didn’t notice the soldier… and the soldier shot him too. Two bullets. One came out the other side. And a hole opened up in his abdomen. And then he fell, right by Mu'tasem.”

“That’s how he went… How Abu Ali went…”

“Haitham, did you call him Abu Ali?”

“His name was Ali Khalifa. But he was called this way. Abu Ali, because his name is Ali. So you add the Abu. Like that.”

“Everyone knows these guys”, says Haitham. “The camp is small, but everyone knows Abu Ali most. I knew him well, the day before I saw him at the gas station, washing his car. But earlier too. He was with me in prison. As a boy. At the Russian Compound. He was a good person… He used to help people, the elderly, all of us cannot believe he’s dead, I swear to you. That he’s gone. Unbelievable. And he is a Jerusalemite. A Jerusalemite. He lives down the hill. Not in the camp… His parents pay municipal taxes. I knew Mu'tasem, too, but not well. He’s a nice guy. Really nice. Studied at the university. He was about to graduate in a year’s time. And he didn’t do anything. Doesn’t throw stones. He was at home. Looking out through his own door and was shot in the head.”

“And the one who was wounded, Ma’amun Awad, he was shot inside his car”, says Majdi. “He was trying to get away, and the soldiers wouldn’t let him pass, and he pleaded, and finally they threw a gas canister into his car, and smoke broke out, and he opened the car door to escape the smoke, and they shot him, they had an M-16, and he is wounded now. Badly wounded.”

“Maybe you know him”, says Haitham, “this is Ma’amun Awad, whose father owns a gas station at Semiramis, where the army camp used to be and the soldiers would throw stones at the taxis, remember? Poor guy. Got two bullets. Two bullets sitting in his backbone, and the doctors fear that if they’re removed, he will become paralyzed. They say if the bullets are taken out, he’ll end up paralyzed.”

And we fell silent again. Time passed. Then I asked: “Haitham, after that happened to Mu'tasem, did his family see?” Because I kept thinking of it the whole time.

“Sure they saw. He was shot at the entrance to his house. In the beginning his mother was upstairs, watching everything. She saw someone on the ground, his brain spilt… she didn’t realize at first that it was her own son she was seeing. Poor guy, she said, poor wounded child, crying for him not knowing it was her son. But shortly afterwards she knew. And rushed out. She couldn’t recognize him. his head was blasted, the brain was spilt on the ground. That’s what they say. And from the eyes up there’s nothing… And his mother went mad, poor woman. We all cried for her. Pulling at her hair. She’s ill. She’s ill now...”

“The thing that hurts you about Mu'tasem is that the fellow was inside his own home. Standing inside his home. You know what that means, at home? Where the heart is. That’s the worst. The most painful. Right?”

“I couldn’t eat for 4, 5 days after all of this”, says Majdi, “nor sleep properly… not after seeing his brain splashed on the ground.. his flesh hot. His and Abu Ali’s, hot… Abu Ali’s abdomen on the floor… all the flesh, the meat... After the soldiers left I went down where they lay, Mu'tasem and Abu Ali. I thought I’d pick all that up from the ground and put it away, on the side. But I was told not to. That they will take it too, to later sew it back into their bodies… So we collected all of this and put it in plastic bags, and it was hot, hot, their flesh was hot.”

“I think they do it on purpose”, Haitham added. “It’s on purpose. Tammi…. People are sitting like this anyway, and have nothing, and their life is hard. Such a hard life… So why pack in Ramadan like this? Why do this and leave people with no illusions? That’s the reason, I say. To take away their illusions. Their… How do you say this in Hebrew, I’ve forgotten. To take away their hope, Aya. That’s the word. That’s the point and I’m not racist. I look at things from many angles. This will happen and that will happen and I’ll think again and again. And I don’t see everyone the same way. But they did this out of racism. That’s what I think. Not because of the stones, and not because of Wajih. Because of racism. Otherwise they wouldn’t kill two people. It’s their racism that got Mu'tasem. And Abu Ali. Their racism…”

“The camp is very heavy now. Our heart is heavy” says Haitham, after we sat quietly for some more moments. “And fear. People are walking around afraid of soldiers, that if they go out at night, they’d be killed. From far away. And it’s quiet at night. People don’t open their windows out of fear. This is the story of what happened that night of Ramadan in our camp… This is what happened.”

And this is what our friend A., another friend from Qalandiya, told us (A. is a very close friend of ours, and he is always asking us to keep him anonymous because he is afraid that if the soldiers find out that he is talking about what happens at the camp, they would hurt his family). He is the one who first told us about this all, right after it happened. He called us twenty minutes after the murder in the camp, to tell, while the calls for the first prayer of Ramadan were still heard in the background, and Mu'tasem was already dead, and Ali not yet, and Ma’amun unconscious, and it all sounded unreal, like a film or a book or a nightmare:

"Mu'tasem, you know, is such a cute guy. He heard a noise… We say “this guy’s clock is through”. Now he stepped out of the door, the soldiers standing outside, saw a guy look out, so they shot him. I don’t know, I say this, you know, he’s dead, but someone shot him. The guy who shot, I mean what is he saying in his own home now? He’s sitting alone, I think he has kids, he too has a family, or a mother, brothers, his father… And he’s sitting at home, and saying I killed a child today. Why? He can’t say why. Because, why? What did the kid do? What did he do to me? Was he armed? No, he carried no weapon. Was he, how do you say this, was he one of the Arab fighters? No, he was not one of those. And I know he had nothing on him. He didn’t throw stones. He just stepped out of his home, and suddenly I killed him – the soldier would say and I say, this soldier, what can he say? If he has a heart, what does he end up saying? He’d say, wow, why did I kill him? That’s what I think. Just like that. Because, why? What did he do?"

And Tamar said, "I think he’s sitting at home and making this… screen… making up some story for himself."

"No, no, listen", A. interrupts her. "He did this and he knows. He could have aimed at the leg, no? He could shoot at the leg and wound him. If he’d want to. But he aimed at the head. And Tammi, on their rifle they have this… he sees through his sights… he looks, he knows. You understand… So I don’t know, I don’t know what he… how he sits at home, knowing, knowing he killed. Say, the soldier is a human being, right? He has a heart, doesn’t he? So what does he tell himself. That I killed a boy today. What does he tell himself…"

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26 - Elderly farmer murdered in Israeli airstrike
aletho | August 26, 2011 URL:http://wp.me/pIUmC-7SK

26 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Ismail Nimr Ammoum worked his whole life as a farm laborer. He did not have land of his own, he worked for others, planting, watering, weeding, whatever needed done. He was a strong man, and he loved to work, work did not bother him. He kept working because he loved to work, what else would he do? He lived with his sister in Buriej, but often spent the nights sleeping wherever he was working. On Wednesday, August 24, 2011 Ismail was working for the Al-Khaldi family. He had spent the previous several days living in a small wood hut on the land. At five A.M. neighbors heard the explosion of an Israeli missile strike, but they thought that the land there was empty, they did not realize that Ismail had stayed the night in the hut. That afternoon, the owner of the land came to check up on things. When he arrived he noticed that things weren’t right, he opened the gate and then he saw the hut. He saw Ismail’s shattered body lying in the rubble. He had been killed in the missile strike.

Ismail’s father was from Lod. He was a refugee; his family was expelled from his home by Israeli soldiers in 1948. He fled to Gaza with his children, eventually they numbered eight, Ismail, four more sons, and three daughters. Ismail’s father is not here to mourn his son. Not because he died of old age, but because Israel killed him. He died during Cast Lead, one of the almost 1,500 Gazans murdered during those cruel three weeks. He was killed when Israel bombed the police station in Buriej.

We sit talking with Nasser, Ismail’s nephew; it is obvious that he respected his uncle Ismail. He misses his uncle, his uncle who was killed for no reason, just an old man who loved to work on the land. Nasser asks, “How can the world do nothing when innocent people are being killed, it must do something.” The world does nothing, and all that can be done in response to the world’s indifference, is, like Ismail, to get up again and go to work, to go to the land, to not abandon it, to carry on living.

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27 - Silwan committee unveils Israeli scheme to take over Al-Bustan zone in Jerusalem
aletho | August 25, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7S9

Palestine Information Center - 25/08/2011
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM -- Spokesman for Silwan defense committee Abdulkarim Abu Sunaina revealed an Israeli Judaization scheme to encroach into Silwan district and wipe out Al-Bustan neighborhood using different excuses such as the establishment of sewerage systems.

Abu Sunaina, in a press release on Tuesday, reported that the Israeli municipal council in occupied Jerusalem closed the street near the sit-in tent in Al-Bustan area and started under military protection to carry out excavations allegedly for the establishment of a sewerage system.

The spokesman affirmed that these excavations are aimed at encroaching upon Al-Bustan neighborhood under different pretexts and then faking archeological findings as a prelude to extending day by day these excavations further into the neighborhood.

He added that such excavations are also intended to undermine the movement of Palestinian residents in the neighborhoods in order to make it easy for the Israeli occupation authority to pounce on them in case it issued demolition orders against their homes in the coming days.

The spokesman noted that the Israeli municipal council dared to take such step only after it was able to jail lately a large number of young Palestinians from Silwan.

In another incident, Wadi Hilwa information center said on Tuesday that a new settlement outpost consisting of eight housing units and four floors will be built in Ras Al-Amud neighborhood in Silwan district near the old police station that was seized by the Zionist settlement society Elad.

The center added that the Jewish settlers are trying to take hold of a building of seven floors in Al-Farouk neighborhood located between Silwan and Jabal Al-Mukkaber.

It noted that Elad society seized months ago a Palestinian apartment building in the same neighborhood.

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28 - Western press and addressing grievances in Gaza
aletho | August 26, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7T5

By Mohammed Suliman - The Electronic Intifada - 08/26/2011
In 2006, the Israeli authorities imposed an overall siege on the Gaza Strip forcing 1.6 million Palestinians to live under miserable conditions. Since then, Gaza, depending on the degree of instability in the area, has been largely covered in the world media, sometimes enjoying the status of a quasi-main theme.

However, many of these subjects dealt with by the Western press are quite unimportant to deal with publicly. The only importance they have seems to be that of their context.

One needs though to be as critical as not to fall victim to any deliberate misrepresentation of facts or any other well-handled, yet ill-timed treatment of any of these controversial subjects.

The real oppressor of Gaza women’s rights

Only last night, a fellow journalist and I had an argument over the recently recurring theme in the Western press of the oppression of women’s rights in the Gaza Strip. We both came to an agreement that one can confidently state women’s rights are flagrantly abused in Gaza but, unlike how Western press tends to show it, the question remains who the real oppressor of women’s rights in Gaza is.

The issue of women’s rights in Gaza is one part of a larger— to avoid the word “propaganda”— misinformation scheme that should be seen as an attempt to divert the world’s attention from the indispensable issues which need to be constantly and unfalteringly addressed in the Western press.

Take this for example. “Sorry, Hamas, I’m wearing blue jeans” is an article that, on the surface of it, seems to be a credible and well intentioned attempt to encapsulate how women’s rights are abused a daily basis in Gaza by the government, the people, their religion and customs. It features the resentment of “a defiant Palestinian feminist from Gaza reflect[ing] on being secular in a religious land.”

Reading through the article, one can’t but feel irritated at the blatantly Orientalist character of it. It is indeed one of the most deeply flawed and misrepresentative articles that falls into this exact category of misinformation that I have spoken of earlier.

I will not go further to reply to this article since the real resentment felt toward it and generated by its blatant inaccuracy has already been highlighted byseveral responses which none has written but Palestinian women (and men) from Gaza refuting its baseless arguments and countering what it displays as “facts”.

The unfortunate “Gaza Youth Manifesto”

Likewise, recently a group of Palestinian youth from Gaza has issued a “manifesto” on their Facebook page called Gaza Youth Breaks Out. It outstandingly highlighted the anger and frustration that have grown so immense inside the chests of young Gazans that they cannot be any longer suppressed. Unluckily, however, its writers poured out their fury indiscriminately at every possible cause they deemed as conducive to their miserable conditions instead of carefully underlining the principal source and prime perpetrator of this unendurable suffering.

Hence, the true causes for this suffering, i.e. Israel, its 2008/09 invasion of the Gaza Strip, the five-year relentless blockade, and its daily heinous crimes against Palestinian civilians, were (unintentionally, I assume) relegated and not as much accentuated as the uncommendable behavior of the Hamas government in Gaza toward its people which replaced Israel as the originator of Gaza’s youth distress.

That said, the GYBO manifesto has received worldwide attention from Western press and media outlets including the Guardian and the BBC. But did any of them take the time to listen to the grievances the manifesto itself prompted in a considerable portion of Gaza’s youth due to its misguided content and damaging quality?

Of course, not. Because simply that is what Western press had been looking for and now that it rose from within Gaza youth itself, they wouldn’t hesitate to embrace this unfortunate manifesto. (Note: under great deal of criticism, the group had to issue a second manifesto, which appears on the group’s Facebook page).

Whether deliberate or not, digressions as such only harm the Palestinians and are aimed at diverting the world’s attention from the base injustice the Palestinians are forced to live under besides the daily crimes committed against them by the Israeli armed forces. Moreover, they do seem to attract the attention of an audience, that has become used to prosaic coverage of continuous and flagrant Israeli violations of basic human rights.

Still, this does not mean issues of human rights’ abuses should be disregarded. The suppression exercised by the government and other violations of human rights should always be brought to light to help fight against it.

But there is still a huge difference between objective reporting of incidents of human rights violations and other obviously subjective and unrepresentative or misleading publications.

The “rising middle class” and addressing minor grievances

Similarly, a newly published Associated Press feature story throws light on the widening gap between a very tiny (rising?) middle class and the majority of the people who live under the poverty line, as the article illustrates.

Well-written, objective, and supported with facts and figures as it might seem, the article should nonetheless be dismissed as misleading and lacking in analytical interpretation necessary to explain the real origins of the discontent the people of Gaza have.

“A budding middle class in the impoverished Gaza Strip is]…[fueling perhaps the most acrimonious grass roots resentment yet toward the ruling Hamas movement.”

The introductory statement of the article is inaccurate since, from the beginning it presupposes the presence of this “resentment” toward the Hamas government in Gaza, and it doesn’t go further to place this feeling within its greater context which is that of the Israeli occupation and its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The only and real grievances the people of Gaza have are those toward Israel and its blockade of the Gaza Strip which has fueled in them so much anger and despair to the extent that, like the GYBO, they started to resent everything around them, on the top of which is the Hamas government. So even this sense of dissatisfaction toward the government is basically a form of grievous indignation toward Israel itself.

Quite normally people would hate the government under whose control they have had to endure the most miserable conditions. It is true the government in Gaza isn’t doing enough to at least alleviate the people’s Israeli-inflicted suffering. It’s also true that there is too much corruption inside the government itself to be concealed or ignored any longer, but trying to make these issues the prime source of people’s anger is dubious since it ignores the fact that what people are enraged about, above all things, is the Israeli siege.

However, since this siege is something the people of Gaza have started to take for granted, criticizing the government, blaming it, and feeling resentment toward it has become a trend. It has become much easier and, indeed, practical for them. (One feels obliged to praise Israel for having relieved itself of the burden of taking responsibility for the people it occupies).

Although, the article makes it clear the majority of the people are discontented and frustrated, at some point it seems to ridiculously question the fact that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza while there are others— a very small minority— who live in self-indulgence. It also never accounts for the so called “rise of the middle class” in Gaza except by simplistically relating it to the attitudes of the Hamas government and the “corruption” of some of its “loyalists”.

The only thing this article seems to do is deflect the readers’ attention from the real origins of frustration in Gaza represented by Israel’s overall inhuman policy toward the Palestinians to few, indeed, unimportant issues.

Israel’s siege and crimes are always the issue

While in other countries, which seem to enjoy wealth and maintain stability, suppression is exercised by governments on a larger scale and women’s rights are abused at a more serious level, little attention is paid to them. Likewise, the grievances toward an assumed middle class rise in Gaza is a completely preposterous issue to discuss when only a few days ago Israeli airstrikes killed 15 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. (update: 11 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes during the past two days).

At a time when the people of the Gaza Strip, both wealthy and poor, are woken from their sleep by Israeli warplanes bombing their neighborhoods, grievances, suffering and anger of this sort is all what the world needs to know about Gaza.

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29 - Don’t look away from Kashmir’s mass graves and people’s struggle
aletho | August 24, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7RX

By Ali Abunimah - The Electronic Intifada - 08/24/2011
Last Summer, during a massive unarmed revolt against Indian rule in Kashmir, the writer Pankaj Mishra posed the following question about the situation in the territory. It remains as valid today as a year ago – especially after the recent discovery of thousands of bodies in mass graves:

Once known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than 80,000 people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killings fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet. In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valley’s 4 million Muslims are exposed to extra-judicial execution, rape and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.

Why then does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldn’t be louder and clearer. India has contained the insurgency provoked in 1989 by its rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators that fill the streets of Kashmir’s cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones. Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle their voices as it did of the old one. Already this summer, soldiers have shot dead more than 50 protestors, most of them teenagers.

The tolls of last summer’s unarmed uprising, violently suppressed by Indian forces with live fire, eventually rose to more than 100. And, though Kashmir is even less in the headlines today, protests and abuses – particularly the arrests and mistreatment of teenage boys – continue.

For decades, until today, the two-thirds of Kashmir under Indian control has been ruled under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, emergency rule as repressive as the worst Arab dictatorship.

Mass graves uncovered

If all the suffering of the living in Kashmir has not succeeded in awakening international concern, the recent revelations of mass graves must. Amnesty International reported on 22 August:

Following a report by a police investigation team, confirming the existence of unmarked graves containing bodies of persons subject to enforced disappearances, urgent action needs to be taken including preserving the evidence and widening the investigation across Jammu and Kashmir said Amnesty International today.

Over 2700 unmarked graves have been identified by the 11-member police team of the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in four districts of north Kashmir. Despite claims of the local police that the graves contained dead bodies of “unidentified militants”, the report points out that 574 bodies have been identified as disappeared locals - 17 of these have already been exhumed and shifted to family or village grave sites.

The police report concludes that there is “every probability” that the remaining over 2100 unidentified graves “may contain the dead bodies of [persons subject to] enforced disappearances.” The report further clarifies that the only way to negate such a claim is to study the DNA profiles of the unidentified dead bodies and warns that in the absence of such tests, “it has to be assumed/ presumed that [the] State wants to remain silent deliberately to hide the Human Rights violations.”

While Amnesty welcomed this report, it calls on Indian authorities:

to initiate thorough investigations into unmarked graves throughout the state. All unmarked grave sites must be secured and investigations carried out by impartial forensic experts in line with the UN Model Protocol on the disinterment and analysis of skeletal remains.

The fact that an investigation has reached this point at all is to India’s credit, but given its appalling record in Kashmir, there is little reason to believe that India will provide justice for victims without strong pressure and exposure.

The silence of the liberals

While almost every other week, the United States issues orders to this or that country’s leader to step down, or to (very selectively) “respect human rights,” the Obama administration has been totally silent about the crisis in Kashmir. During his visit to India last year, Obama did not mention it.

In US media and establishment discourse, India is often presented as a colorful, “vibrant democracy” with a booming economy and an emerging middle class which is eyed hungrily by American corporations looking to export consumer goods – or jobs to India’s cheaper labor force.

I was reminded of the general obliviousness to the situation in Kashmir by a recent comment on Twitter from Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning in Obama’s State Department, on the occasion of India assuming the chairmanship of the UN Security Council:

@SlaughterAM
Anne-Marie Slaughter If India wants to distinguish itself as chair of the UNSC in August, it can take the lead on a serious int’l response to Syrian violence.
Aug 02 via web FavoriteRetweetReply

I can’t think of an occasion when I have heard American establishment intellectuals call for a “serious international response” to the repression in Kashmir; and surely if India wants to “distinguish itself” in international leadership it should deal frankly with the situation in Kashmir.

Israel and India, Hindutva and Zionism

Although the crisis in Kashmir is off the media radar – and that of many writers and activists concerned with Palestine – thanks to many people in Kashmir I have encountered via Twitter, I have become more educated about the situation. Nonetheless, in recent years, the patterns of Indian behaviour and discourse around Kashmir have come to closely resemble those of Israel toward the Palestinians.

This has been particularly true with the rise of Hindutva over the past two decades – an extreme form of Indian nationalism which views Muslims as alien and often denigrates them in ways familiar to Palestinians subjected to such dehumanizing discourses from Islamophobic Zionists and their allies in Europe and the United States.

Hindutva nationalists and Zionists often try to reframe the “conflicts” not as ones over human and political rights, sovereignty, consent and self-determination, but as being caused by irrational and implacable “Muslims” and “Islamists” who if not confronted and stopped will take over the world. In this context, all the repression and state violence to which millions of people are subjected is justified in the name of “fighting terror” and defending “democracy” and “civilized values.”

And, as Yasmin Qureshi pointed out in an analysis for The Electronic Intifada, Zionist and Hindutva groups are increasingly cooperating on US university campuses to try to shut down discussions of both Palestine and Kashmir.

India-Israel alliance aids repression

The cooperation moreover is not just discursive: India has greatly increased its military ties with, and weapons purchases from Israel – including drones. AndShin Bet and other Israeli agencies responsible for human rights abuses and extrajudicial executions of Palestinians and Lebanese have provided training and advice to India on how to suppress the people of Kashmir.

“My most recent film is about the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front in India. I am not allowed in India anymore. Interestingly, India is one of the biggest arms trade partners of Israel,” Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni told The Electronic Intifada last year, “India uses the same tactics against the Kashmir people as Israel does against the Palestinians.”

Justice must not be delayed

Ultimately there can be no solution to the question of sovereignty over Kashmir – a painful remnant of British colonialism – until the region’s people are given the right to determine their future, a promise made and long denied to them, free from manipulation by India or Pakistan, which controls most of the rest of the territory (China also occupies a smaller segment). Pakistan has its own ignoble record of interference in Kashmir and using its people as pawns in its conflict with India.

In the meantime, India’s global image as a “vibrant democracy” should not be allowed to obscure the reality of mass repression – and mass graves – or to delay justice for the victims any further.

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30 - GAZA : Soldiers shoot 75 year old woman along with ten goats
aletho | August 16, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7Mr

16 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement
Selma Al Sawarka, or Um Ahmad, is an active woman, a mother of seven, and a grandmother of 35, who has never quit working. August 10, 2011 dawned like most days do for her; she went out to graze her family’s goats. She took her neighbor with her, 15 year old Keefa Al Bahabsa.

They went to the same land they usually go to. At 9:30 that morning they saw an Israeli tank and an Israeli jeep near the border. Not an uncommon sight. The tank and jeep left. About 30 minutes later, the jeep returned, three soldiers got out, and opened fire on Um Ahmed and Keefa. Um Ahmed was shot in the leg, Keefa fled to get help. The soldiers also shot ten of the family's goats.

Um Ahmed is used to being shot at by the Israelis as her land is only 600 meters from the border. Usually, she says, the soldiers shoot around her, or into the air, trying to drive her from her land; she doesn’t know why today was different, why they shot directly at her, why they shot her in the leg. Her scarf also has bullet holes in it; only through the grace of God is she still here.

It took half an hour for Keefa to return with help, they loaded Um Ahmed onto a donkey cart, and went to the main road to meet a taxi to take her to the hospital. When I met Um Ahmed she was laying on a mat on the floor, recovering from being shot. A pale blue scarf covered her head. Bracelets adorned her wrists. Her daughter sat next to her. The room was simple, some mats on the floor, two chairs for the guests, a dresser, and small stand with a TV.

On the wall was a picture of her son Mustapha. He was killed by the Israeli’s on Dec, 15, 2004. Sometimes, the soldiers, or even the settlers themselves, would close the road near Netzarim settlement, the only way to go anywhere was to leave the road, and walk on the beach by the sea. Mustapha was shot and killed as he walked on the beach. The house we are in used to be Mustapha’s house. Beside the TV is another picture, another of her sons, this one has been in prison for the last ten years. He has eleven years left on his sentence. Um Ahmed, like all Gazan mothers, is not allowed to visit her son in prison, for four years this has been a blanket Israeli policy. Instead, she looks at this picture, she thinks about him in prison, while her leg heals.

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31 - Venezuela Says U.S. Lacks “Moral Authority” to Judge Antiterrorism Efforts
aletho | August 20, 2011 URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7Ot

By Franklin Rosales - Venezuelanalysis.com - August 19th 2011
Caracas – This Friday the Venezuelan government formally “rejected” a U.S. State Department antiterrorism report issued a day earlier, describing the document as “plagued with false affirmations, political preconceptions, and veiled threats.”

In a press release issued today, Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the U.S. government seeks “to impose, by way of intimidation, its international policy of disregard and domination” and that the ongoing “refuge and protection” provided by the United Stated to confessed terrorist Luis Posada Carriles negated all “moral authority” in the U.S.’s so-called War on Terrorism.

The U.S. Country Reports on Terrorism 2010, issued on 18 August 2011, states that the U.S. State Department is “concerned about Hezballah’s fundraising activities in Venezuela,” and declares that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is continuing “to strengthen Venezuela’s relationship with state sponsor of terrorism Iran”. The report also claims that 2010 was another year in which Venezuela “was not cooperating fully with U.S. antiterrorism efforts.”

“Throughout the year,” the U.S. report asserts, “President Chavez rejected allegations that he or his government supported terrorism and instead accused the United States of sponsoring terrorism.”

In response to yesterday’s report, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said it rejected, “in the most vehement manner, the accusations of the U.S. State Department” and that by issuing its report the U.S. government had “ratified its policy of permanent aggression against independent and sovereign governments such as that of Venezuela.”

According to the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry response, “the U.S. State Department tends to classify as ‘terrorists’ or ‘complacent with terrorism’ those governments and political organizations that do not bow down in the face of its imperial intentions.”

The Venezuelan government also affirmed that the United States “does not have the moral authority” to judge each country’s antiterrorism efforts, having given “refuge and protection to Luis Posada Carriles, an international criminal charged for terrorism.”

Luis Posada Carriles is wanted in both Venezuela and Cuba for his involvement in the 1976 downing of a Cubana de Aviacion airplane, killing all 73 people on board.

Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry also pointed out that “civilian massacres” committed and “undercover operations” carried out by U.S. forces abroad were “illegal operations” that only added to international skepticism towards U.S. antiterrorism efforts.

In recent years, right-wing U.S. Congressman Connie Mack and others have attempted to place Venezuela on the State Department’s list of “state sponsor of terrorism.” Unable to provide concrete evidence linking the Venezuelan government to U.S.-classified “terrorist” organizations such as Colombia’s Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC) or Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Mack in recent months has sought to portray joint Venezuela-Iran economic development projects as Venezuelan support for Iran’s “desire for nuclear weapons.”

In response to a June 2011 hearing held by the U.S. Congress Western Hemisphere Subcommittee in which Mack called Venezuela a “hub” for international terrorism, the Venezuelan National Assembly responded by defining “true terrorism” as “that which has been carried out by the U.S. government through its military invasions,” referring specifically to the U.S. invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, among others.

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32 - Australia 60 Minutes - Fukushima Radiating Everyone on Earth
Unspeakable impactURL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-7Q0

watch?v=DcOol3KJscc&w=560&h=345

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THE ULTIMATE CON
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgoXQWiSlM&feature=email
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FINED $ 5,000 FOR GROWING TOO MANY ORGANIC VEGETABLES IN THE BACKYARD
Some things are so absurd if they didn't actually happen you couldn't make them up.
Here is the story of man being fined $5,000 for growing too many organic vegetables in his backyard.
Video : http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/1015.html
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Camp FEMA: American Lockdown – Full Documentary

28 Aug 2011

Recent legislation attempting to legitimize the use of internment camps to detain U.S. citizens in the event of an uprising or civil unrest has many people asking what nation they live in.. In a country born out of political dissent, we watch our leaders in Washington slowly pass bills that label ordinary Americans as thought criminals and potential domestic terrorists for simply questioning the actions of their government. We see third party candidates and their impassioned supporters listed in secret government reports that call their allegiance into question and brand them as fanatics and extremists. Senate committee hearings and official FBI documents further illustrate the mindset of our elected officials as they classify homeschoolers, gun rights activists and anti-abortionists as threats against the existing social and political order; by default creating an entire nation of radicals and revolutionaries - where everyone is a suspect equally guilty until proven otherwise. How has our government shown that they will deal with these people? The same way as every other totalitarian regime throughout history - marginalize their activities then lock them up. Prisons are being built; internment camps constructed and laws passed that deal severely with anyone who dares to step out of line or ask too many questions. Who are the potential domestic terrorists that will end up in these camps? Read the documentation for yourself and hear what our experts have to say. States rights take a front row seat in this new political thriller that is guaranteed to send shivers up your spine. Find out where the true power of the people rests in halting these treasonous activities NOW!

Webster Tarpley: Syria is next on NATO list after Libya

28 Aug 2011

The NATO is getting ready for Syria , the Libya war may go for several years and the NATO could lose it , it is not an Arab spring it is a CIA rampage , Turkey could become a kamikaze puppet for the NATO in its attack against Syria , somebody in the foreign office is playing on the ambition and the vanity of Turkey to become a world power ...
Video: Homelessness and Poverty on the Rise in Britain and America

28 Aug 2011

Homelessness and Poverty on the Rise in Britain nobody is immune not even talented businessmen , Homeless people are just those unable to pay to occupy land, if you remove that concept then things are much easier instead of helping other countries with foreign aid why don't we help the homeless in this country. the trillion dollars spent on useless wars abroad , that are taxes go to pay for like, congressmen pay raise could ultimate homelessness in America. It's a bad two way street can't get a home without a job can't get a job without a home !!


Architects & Engineers - Solving the Mystery of WTC 7 - AE911Truth.Org http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZEvA8BCoBw&feature=player_embedded#! (There it is, WTC 7 had to have had explosives put inside weeks ahead, it was all planned.)

Zionism Stinks: The official 2001 FBI docs on Urban Moving Systems and the 9-11-2001 Dancing Israeli Incident http://mybigfatanti-zionistlife.blogspot.com/2011/08/official-2001-fbi-docs-on-urban-moving.html
Urban Moving Systems (active as a business since approximately 1996) centers around the fact that it was a Mossad front company,

It Wasn't Muslims
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40iVcIgnwKA&feature=player_embedded#!
(Or read it here) http://www.takeourworldback.com/itwasntmuslims.htm
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Video: BBC Confirmed Nibiru Elenin In Our Solar System!

Posted: 30 Aug 28

NO MORE DOUBTS IT'S IN OUR SKY !
-----------
Comet Elenin Could Be Disintegrating

Posted: 30 Aug 2011 02:22 AM PDT

Astronomers monitoring Comet Elenin have noticed the comet has decreased in brightness the past week, and the coma is now elongating and diffusing. Some astronomers predict the comet will disintegrate and not survive perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. On August 19, a massive solar flare and coronal mass ejection hit the comet, which may have been the beginning of the end for the much ballyhooed lump of ice and dirt.
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33 - Where’s Hoffman ?
If you asked that question and thought I was vacationing, guess again.
Like many operations, our Truth Mission is suffering straitened circumstances.
‘So what else is new?’ you ask. ‘The financial crisis is hitting everyone.’
Our own predicament is exacerbated by a boycott against us by people claiming to be fighting the same fight we are fighting.
Texe Marrs, Paul Fromm, Pastor Herman Otten of Christian News, Jeff Rense and Willis Carto are the admirable exceptions. Otten, Rense and Carto afford us publicity. Fromm and Marrs were the only significant sellers of my book Judaism Discoveredoutside of Amazon.com With odds like that, it is difficult to remain in business.
‘On the Contrary’ blogging will continue but not as often. One very important case I wanted to report here was the murder last week of a major Kabbalistic rabbi by a Hasidic rabbi, in the Israeli state. This sensational murder is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what this case represents. Taking hours to write that blockbuster investigative story here, however, is just not remunerative. Therefore it will appear as a section in the new, revised, updated edition of Judaism Discovered which I’m compiling now.
I am not on a pension. I am not retired or disabled. Writing online is not a hobby of mine. I am a professional historian who, in eight books, has pioneered historical discoveries such as white chattel slavery (not 'indentured servitude') in early America. I am also an investigative journalist, formally with the Associated Press and the American Contemporary Radio Division of ABC News.
After the second edition of Judaism Discovered is completed, I hope to write a book that will serve as an exposé of the root of the evil of shylock indebtedness that afflicts our nation -- Usury: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not. When that is concluded I hope to return to my research on the Cryptocracy with a sequel to Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, which will be titledTwilight Language. I also seek to initiate a “University of the Airwaves,” wherein my chalkboard lectures on these diverse subjects are videotaped and distributed for advanced students. Furthermore, our dream of The Hoffman Center for the Study of Anti-Goyimism awaits an affluent visionary.
You’ve heard it before: all of this takes money. It used to be that I could write books and write columns for The Hoffman Wire and the On the Contrary Blog, and manage our revisionisthistory.org website. In the past, donations for the latter three online missions were sufficiently robust to fund them. That is not the case at present.
We do have an investor for the forthcoming new edition of Judaism Discovered. Therefore, Judaism Discovered is where I am putting my time and energy. We also have several hundred paid subscribers to our hardcopy history newsletter, Revisionist History. Subscribers are due an issue this month.
I promise to try to do my best to burn the midnight oil and occasionally produce something for free for my Internet audience, as a public service of our educational outreach. Hard times have, nonetheless, dictated a tougher approach toward the management of my time. I wish it were otherwise. My chief interest is in educating as many thousands of people as I can. The Internet is a terrific tool toward that end. Just like many of you, however, in the days and weeks ahead I will be mostly “punching the clock” -- trying to get these important books written and published, and that’s only the beginning. After the books are in print we have to find a way to buck the boycott and the attacks which emanate mostly from within ‘our own ranks,’ and garner publicity for these books; that in itself is a full-time job.
Meanwhile, thank you for your interest in my work. If you have a moment, consider browsing our online store, where you will find my books, newsletters, CDs, DVDs and PDF files offered for sale: http://revisionisthistorystore.blogspot.com/
Michael Hoffman


Death threat e-mailed to Hoffman
"We will be paying you a little visit next month, to offer you your very own circumcision, from the neck down"


While death threats are routine, I thought I would share this particularly egregious one for my own protection. It arrived several hours after I had sent a courteous e-mail questioning a column on the Talmud written by University of Haifa Prof. Steven Plaut (I sent my questions via e-mail to Plaut and his publisher, the Brooklyn-based "Jewish Press").


I am not making any connection between the threatening e-mail I received (see below) and Prof. Plaut or the "Jewish Press." I am only stating a fact concerning the sequence of the e-mail I have sent and received.


To the best of my knowledge, I have not received a communication by e-mail or any other means, from Plaut or "Jewish Press."


Caveat: the following threatening e-mail contains exceedingly vulgar language.


Michael Hoffman
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34 - IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century
Staff Study
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
House of Representatives
One Hundred Fourth Congress



Title Page
Transmittal Letter


Table of Contents
I. Overview and Summary
II. Intelligence Community Management
III. Intelligence Requirements Process
IV. Collection Synergy
V. SIGINT: Signals Intelligence
VI. IMINT: Imagery Intelligence
VII. MASINT: Measurement and Signatures Intelligence
VIII. Collection: Launch
IX. Clandestine Service
X. Intelligence Community "Surge" Capability
XI. Intelligence Support to Military Operations
XII. Intelligence Centers
XIII. Intelligence and Law Enforcement
XIV. Intelligence Communications
XV. Congressional Oversight

Appendices

A. IC21 Hearings and Witnesses
B. IC21 Staff Panels
C. CRS Report: Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization 1949-1996

Figures

Figure 1: IC Functional Flow
Figure 2: IC21 Staff Studies
Figure 3: IC21 Objective Community
Figure 4: IC Functions
Figure 5: IC Structure and Flow




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35 - 'Extermination' Camp Propaganda Myths

MARK WEBER


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1. The Camps[1]

Everyone has heard that during the Second World War German authorities systematically killed many hundreds of thousands of prisoners, especially Jews, in concentration camps.[2] For example, in his closing address to the Nuremberg Tribunal (July 26, 1946), chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross said that "more than six million" Jews were killed by the Germans, and that

"[...] murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek and Oranienburg."[3]

Some months earlier - in late April and early May 1945 - an American congressional delegation of six US senators and six US congressmen visited three German concentration camps: Dachau, Buchenwald and Nordhausen. In these camps, the American lawmakers concluded in their report, German authorities carried out "a calculated and diabolical program of planned torture and extermination". The delegation's report was published as an official US Senate document. American newspapers gave prominent coverage to the report, which was also a US prosecution exhibit at the main Nuremberg trial.[4]

How valid are such accusations? How have they held up with the passage of time? Before focusing on two of the most important of the German wartime camps - Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen - we take a quick look at the camp system in general, with an eye to answering these and similar questions. What was the purpose of these camps? How were they administered?

1.1. Abandoned Extermination Claims

Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, many claims about mass killings in German wartime camps - claims that were once widely accepted and backed with apparently impressive evidence - have been quietly dropped. No reputable historian still accepts, for example, the claim made by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg that at one camp the Germans used "special electrical appliances for the mass murder of the doomed". Prisoners allegedly were killed there in a special "building where the floor was electrified in a special way".[5] Similarly discredited is the Nuremberg claim by the American prosecution that Jews were systematically killed at the Treblinka camp by steaming them to death.[6]

At Nuremberg and for some years afterward it was seriously claimed that many inmates were systematically gassed at Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps in Germany proper. Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg presented seemingly solid proof of such gassings. Over the past several decades, however, nearly all claims of gassings and mass extermination at these and other camps in Germany proper have been quietly abandoned. No reputable historian of this subject now supports the once supposedly proven story of "extermination camps" in the territory of the old German Reich.

A US War Department official, Stephen F. Pinter, looked into the claims of mass extermination in German camps. In a letter published in 1959 he summarized his findings:[7]

"I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber, was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate, since the Russians would not permit it.

[... Often cited is] the old propaganda myth that millions of Jews were killed by the National Socialists. From what I was able to determine during six years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject."

An authoritative debunking of many execution gassing stories was provided in 1960 by Martin Broszat, an official (and later director) of the semi-official Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) in Munich. "Neither in Dachau, nor in Bergen-Belsen, nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed", he wrote in a letter published in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit. Broszat acknowledged that there were no mass gassings in any of the camps in Germany proper, and noted that the "inmates who died in Dachau or other concentration camps in the Old Reich [Germany in its borders of 1937] were above all victims of the catastrophic hygienic and supply conditions".[8] Broszat (who died in 1989) did not present any evidence for his statement, nor did he explain why the apparently convincing "testimonies" and official "proofs" for gassings at camps in Germany proper were no longer to be considered valid.

French-Jewish historian Olga Wormser-Migot likewise concluded in her detailed 1968 study of the German concentration camp system that the stories of execution gas chambers in Germany proper and Austria are mythical.[9] Part of the reason for the persistence of baseless 'gas chamber' stories, she wrote, is confusion about the distinction between a gas chamber and a crematory. Another factor, perhaps more basic, is an 'unconscious desire' to keep alive the memory of the evil wartime treatment of the Jews. Psychologically, the 'gas chamber' has become one of the "leitmotifs of the heroic epic of the deportation".[10]

Even noted 'Nazi hunter' Simon Wiesenthal has acknowledged (in 1975 and again in 1993) that "there were no extermination camps on German soil".[11]

The Holocaust story these days is that there were only six 'extermination' camps, all of them in what is now Poland. Prominent Holocaust historians now claim that masses of Jews were gassed at just six sites: Auschwitz (including Birkenau), Majdanek (Lublin), Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec.[12]

1.2. No Documentary Evidence

The German authorities kept astonishingly detailed records of every aspect of camp affairs.[13] Remarkably, though, there is no contemporary documentary evidence of homicidal gassings or of a policy of mass extermination in the camps. Not a single contemporary German document mentions or even refers to killings of Jews in gas chambers. Nor are there any contemporary plans or diagrams of extermination gas chambers. There is similarly no documentary proof that any of the various rooms or buildings said to have been execution gassing facilities were, in fact, ever used as such.

What 'evidence' there is for mass extermination in the German wartime camps consists entirely of dubious 'testimony', either from a handful of German officials (such as the now discredited "confession" of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß), or from a small number of former inmates.[14]

'Eyewitnesses' of gassings are rare. Only a small number of persons has ever claimed to have seen such execution gas chambers in operation, and their scant descriptions of homicidal gassings are typically cursory, vague and/or contradictory. As a number of historians have acknowledged, such testimony is not very credible. Holocaust historian Gitta Sereny has warned that quite a few of the familiar 'eyewitness' testimonies are nothing more than baseless hearsay. Some of the best-known 'memoirs' of extermination gassings, she complains, are "partial or complete fakes, such as Jean-François Steiner's Treblinka or Martin Gray's For Those I Loved".[15]

Similarly, the archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center has confirmed that more than 10,000 of the 20,000 'testimonies' of Jewish 'survivors' on file there are "unreliable". Many survivors, wanting "to be part of history", apparently let their imaginations run away with them, director Shmuel Krakowski said in 1986.[16]

1.3. Wartime Development of the Camp System

At the outbreak of war in 1939, there were six relatively small concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) in Germany (including Austria). Including their subordinate 'satellite camps', these held a total of 21,400 inmates.[17]

As Germany's demand for labor in war-related industries grew, and it became obvious that the conflict would not end quickly, attention turned to the camp inmates as an important source of manpower. Accordingly, the camp system was placed under the control of a new "SS Economic-Administrative Main Office" (SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt) or WVHA, headed by Oswald Pohl, a former naval officer. Headquartered in Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, the agency was created in early 1942 "to utilize prisoner labor on a large scale".[18]

Until 1942, Jews were not held in the concentration camps in large numbers. (A notable exception was the temporary "protective custody" roundup of many Jews in the wake of the infamous November 1938 'Crystal Night' outbreak of violence. After a few days or weeks, these detainees were released.) In January 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler explained that the concentration camps would now have to "deal with major economic tasks", and ordered that the camps should therefore prepare for the reception of 100,000 Jewish men and up to 50,000 Jewish women during the next several weeks.[19]

Camp system administrator Pohl confirmed the new policy in an April 1942 report to Himmler:[20]

"The war has brought about a marked change in the structure of the concentration camps, and has changed their function with regard to the employment of the prisoners. The custody of prisoners for reasons of security, education or prevention is no longer the main consideration.

The mobilization of all prisoner labor resources for war-related tasks (increase in armament production) and, later, for peacetime reconstruction work, is becoming more and more important. Accordingly, measures have now become necessary to gradually transform the concentration camps from their earlier one-sided political role into an organization suited for economic tasks."

In his attached order to camp commandants (and others), Pohl wrote:

"The camp commandant alone is responsible for the employment of the labor personnel. This employment must be exhaustive, in the full sense of the term, and meant for the highest level of efficiency [Leistung]."

As a result, both the number of camps and the number of inmates increased dramatically during the remaining war years. The camps became enormous forced labor centers where inmates were employed in production essential to the war effort, not only in SS industrial work but in many private German firms. In accord with the new policy, large numbers of Jews were diverted to the camps. As Pohl euphemistically put it in a September 1942 communication to Himmler:

"Employable Jews who are migrating [that is, are being deported] to the East will have to interrupt their journey and work in war-related industry."[21]

The number of internees (Jewish and non-Jewish) in Pohl's WVHA camp system grew steadily: 110,000 in September 1942, more than 154,000 in March 1943, about 200,000 by May-June 1943, and nearly 225,000 by August 1943.[22] By April 1944, the WVHA system had grown to 20 full-fledged concentration camps (KL) and 165 satellite labor camps.[23]

In a June 1944 speech to military commanders, Himmler reported with some satisfaction on the productivity of his enormous camp work force:[24]

"In this year of the war, 40 million working hours of labor are now devoted to war production every month in the concentration camps. Most, or up to nine-tenths, of the concentration camp inmates are non-Germans and criminals [sic]. They produce one-third of the German fighter planes. One-third of the German rifle barrels are now produced there with just one German foreman for every 90 prisoners. Countless other things are manufactured, from the finest optical instruments to munitions and enormous quantities of mortars and 3.7 flak guns. In addition, these camp workers are building great underground factories."

In mid-August 1944, the WVHA camp system held 524,000 people.[25] By January 1945, this figure had grown to about 714,000. The actual number of inmates may have been substantially higher, as many tens of thousands of people - many of them Jews - were hastily brought into the camps during the war's final chaotic months.[26]

As extensive at it was, the concentration camp network did not include ghettos or camps under the control of the Higher SS and Police Leaders, where most Jews were held. In addition to Jews in concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Lublin (Majdanek) and Bergen-Belsen, many hundreds of thousands of Jews were held in numerous special labor camps and company camps, especially in Poland and the occupied Soviet territories.[27]

1.4. Measures to Reduce Deaths

As already suggested, it has been widely claimed that Germany's wartime camps were organized to systematically kill as many prisoners as possible. The masses of dead and dying inmates in the camps liberated by Allied forces during the final weeks of the war in Europe certainly seemed to confirm this view. While incontestably large numbers of prisoners perished in the camps, succumbing especially to typhus and other diseases, such deaths were not due to any policy or program. To the contrary, German authorities undertook extensive measures to save the lives of concentration camp inmates.

SS chief Himmler responded to reports of large-scale deaths in the camps with an urgent letter on December 16, 1942, to camp system administrator Pohl:

"Efforts absolutely must be taken to reduce the death rate in the concentration camps by improving the nutrition and, whenever possible and necessary, the working conditions. The camp commandants are to be held personally responsible for this."[28]

Acting on this, SS officer Richard Glücks, head of the WVHA agency that supervised the camps, sent a secret directive on December 28, 1942, to every concentration camp, including Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Majdanek (Lublin). It noted with alarm that more than half of recent arrivals in the camps - 70,000 out of 136,000 - had died. "With such a high death rate", Glücks added, "the number of prisoners can never be brought to the level ordered by the Reichsführer SS [Himmler]".[29]

Glücks went on to order that

"[...] camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps. [...] More than they have in the past, the camp doctors must supervise the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants. [...] The camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor sites are improved as much as possible.

The secret directive concluded:

"The Reichsführer SS has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced."

Glücks followed up by pointedly informing the concentration camp commandants in January 1943:

"As I have already pointed out, every means must be used to lower the death rate in the camp."[30]

In a secret order of October 26, 1943, to the commandants of the major camps, including Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Lublin (Majdanek), Pohl laid down specific measures to ensure the health and productivity of the internees.[31] Each commandant, he wrote, was to personally see to it that this directive was brought to the attention of his camp administrator and head camp physician, who had to confirm receipt with their signatures. A copy of the order was sent to Himmler.

Pohl's directive began by stressing the importance of the camps in the war effort:

"Because of our work during the past two years, the concentration camps now represent a factor of decisive military importance in armaments production. From nothing we have built an armaments works without parallel.

In earlier years, because of the educational-rehabilitation purpose that prevailed at the time, it was not important whether the prisoners performed productive work. Now, however, the labor productivity of the prisoners is important, and all measures by commandants, administrators and physicians must be directed above all at maintaining the health and the productivity of the prisoners.

[...] In this regard, the following are necessary:

1. Nutrition that is proper and appropriate for the work.

2. Proper and appropriate clothing.

3. Use of every natural means of maintaining good health.

4. Avoidance of all unnecessary exertions unless directly required to maintain productivity."

Pohl went on to cite specific measures for improving the health and well-being of the prisoners:

"The mid-day lunch should consist of 1.25 to 1.5 liters - not thin soup, but thick, substantial meals.

Receipt of additional [food] parcels is to be encouraged.

Meal time and proper digestion requires rest. For this reason, there should be sufficient rest periods at mealtime. No unnecessary marches. The food should be brought to the people, not the people to the food.

In addition to warm food, clothing is needed to keep the body warm and protect it from cold. This is especially important in the case of prisoners who work outside.

Care must be taken to ensure an undisturbed night-time sleep period of at least seven to eight hours.

Roll calls should be kept as brief as possible."

Pohl also specified that ill prisoners in the sick bays were to receive a special diet to help restore their health, and that good work and helpful suggestions by inmates were to be rewarded with bonuses.

While such measures were not always implemented as ordered, these high-level directives did not fail to have an impact.

Pohl reported to Himmler in September 1943 that the monthly death rate in the camps had fallen from about ten percent in the summer and fall of 1942 to about two percent in August 1943. "The reduction in the mortality rate", he went on, "is due primarily to the fact that the hygienic measures that have long been demanded have now been carried out, at least to a larger extent". Himmler thanked Pohl for his work, and expressed the belief that the situation would improve still further once better sewerage and sanitary facilities were installed.[32]

2. Buchenwald: Legend and Reality

Buchenwald is widely regarded as one of wartime Germany's most notorious "death camps". In fact, though, this carefully cultivated image bears little resemblance to reality. Today, more than half a century after the end of the Second World War, the camp deserves another, more objective look.

2.1. History and Function

The Buchenwald concentration camp was located on a wooded hill outside of Weimar. It was opened in July 1937. Until the war years, almost all the inmates were either professional criminals or political prisoners (most of them ardent Communists). Some 2,300 Buchenwald inmates were pardoned in 1939 in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939 the camp population was 5,300. This grew slowly to 12,000 in early 1943, and then increased rapidly as many foreign workers, especially Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, were brought for employment in war production.[33]

During the war years Buchenwald was expanded into a vast complex of more than a hundred satellite factories, mines and work shops spread across a large portion of Germany. The most important of these was probably the Dora underground plant, which produced V-2 missiles. In October 1944 it became the independent Nordhausen (Mittelbau) camp.[34]

Many thousands of Jews arrived at Buchenwald from Hungary and various eastern camps in 1944 and 1945. Most had been evacuated by railroad from Auschwitz and other camps threatened by the advancing Red Army.[35]

The number of inmates increased enormously during the final months of the war: 34,000 in November 1943, 44,000 in April 1944, and 80,000 in August 1944. A monthly peak was reached at the end of February 1945, when 86,000 inmates were crammed into the severely overcrowded camp. Almost 30,000 inmates were evacuated from Buchenwald during the week before the U.S. Army takeover on 11 April 1945. Altogether a total of 239,000 persons were interned in the camp between 1937 and April 1945.[36]

2.2. The Commandant and His Wife

The first Commandant, Karl Koch, ran Buchenwald from 1937 until early 1942, when he was transferred to Majdanek. He proved a notoriously brutal and corrupt administrator who enriched himself with valuables stolen from numerous inmates, whom he then had killed to cover up his thefts. The camp physician, Dr. Waldemar Hoven, murdered many inmates in cooperation with Koch and the Communist underground camp organization. Koch was eventually charged by an SS court with murder and corruption, found guilty and executed.[37]

His wife, Ilse Koch, was involved in many of her husband's crimes, but the fantastic charge that she had lamp shades and other items manufactured from the skins of murdered inmates is not true. This allegation was made by the United States prosecution team at the main Nuremberg trial.[38]

General Lucius D. Clay, Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe and Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone of Germany, 1947-49, carefully reviewed the Ilse Koch case in 1948 and found that, whatever her other misdeeds, the lampshade charge was baseless. He commuted her sentence from life imprisonment to four years and informed the Army Department in Washington:

"There is no convincing evidence that she [Ilse Koch] selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tatooed skins or that she possessed any articles made of human skin."[39]

During a 1976 interview Clay recalled the case:[40]

"We tried Ilse Koch. [...] She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and I commuted it to three [four] years. And our press really didn't like that. She had been destroyed by the fact that an enterprising reporter who first went into her house had given her the beautiful name, the "Bitch of Buchenwald," and he had found some white lampshades in there which he wrote up as being made out of human flesh.

Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.

[...] The Germans picked her up and gave her 12 years for her treatment of her own people. But it wasn't really a war crime in the strict sense of the word.

And those are the kinds of things that we had to deal with all the time."

2.3. The Inmates: Life and Death

There is no question that many atrocities were committed against Buchenwald inmates. However, at least a very large portion of them were committed, not by the German SS guards, but by the underground Communist camp organization that gained almost total internal control after 1943. This remarkable situation was confirmed in a detailed U.S. Army intelligence document of 24 April 1945 entitled Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report.[41] This confidential analysis remained classified until 1972.

In a short preface, Army intelligence chief Alfred Toombs called this secret report "one of the most significant accounts yet written on an aspect of life in Nazi Germany" because it "tells how the [Buchenwald] prisoners themselves organized a deadly terror within the Nazi terror." The general accuracy of the report had been independently confirmed, Toombs added.

As large numbers of foreigners began arriving at the camp during the war years, the confidential report noted, the understaffed SS found it necessary to turn over an ever larger share of camp administration to the inmates themselves. In practice this meant that by 1943 the well-organized and disciplined Communist inmate organization had taken virtually total control of the camp's internal operation. As the report explained:

"The trusties had wide powers over their fellow inmates. At first they were drawn almost exclusively from the German criminals. This period lasted until 1942. But gradually the Communists began to gain control of this organization. They were the oldest residents, with records of 10-12 years in the concentration camps [...] They clung together with remarkable tenacity, whereas the criminal elements were simply out for their own individual welfare and had little group cohesiveness. The Communists maintained excellent discipline and received a certain amount of direction from outside the camp. They had brains and technical qualifications for running the various industries established at the camp.

Their advances were not made without resistance from the criminals, but gradually the criminals were eliminated from power, partly by intimidation, partly with the aid of the SS. Numbers of the criminals were killed by beatings, hangings, or injections of phenol into the heart or of air or milk into the veins. The injections were a specialty of the camp doctor[Hoven], who became a partisan of the Communist faction.

Besides the top positions in the trusty organization, there were a number of key Communist strongholds in the administration of the camp. One was the food supply organization, through which favored groups received reasonable rations while others were brought to the starvation level. A second was the hospital, staffed almost exclusively by Communists. Its facilities were largely devoted to caring for members of their party [...]Another Communist stronghold was the Property Room [...] Each German trusty obtained good clothing and numerous other valuables. The Communists of Buchenwald, after ten or twelve years in concentration camps, are dressed like prosperous business men. Some affect leather jackets and little round caps reminiscent of the German navy, apparently the uniform of revolution."

As a result of all this:

"[...] Instead of a heap of corpses or a disorderly mob of starving, leaderless men, the Americans [who captured the camp] found a disciplined and efficient organization in Buchenwald. Credit is undoubtedly due to the self-appointed Camp Committee, an almost purely Communist group under the domination of the German political leaders.

[...] The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death [...] The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities committed at Buchenwald."

Communist block chiefs, the report stated, would personally beat their charges and "sometimes forced whole blocks to stand barefoot in the snow for hours, apparently on their own initiative." The Communists killed "large numbers" of Polish inmates who refused to submit to their rule. They forced French inmates to give up thousands of Red Cross parcels. The report mentioned several particularly brutal Communist camp leaders by name.

It confirmed that the camp physician, Dr. Hoven, had been an important Communist ally who killed numerous criminal and anti-Communist political prisoners with lethal injections. An SS investigation team uncovered his activities during the war and sentenced him to death for murder. However, because of the critical wartime shortage of doctors, he was reprieved after 18 months in jail. After the war the Communists tried to protect their ally, but Hoven was sentenced to death for a second time by a U.S. military tribunal and executed in 1948.

Camp Communists maintained close relations with the well-organized underground Communist party on the outside.

"From Buchenwald an inmate went out regularly to establish contact with a Communist courier bringing news and instructions. Bound by his loyalty to the Party, the contact man never made use of his opportunity to escape personally."

The Communist camp military organization had three machine guns, fifty rifles and a number of hand grenades. The German Communists lived better than any other group. The report noted:

"Even now they may be distinguished from the rest of the inmates by their rosy cheeks and robust health, though they have been in concentration camps for much longer than the others."

Finally, the report's authors warned against the simplistic and naive notion that former inmates should be trusted and helped just because they had been interned in German camps.

"Some are in fact 'bandits,' criminals from all Europe or foreign workers in Germany who were caught stealing [...] They are brutalized, unpleasant to look on. It is easy to adopt the Nazi theory that they are subhuman."

A book published in 1961 by the Communist-run "International Buchenwald Committee" of East Berlin proudly describes the wartime activities of the camp's Communist underground. It ran an underground camp newspaper, an illegal radio transmitter, an inmate orchestra (which played Communist songs), a large library and even a military organization. It held Communist ceremonies and political meetings, and carried out extensive sabotage of German war production.[42]

Former Buchenwald inmate Ernst Federn, a Jew, explained after the war how the Communist camp organization cooperated with the SS to increase its own power and eliminate opponents and undesirables. He recalled that the leader of the Jewish section of the Communist camp organization, Emil Carlebach, "declared quite frankly that for him only his [Communist] friends counted, that everybody else might as well perish." Federn reported that he personally witnessed two acts of brutality by Carlebach, who was a Block Senior from 1942 until 1945. In one case he ordered the death of a fellow Jewish inmate for allegedly mistreating inmates at another camp. On another occasion Carlebach personally beat an elderly Jewish inmate from Turkey to death because he had unavoidably relieved himself in the barracks.[43]

Similarly, an Englishman who spent 15 months in Buchenwald reported after the war that the Communist camp organization did not consider the Jewish inmates particularly worth trying to keep alive.[44]

In recent years some homosexual organizations have claimed that thousands of homosexuals were "systematically exterminated" in the German concentration camps.[45] While it is true that many were interned as criminals, no homosexual was ever killed by the Germans for that reason alone. It is also worth recalling that during the 1930s and 1940s, homosexual behavior was considered an odious crime in most of the world, including the United States.

A former Buchenwald inmate recalled in 1981:

"[...] Homosexuals were oppressed by the Nazis because of their social mores [...] In Buchenwald, a great number of them were not killed by the Nazis, but by political prisoners [Communists], because of the homosexuals' aggressive and offensive behavior."[46]

Day-to-day conditions were much better than most portrayals would suggest. Inmates could both receive and send two letters or postcards monthly. They could receive money from the outside. Inmates were also paid for their labor with special camp currency which they could use to purchase a wide variety of items in the camp canteen. They played soccer, handball and volleyball in their spare time. Soccer matches were held on Saturdays and Sundays on the camp playing field. A large camp library offered a wide range of books. A motion picture theater was very popular. There were also variety shows, and musical groups put on regular concerts in the central square. A camp brothel, which employed 15 prostitutes when the Americans arrived, was available to many inmates.[47]

2.4. Extermination Factory?

The Americans who arrived at Buchenwald in April 1945 found hundreds of sick inmates and many unburied corpses in the camp. Horrific photos of these gruesome scenes were immediately circulated throughout the world and have been widely reproduced ever since, giving the impression that Buchenwald was a diabolical mass killing center.

The American government encouraged this impression. A U.S. Army report about Buchenwald prepared for the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe and made public at the end of April 1945 declared that the "mission of the camp" was "an extermination factory".[48] And two weeks later a U.S. Congressional report on German camps, later used as a Nuremberg trial document, was issued which likewise described Buchenwald as an "extermination factory".[49]

This superficially plausible description is, however, completely wrong. The great majority of those who died at Buchenwald perished during the chaotic final months of the war. They succumbed to disease, often aggravated by malnutrition, in spite of woefully inadequate efforts to keep them alive. They were victims, not of an 'extermination' program, but rather of the terrible overcrowding and severe lack of food and medical supplies due to a general collapse of order in Germany during the tumultuous final phase of the war.

Along with these indirect victims of the war were many healthy inmates. B. M. McKelway inspected Buchenwald shortly after the U.S. takeover as one of a group of American newspaper editors and publishers. He reported that "many of the hundreds of inmates we saw appeared to be healthy while others suffering from dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis and other diseases were living skeletons."[50]

One striking indication that Buchenwald was not an 'extermination' camp is the fact that some of the internees were children too young to work. An estimated one thousand boys, aged two to 16, were housed in two special children's barracks. Train transports of Jewish children arrived from 1942 to 1945. Some arrived from Auschwitz in 1943. Other Jewish children came from Hungary and Poland.[51] The confidential U.S. Army report of April 24, 1945, noted the "most remarkable sight of the children" who "rush about, shrieking and playing".[52]

2.5. The Gas Chamber Lie

Perhaps the most vicious lie circulated after the war about Buchenwald is the charge that the Germans exterminated inmates there in gas chambers. An official French government report submitted to the Nuremberg tribunal as a prosecution exhibit imaginatively stated:

"Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail. In 1944, at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain [of the gas chambers] had a floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into the room with the crematory oven."[53]

The chief British prosecutor at the main Nuremberg trial, Sir Hartley Shawcross, declared in his closing address that "murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens" of Buchenwald and other camps.[54]

In a book published in 1947, French priest Georges Henocque, former chaplain of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, claimed to have visited the inside of a Buchenwald gas chamber, which he described in detail. This particular story has been cited as a good example of the kind of Holocaust lies which even prominent personalities are capable of inventing.[55]

Another French priest and former inmate, Jean-Paul Renard, made a similar claim about the camp in his own book published shortly after the war:

"I saw thousands and thousands of persons going into the showers. Instead of liquid, asphyxiating gases poured out over them."

When fellow Frenchman and former Buchenwald inmate Paul Rassinier pointed out to the priest that there was no gas chamber in the camp, Renard replied:

"Right, but that's only a figure of speech [...] and since those things existed somewhere, it's not important."[56]

In a book published in 1948, Hungarian Jewish writer Eugene Levai charged that the Germans killed tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews at Buchenwald in gas chambers.[57]

A widely distributed booklet issued by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith also spread the tale that people were gassed at Buchenwald.[58]

In 1960 the Buchenwald gassing story was officially declared a fable. As mentioned before, in that year, Martin Broszat of the anti-Hitler Institute for Contemporary History in Munich specifically stated that no one was ever gassed at Buchenwald.[8]Professor A.S. Balachowsky, a member of the Institut de France, likewise declared in November 1971:

"I would like to confirm to you that no gas chamber as such existed at Buchenwald [...]."[59]

Holocaust writer Konnilyn Feig conceded in her book, Hitler's Death Camps, that Buchenwald did not have a gas chamber.[60] Today no serious historian still claims gassings there.

2.6. How Many Perished?

The numbers of persons estimated to have perished at Buchenwald while it was under German control vary tremendously. According to former inmate Elie Wiesel, the prolific Jewish writer and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, "In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day."[61] This wildly irresponsible statement is, unfortunately, all too typical of the glib rhetoric of the man who was also chosen to head the U.S. government's official Holocaust Memorial Council.

The 1980 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia claimed that "more than 100,000" died in the camp.[62] The Encyclopaedia Judaica put the number at 56,549.[63] Raul Hilberg, writing in the 1982 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana, stated that "more than 50,000 died in the Buchenwald Complex".[64]

The U.S. Army intelligence report of April 24, 1945, (cited above) noted that the total number of certified deaths was 32,705.[65] A detailed June 1945 U.S. government report about Buchenwald put the total at 33,462, of whom more than 20,000 died in the chaotic final months of the war.[66]

The authoritative International Tracing Service of Arolsen, an affiliate of the International Red Cross, stated in 1984 that the number of documented deaths (of both Jews and non-Jews) at Buchenwald was 20,67 1, with another 7,463 for Dom (Mittelbau).[67]

While even these lower figures are regrettably high, it is important to realize that the great majority of those who died at Buchenwald were unfortunate victims of a catastrophic war, not German policy. Most of the rest were murdered by order of the Communist underground camp organization. Several hundred were also killed in Allied bombing attacks.

In one air raid against a large munitions factory near the main camp, British bombers killed 750 persons, including 400 inmates.[68]

2.7. American and Soviet Atrocities

Following the American takeover of Buchenwald in April 1945, about 80 remaining German guards and camp functionaries were summarily murdered. Inmates brutally beat the Germans to death, sometimes with the aid and encouragement of American soldiers.[69] Between 20 and 30 GIs took turns gleefully beating six young Germans to death.[70] Inmates also commandeered American jeeps and drove to nearby Weimar, where they looted and randomly killed German civilians.[71]

After the war the Soviet secret police operated Buchenwald as a concentration camp for "potential class enemies" and other "possibly dangerous" German civilians. In September 1949, more than four years after the end of the war, there were still 14,300 inmates in the "special camp". (While Buchenwald was under German control, the number of inmates did not reach 14,000 until May 1943.) Conditions were horrible. Even the Soviet official in charge of the concentration camps in Germany, General Merkulov, acknowledged the severe lack of order and cleanliness, particularly at Buchenwald. At least 13,000 and as many as 21,000 persons died in Soviet-run Buchenwald, but no one has ever been punished for the deaths and mistreatment in this notorious postwar camp.[72]

One former inmate described his "five years of horrible seclusion, humiliations, interrogations and annihilation" in the Soviet-run camp in these words:[73]

"People were mere numbers. Their dignity was consciously trampled upon. They were starved without mercy and consumed by tuberculosis until they were skeletons. The annihilation process, which had been well tested over decades, was systematic. The cries and groans of those in pain still echo in my ears whenever the past comes back to me in sleepless nights. We had to watch helplessly as people perished according to plan - like creatures sacrificed to annihilation.

Many nameless people were caught up in the annihilation machinery of the NKVD [Soviet secret police] after the collapse of 1945. They were herded together like cattle after the so-called liberation and vegetated in the many concentration camps. Many were systematically tortured to death. A memorial was built for the dead of the Buchenwald concentration camp. A figure of death victims was chosen based on fantasy. Intentionally, only the dead of the 1937-1945 period were honored. Why is there no memorial honoring the dead of 1945 to 1950? Countless mass graves were dug around the camp in the postwar period."

In an act of stunning hypocrisy, the Communist rulers of the post-war 'German Democratic Republic' have turned the Buchenwald camp area into a kind of secular shrine. Every year, hundreds of thousands visit the site, complete with museums, bell tower, monumental sculpture and memorials dedicated, ironically enough, to the "victims of fascism".[74] There is nothing to remind visitors of the thousands of forgotten Germans who perished miserably during the years after the war when the camp was run by the Soviets.

The story of Buchenwald, like the story of virtually every German wartime concentration camp, is a microcosm of the entire Holocaust tale. The widely-accepted portrayal of Buchenwald, like those of the other German camps, contrasts sharply with the little-known reality.

3. Bergen-Belsen Camp: The Suppressed Story

Fifty-five years ago, on April 15, 1945, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The anniversary was widely remembered in official ceremonies and in newspaper articles that, as the following essay shows, distort the camp's true history. Largely because of the circumstances of its liberation, the relatively unimportant German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen has become along with Dachau and Buchenwald - an international symbol of German barbarism.

The British troops who liberated the Belsen camp three weeks before the end of the war were shocked and disgusted by the many unburied corpses and dying inmates they found there. Horrific photos and films of the camp's emaciated corpses and mortally sick inmates were quickly circulated around the globe. Within weeks the British military occupation newspaper proclaimed:

"The story of that greatest of all exhibitions of 'man's inhumanity to man' which was Belsen Concentration Camp is known throughout the world."[75]

Ghastly images, recorded by Allied photographers at Belsen in mid-April 1945 and widely reproduced ever since, have greatly contributed to the camp's reputation as a notorious extermination center. In fact, the dead of Bergen-Belsen were, above all, unfortunate victims of war and its turmoil, not deliberate policy. It can even be argued that they were as much victims of Allied as of German measures.

The Bergen-Belsen camp was located near Hannover in northwestern Germany on the site of a former army camp for wounded prisoners of war. In 1943 it was established as an internment camp (Aufenthaltslager) for European Jews who were to be exchanged for German citizens held by the Allies.

More than 9,000 Jews with citizenship papers or passports from Latin American countries, entry visas for Palestine, or other documents making them eligible for emigration, arrived in late 1943 and 1944 from Poland, France, Holland and other parts of Europe. During the final months of the war, several groups of these "exchange Jews" were transported from Axis-occupied Europe. German authorities transferred several hundred to neutral Switzerland, and at least one group of 222 Jewish detainees was transferred from Belsen (by way of neutral Turkey) to British-controlled Palestine.[76]

Until late 1944 conditions were generally better than in other concentration camps. Marika Frank Abrams, a Jewish woman from Hungary, was transferred from Auschwitz in 1944. Years later she recalled her arrival at Belsen:

"[...] We were each given two blankets and a dish. There was running water and latrines. We were given food that was edible and didn't have to stand for hours to be counted. The conditions were so superior to Auschwitz we felt we were practically in a sanitarium."[77]

Inmates normally received three meals a day. Coffee and bread were served in the morning and evening, with cheese and sausage as available. The main mid-day meal consisted of one liter of vegetable stew. Families lived together. Otherwise, men and women were housed in separate barracks.[78] Children were also held there. There were some 500 Jewish children in Belsen's "No. 1 Women's Camp" section when British forces arrived.[79]

During the final months of the war, tens of thousands of Jews were evacuated to Belsen from Auschwitz and other eastern camps threatened by the advancing Soviets. Belsen became severely overcrowded as the number of inmates increased from 15,000 in December 1944 to 42,000 at the beginning of March 1945, and more than 50,000 a month later.[80]

Many of these Jewish prisoners had chosen to be evacuated westwards with their German captors rather than remain in eastern camps to await liberation by Soviet forces.[81]

So catastrophic had conditions become during the final months of the war that about a third of the prisoners evacuated to Belsen in February and March 1945 perished during the journey and were dead on arrival.[82]

As order broke down across Europe during those chaotic final months, regular deliveries of food and medicine to the camp stopped. Foraging trucks were sent to scrounge up whatever supplies of bread, potatoes and turnips were available in nearby towns.[83]



Plan of the Bergen-Belsen camp (Click for fullsize picture)


3.1. Epidemic

Disease was kept under control by routinely disinfecting all new arrivals. But in early February 1945 a large transport of Hungarian Jews was admitted while the disinfection facility was out of order. As a result, typhus broke out and quickly spread beyond control.[84] This disease was the worst killer, but typhoid fever and dysentery also claimed many lives. Aggravating the situation was a policy during the final months of transferring already sick inmates from other camps to Belsen, which was then officially designated a sick or convalescence camp (Krankenlager). The sick women of Auschwitz, for example, were transferred to Belsen in three groups in November-December 1944.[85]

Commandant Josef Kramer quarantined the camp in an effort to save lives, but SS camp administration headquarters in Berlin insisted that Belsen be kept open to receive still more Jewish evacuees arriving from the East. The death rate soon rose to 400 a day.[86]

When SS chief Heinrich Himmler learned of the typhus outbreak at Bergen-Belsen, he immediately issued an order to all appropriate officials requiring that

"[...] all medical means necessary to combat the epidemic should be employed [...] There can be no question of skimping either with doctors or medical supplies."

However, the general breakdown of order that prevailed on Germany by this time made it impossible to implement the command.[87]

3.2. 'Belsen Worst'

Violette Fintz, a Jewish woman who had been deported from the island of Rhodes to Auschwitz in mid-1944, and then to Dachau and, finally, in early 1945, to Belsen, later compared conditions in the different camps:[88]

"Belsen was in the beginning bearable and we had bunks to sleep on, and a small ration of soup and bread. But as the camp got fuller, our group and many others were given a barracks to hold about seven hundred lying on the floor without blankets and without food or anything. It was a pitiful scene as the camp was attacked by lice and most of the people had typhus and cholera [...] Many people talk about Auschwitz - it was a horrible camp. But Belsen, no words can describe it [...] From my experience and suffering, Belsen was the worst."

Belsen's most famous inmate was doubtless Anne Frank, who had been evacuated from Auschwitz in late October 1994. She succumbed to typhus in March 1945, three or four weeks before liberation.

3.3. Kramer Reports a 'Catastrophe'

In a March 1, 1945, letter to Gruppenführer (General) Richard Glücks, head of the SS camp administration agency, Commandant Kramer reported in detail on the catastrophic situation in the Bergen-Belsen, and pleaded for help:[89]

"If I had sufficient sleeping accommodation at my disposal, then the accommodation of the detainees who have already arrived and of those still to come would appear more possible. In addition to this question a spotted fever and typhus epidemic has now begun, which increases in extent every day. The daily mortality rate, which was still in the region of 60-70 at the beginning of February, has in the meantime attained a daily average of 250-300 and will increase still further in view of the conditions which at present prevail.

Supply. When I took over the camp, winter supplies for 1500 internees had been indented for [...]; some had been received, but the greater part had not been delivered. This failure was due not only to difficulties of transport, but also to the fact that practically nothing is available in this area and all must be brought from outside the area [...]

For the last four days there has been no delivery [of food] from Hannover owing to interrupted communications, and I shall be compelled, if this state of affairs prevails till the end of the week, to fetch bread also by means of truck from Hannover. The trucks allotted to the local unit are in no way adequate for this work, and I am compelled to ask for at least three to four trucks and five to six trailers. When I once have here a means of towing then I can send out the trailers into the surrounding area [...]The supply question must, without fail, be cleared up in the next few days. I ask you, Gruppenführer, for an allocation of transport [...]

State of Health. The incidence of disease is very high here in proportion to the number of detainees. When you interviewed me on Dec. 1, 1944, at Oranienburg, you told me that Bergen-Belsen was to serve as a sick camp for all concentration camps in north Germany. The number of sick has greatly increased, particularly on account of the transports of detainees that have arrived from the East in recent times - these transports have sometimes spent eight or fourteen days in open trucks [...]

The fight against spotted fever is made extremely difficult by the lack of means of disinfection. Due to constant use, the hot-air delousing machine is now in bad working order and sometimes fails for several days [...]

A catastrophe is taking place for which no one wishes to assume responsibility [...] Gruppenführer, I can assure you that from this end everything will be done to overcome the present crisis [...]

I am now asking you for your assistance as it lies in your power. In addition to the above-mentioned points I need here, before everything, accommodation facilities, beds, blankets, eating utensils - all for about 20,000 internees [...] I implore your help in overcoming this situation."



Mass grave at Belsen camp, shortly after its liberation by British troops. Photographs such as this are widely reproduced as proof of a German policy of extermination. Contrary to Allied propaganda claims of the time, and Holocaust allegations in recent decades, though, these unfortunate prisoners were victims of typhus and starvation that were indirect consequences of the war - not of any deliberate policy. At least 14,000 Jews died in the camp following the British takeover.


Under such terrible conditions, Kramer did everything in his power to reduce suffering and prevent death among the inmates, even appealing to the hard-pressed German army - "I don't know what else to do" - he told high-ranking army officers.

"I have reached the limit. Masses of people are dying. The drinking water supply has broken down. A trainload of food was destroyed by low-flying[Allied] war planes. Something must be done immediately."[90]

Working together with both Commandant Kramer and chief inmate representative Kuestermeier, Colonel Hanns Schmidt responded by arranging for the local volunteer fire department to provide water. He also saw to it that food supplies were brought to the camp from abandoned rail cars. Schmidt later recalled that Kramer

"[...] did not at all impress one as a criminal type. He acted like an upright and rather honorable man. Neither did he strike me as someone with a guilty conscience. He worked with great dedication to improve conditions in the camp. For example, he rounded up horse drawn vehicles to bring food to the camp from rail cars that had been shot up."[90]

"I was swamped", Kramer later explained to incredulous British military interrogators:[91]

"The camp was not really inefficient before you [British and American forces] crossed the Rhine. There was running water, regular meals of a kind - I had to accept what food I was given for the camp and distribute it the best way I could. But then they suddenly began to send me trainloads of new prisoners from all over Germany. It was impossible to cope with them. I appealed for more staff, more food. I was told that this was impossible. I had to carry on with what I had.

Then as a last straw the Allies bombed the electric plant that pumped our water. Loads of food were unable to reach the camp because of the Allied fighters. Then things really got out of hand. During the last six weeks I have been helpless. I did not even have sufficient staff to bury the dead, let alone segregate the sick [...] I tried to get medicines and food for the prisoners and I failed. I was swamped. I may have been hated, but I was doing my duty."

Kramer's clear conscience is also suggested by the fact that he made no effort to save his life by fleeing, but instead calmly awaited the approaching British forces, naively confident of decent treatment. Later he stated:

"When Belsen Camp was eventually taken over by the Allies, I was quite satisfied that I had done all I possibly could under the circumstances to remedy the conditions in the camp."[92]

3.4. Negotiated Transfer

As British forces approached Bergen-Belsen, German authorities sought to turn over the camp to the British so that it would not become a combat zone. After some negotiation, it was peacefully transferred, with an agreement that "both British and German troops will make every effort to avoid battle in the area."[93]

A revealing account of the circumstances under which the British took control appeared in a 1945 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association:[94]

"By negotiations between British and German officers, British troops took over from the SS and the Wehrmacht the task of guarding the vast concentration camp at Belsen, a few miles northwest of Celle, which contains 60,000 prisoners, many of them political. This has been done because typhus is rampant in the camp and it is vital that no prisoners be released until the infection is checked. The advancing British agreed to refrain from bombing or shelling the area of the camp, and the Germans agreed to leave behind an armed guard which would be allowed to return to their own lines a week after the British arrival.

The story of the negotiations is curious. Two German officers presented themselves before the British outposts and explained that there were 9,000 sick in the camp and that all sanitation had failed. They proposed that the British should occupy the camp at once, as the responsibility was international in the interests of health. In return for the delay caused by the truce the Germans offered to surrender intact the bridges over the river Aller. After brief consideration the British senior officer rejected the German proposals, saying it was necessary that the British should occupy an area of ten kilometers round the camp in order to be sure of keeping their troops and lines of communication away from the disease. The British eventually took over the camp."

3.5. Brutal Mistreatment

On April 15, 1945, Belsen's commanders turned over the camp to British troops, who lost no time mistreating the SS camp personnel. The Germans were beaten with rifle butts, kicked, and stabbed with bayonets. Most were shot or worked to death.[95]British journalist Alan Moorehead described the treatment of some of the camp personnel shortly after the takeover:[96]

"As we approached the cells of the SS guards, the [British] sergeant's language become ferocious. 'We had had an interrogation this morning', the captain said. 'I'm afraid they are not a pretty sight.' [...] The sergeant unbolted the first door and [...] strode into the cell, jabbing a metal spike in front of him. 'Get up', he shouted. 'Get up. Get up, you dirty bastards.' There were half a dozen men lying or half lying on the floor. One or two were able to pull themselves erect at once. The man nearest me, his shirt and face spattered with blood, made two attempts before he got on to his knees and then gradually on to his feet. He stood with his arms stretched out in front of him, trembling violently.

'Come on. Get up', the sergeant shouted [in the next cell]. The man was lying in his blood on the floor, a massive figure with a heavy head and bedraggled beard [...] 'Why don't you kill me?' he whispered. 'Why don't you kill me? I can't stand it any more.' The same phrases dribbled out of his lips over and over again. 'He's been saying that all morning, the dirty bastard', the sergeant said."

Commandant Kramer, who was vilified in the British and American press as "The Beast of Belsen" and "The Monster of Belsen", was put on trial and then executed, along with chief physician Dr. Fritz Klein and other camp officials. At his trial, Kramer's defense attorney, Major T.C.M. Winwood, predicted:

"When the curtain finally rings down on this stage Josef Kramer will, in my submission, stand forth not as 'The Beast of Belsen' but as 'The Scapegoat of Belsen'."[97]

In an 'act of revenge', the British liberators expelled the residents of the nearby town of Bergen, and then permitted camp inmates to loot the houses and buildings. Much of the town was also set on fire.[98]



Josef Kramer in British captivity. After a military trial, the former Bergen-Belsen Commandant was put to death.

3.6. Postwar Deaths

There were some 55,000 to 60,000 prisoners in Bergen-Belsen when the British took control of the camp. The new administrators proved no more capable of mastering the chaos than the Germans had been, and some 14,000 Jewish inmates died at Belsen in the months following the British takeover.[99]

Although still occasionally referred to as an 'extermination camp' or 'mass murder' center, the truth about Bergen-Belsen has been quietly acknowledged by scholars.[100] In his 1978 survey of German history, University of Erlangen professor Hellmut Diwald[101] wrote of

"[...] The notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where 50,000 inmates were supposedly murdered. Actually, about 7,000 inmates died during the period when the camp existed, from 1943 to 1945. Most of them died in the final months of the war as a result of disease and malnutrition - consequences of the bombings that had completely disrupted normal deliveries of medical supplies and food. The British commander who took control of the camp after the capitulation testified that crimes on a large scale had not taken place at Bergen-Belsen."

Martin Broszat, Director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, wrote in 1976:[102]

"[...] In Bergen-Belsen, for example, thousands of corpses of Jewish prisoners were found by British soldiers on the day of liberation, which gave the impression that this was one of the notorious extermination camps. Actually, many Jews in Bergen-Belsen as well as in the satellite camps of Dachau died in the last weeks before the end of the war as a result of the quickly improvised retransfers and evacuations of Jewish workers from the still existing ghettos, work camps and concentration camps in the East (Auschwitz) [...]"

Dr. Russell Barton, an English physician who spent a month in Bergen-Belsen after the war with the British Army, has also explained the reasons for the catastrophic conditions found there:[103]

"Most people attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the Germans in general and the camp administrators in particular. Inmates were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists from different countries interpreted the situation according to the needs of propaganda at home.

For example, one newspaper emphasized the wickedness of the "German masters" by remarking that some of the 10,000 unburied dead were naked. In fact, when the dead were taken from a hut and left in the open for burial, other prisoners would take their clothing from them [...]

German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed [...]

I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from malnutrition? [...]The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs.

In trying to assess the causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented."

3.7. Gas Chamber Myths

Some former inmates and a few historians have claimed that Jews were put to death in gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen. For example, a significant work published shortly after the end of the war, A History of World War II, informed readers:

"In Belsen, [Commandant] Kramer kept an orchestra to play him Viennese music while he watched children torn from their mothers to be burned alive. Gas chambers disposed of thousands of persons daily."[104]



A protest meeting in the Bergen-Belsen camp, September 1947. For five years following the end of the war, British authorities maintained the camp as a "Displaced Persons" center. During this period it flourished as a major black market center. At this pro-Zionist gathering of 4,000 Jews, camp leader Joseph Rosensaft speaks against British policy in Palestine.


In Jews, God and History, Jewish historian Max Dimont wrote of gassings at Bergen-Belsen.[105] A semi-official work published in Poland in 1981 claimed that women and babies were "put to death in gas chambers" at Belsen.[106]

In 1945 the Associated Press news agency reported:[107]

"In Lueneburg, Germany, a Jewish physician, testifying at the trial of 45 men and women for war crimes at the Belsen and Oswiecim [Auschwitz]concentration camps, said that 80,000 Jews, representing the entire ghetto of Lodz, Poland, had been gassed or burned to death in one night at the Belsen camp."

Five decades after the camp's liberation, British army Captain Robert Daniell recalled seeing "the gas chambers" there.[108]

Years after the war, Robert Spitz, a Hungarian Jew, remembered taking a shower at Belsen in February 1945:

"[...] It was delightful. What I didn't know then was that there were other showers in the same building where gas came out instead of water."[109]

Another former inmate, Moshe Peer, recalled a miraculous escape from death as an eleven-year-old in the camp. In a 1993 interview with a Canadian newspaper, the French-born Peer claimed that he "was sent to the [Belsen] camp gas chamber at least six times." The newspaper account went on to relate:

"Each time he survived, watching with horror as many of the women and children gassed with him collapsed and died. To this day, Peer doesn't know how he was able to survive."

In an effort to explain the miracle, Peer mused:

"Maybe children resist better, I don't know."

Although Peer claimed that "Bergen-Belsen was worse than Auschwitz", he acknowledged that he and his younger brother and sister, who were deported to the camp in 1944, all somehow survived internment there.[110]

Such gas chamber tales are entirely fanciful. These days no reputable scholar supports it.[8]

3.8. Exaggerated Death Estimates

Estimates of the number of people who died in Bergen-Belsen have ranged widely over the years. Many have been irresponsible exaggerations. Typical is a 1985 YorkDaily News report, which told readers that "probably 100,000 died at Bergen-Belsen".[111] An official German government publication issued in 1990 declared that "more than 50,000 people had been murdered" in the Belsen camp under German control, and "an additional 13,000 died in the first weeks after liberation".[112]Closer to the truth is the Encyclopaedia Judaica, which maintains that 37,000 perished in the camp before the British takeover, and another 14,000 afterwards.[113]

Whatever the actual number of dead, Belsen's victims were not "murdered", and the camp was not an 'extermination' center.

3.10. Black Market Center

From 1945 until 1950, when it was finally shut down, the British maintained Belsen as a camp for displaced European Jews. During this period it achieved new notoriety as a major European black market center. The 'uncrowned king' of Belsen's 10,000 Jews was Yossl (Josef) Rosensaft, who amassed tremendous profits from the illegal trading. Rosensaft had been interned in various camps, including Auschwitz, before arriving in Belsen in early April 1945.[114]

British Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, chief of "displaced persons" operations in postwar Germany for the United Nations relief organization UNRRA recalled in his memoir that[115]

"[...] under Zionist auspices there had been organized at Belsen a vast illegitimate trading organization with worldwide ramifications and dealing in a wide range of goods, principally precious metals and stones. A money market dealt with a wide range of currencies. Goods were being imported in cryptically marked containers consigned in UNRRA shipments to Jewish voluntary agencies [...]"

3.11. Legacy

A kind of memorial center now draws many tourists annually to the camp site. Not surprisingly, Bergen's 13,000 residents are not very pleased with their town's infamous reputation. Citizens report being called "murderers" during visits to foreign countries.[116]

In striking contrast to the widely-accepted image of Belsen, which is essentially a product of hateful wartime propaganda, is the suppressed, albeit grim, historical reality. In truth, the Bergen-Belsen story may be regarded as the Holocaust story in miniature.



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Notes

Mark Weber is editor of The Journal of Historical Review, and director of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR, www.ihr.org). He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University, and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).

Editor's declaration: This contribution was not part of in the original German edition of this handbook. It was included here in order to address the concentration camps located in the so-called Old Reich (Altreich), an important topic neglected in the German edition. The inclusion of this article does not indicate any preferences of the editor or the publisher regarding the ongoing conflict between Mark Weber and the IHR on one hand and Willis Carto (founder of the IHR) on the other.

[1] Chapter 2. and 3. of this article were reprinted from: The Journal of Historical Review, 7(4) (1986), pp. 405-418, and 15(3) (1995), pp. 23-30, respectively (online: ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p405_Weber.html and .../v15/v15n3p23_Weber.html).
[2] Thus, American journalist and historian William Shirer wrote in his influential best-selling account, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: "All the thirty odd principle Nazi concentration camps were death camps and millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them." (In the 1962 Crest paperback edition, p. 1259. In some other editions, this is p. 967.)
[3] International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal (henceforth IMT "blue series"), 42 vols., Nuremberg 1947-1949; here: vol. 19, p. 434.
[4] Nuremberg document 159-L, ibid. vol. 37, pp. 605-629; Congressional Record - Senate, May 15, 1945, pp. 4576-4582; "Congressional Atrocity Report Stresses Calculated Killings" (AP dispatch), Washington (DC)Evening Star, May 15, 1945, front page.
[5] IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 7, pp. 576-77. Although he named Belsen as the camp were these electrocutions were supposedly being carried out, he may have meant to refer to Belzec.
[6] Nuremberg document PS-3311. ibid., vol. 32, pp. 153-58.
[7] Letter by Pinter in the Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1959, p. 15. See also Theodore J. O'Keefe, "The Liberation of the Camps: Facts vs. Lies", The Journal of Historical Review (JHR), 15(4) (1995), pp. 18-23 (online: ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n4p18_Okeefe.html).
[8] M. Broszat, "Keine Vergasung in Dachau", Die Zeit (Hamburg), August 19, 1960, p. 16. (US edition: August 26, 1960, p. 14). Facsimile reprint, with translation, in "No Gassing in Dachau", JHR, 13(3) (1993), p. 12. The Institut für Zeitgeschichte is funded by the German federal government and the Bavarian state government.
[9] O. Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire nazi, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1968, p. 11; see also pp. 12, 541-544.
[10] Ibid.; quoted in Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück, Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1975, pp. 218-219.
[11] Letters by Wiesenthal in Books & Bookmen (London), April 1975, p. 5, and in Stars and Stripes (European edition), Jan. 24, 1993, p. 14. Facsimile of Wiesenthal's Stars and Stripes letter is in JHR, 13(3) (1993), p. 10. See also M. Weber, "Simon Wiesenthal: Fraudulent 'Nazi Hunter'", JHR, 15(4) (1995), pp. 8-16 (online: ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n4p-8_Weber.html).
[12] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols., Holmes & Meier, New York 1985, p. 1219. Note also Uwe Adam, "The Gas Chambers", in François Furet (ed.), Unanswered Questions, Schocken, New York 1989, pp. 142-154; "Gas Chambers", Israel Gutman (ed.),Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan, New York 1990, p. 541.
[13] Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, B. Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989. See also S. Crowell, "Wartime Germany's Anti-Gas Air Raid Shelters: A Refutation of Pressac's 'Criminal Traces'", JHR, 18(4) (1999), pp. 7-30; M. Weber, "High Frequency Delousing Facilities at Auschwitz", JHR, 18(3) (1999), pp. 4-12.
There are extensive documents confirming, for example, purchase and installation of crematory ovens and (non-homicidal) delousing gas chambers, often down to the last Pfennig. See, for example, IMT "blue series", op. cit.(note 3), vol. 7, pp. 584-585.
[14] On the Höß evidence, see Robert Faurisson, "How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss", JHR 7(4) (1986), pp. 389-403.
[15] "The men who whitewash Hitler", New Statesman (London), Nov. 2, 1979, pp. 672-673.
[16] The Jerusalem Post (Israel), August 17, 1986, p. 1.
[17] Pohl report to Himmler, April 30, 1942. Document R-129. IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 38, p. 363; R. Hilberg, op. cit. (note 12), p. 870.
[18] Nuremberg document NO-542. Quoted in Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, Holocaust Library, New York 1979, p. 72; R. Hilberg, op. cit. (note 12), p. 867.
[19] Himmler to Glücks, Jan. 25, 1942. Nuremberg document NO-500. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, Washington, DC, 1949-1953 (henceforth NMT "green series"), volume 5, p. 365; R. Hilberg,op. cit. (note 12), p. 917. Only a fraction of this number of Jews was actually sent "during the next few weeks". Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, 2nded., Sphere Books, London 1971, p. 107.
[20] Pohl report, April 30, 1942. Document R-129. IMT "blue series", op. cit.(note 3), vol. 38, pp. 362-367.
[21] Pohl to Himmler, Sept. 16. 1942. R. Hilberg, op. cit. (note 12), p. 917.
[22] Pohl report to Himmler, Sept. 30, 1943. Document 1469-PS. NMT "green series", op. cit. (note 19), vol. 5, pp. 381f.
[23] Pohl to Himmler, April 5, 1944. Nuremberg document NO-20a. NMT "green series", op. cit. (note 19), vol. 5, p. 383; R. Hilberg, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 870-871; Danuta Czech (ed.), Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945, I.B. Tauris, London/New York 1990, p. 605.
[24] B. Smith, A. Peterson (eds.), Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden, Propyläen, Frankfurt 1974, p. 199. (June 21, 1944).
[25] WVHA report (W. Burger), Aug. 15, 1944. NO-1990. NMT "green series",op. cit. (note 19), vol. 5, pp. 388-89. An additional 612,000 were reportedly in the process of being added to the camp system.
[26] Yehuda Bauer, in Brewster S. Chamberlin, Marcia Feldman (eds.), The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, US Holocaust Memorial Council, Washington, DC, 1987, p. 91; however, Oswald Pohl estimated that at the end of 1944 there were no more than 700,000 people in the WVHA camps. See Pohl's written statement of June 1, 1948. Deutsche Hochschullehrer Zeitung (Tübingen), Nr. 1/2, 1963, pp. 24-25, p. 24.
[27] R. Hilberg, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 524-25, 531-32. By 1943, there were some 700,000 Jews in camps in German-occupied Poland alone. Source: Die Welt(Bonn/Berlin), Jan. 9, 1986 (or 1985?). Translation in The German Tribune(Hamburg), Jan. 19, 1986, p. 5; Also, according to a December 1943 report by the Generalgouvernement (Poland) main labor office, there were about 1.4 million "Jewish workers" in the German-ruled GG of Poland. Source: Albert Speer, Der Sklavenstaat, DVA, Stuttgart 1981, p. 398.
[28] Facsimile reprint in Obozy hitlerowskie na ziemiach polskich 1939-1945. Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warsaw 1979, pp. 135-136.
[29] A. de Cocatrix, Die Zahl der Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung, International Tracing Service/ICRC, Arolsen 1977, pp. 4-5; Document PS-2171, Annex 2. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, DC, 1946-1948 (henceforth NC&A "red series"), vol. 4, pp. 833-834; D. Czech (ed.),op. cit. (note 23), p. 291.
This directive was quoted, as document E-168, at the main Nuremberg trial by SS defense attorney Dr. Horst Pelckmann on August 7, 1946: IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 20, pp. 434-435. It was also cited by Pelckmann on August 26, 1946: ibid., vol. 21, p. 605.
[30] Document NO-1523. NMT "green series", op. cit. (note 19), vol. 5, pp. 372-373.
[31] Pohl order to camp commandants, Oct. 26, 1943. Bundesarchiv (Koblenz), Bestand SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt. Signatur NS 3/386. Sammlung von Verwaltungsanordnungen, insbes. KL; Quoted at length in Deutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), August 12, 1977, pp. 1, 7. Cited in D. Czech (ed.), op. cit. (note 23), pp. 514-515.
[32] Pohl to Himmler, Sept. 30, 1943 (and Himmler response). Document 1469-PS. NMT "green series", op. cit. (note 19), vol. 5, pp. 379-382.
[33] The information in this section is from two sources: "Buchenwald", Cecil Roth et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica, Macmillan and Keter, New York and Jerusalem 1971, vol. 4, pp. 1442, 1445; and U.S. government report B-2833 of 18 June 1945. Document 2171-PS, published in the NC&A "red series",op. cit. (note 29), vol. 4, pp. 800-833.
[34] U.S. Army report of 25 May 1945. Document 2222-PS. Published in NC&A"red series", op. cit. (note 29), vol. 4, pp. 860-864; "German-Born NASA Expert...", New York Times, 18 October 1984, pp. Al, A12; "Ex-Nazi Denies Role...", New York Times, 21 October 1984, p. 8.
[35] Document 2171-PS. NC&A "red series", op. cit. (note 29), vol. 4, pp. 800-833.
[36] 2171-PS. NC&A "red series", op. cit. (note 29), vol. 4, pp. 832-833.
[37] Nuremberg testimony of Günther Reinecke, 7 August 1946. Published in theIMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 20, pp. 438, 441-442; SS indictment brief against Karl Koch, 11 April 1944. Document NO-2360.
[38] IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 3, pp. 514-515; vol. 5, pp. 220-201; vol. 32, pp. 267ff.
[39] "Clay Explains Cut in Ilse Koch Term", New York Times, 24 Sept. 1948, p. 3.
[40] Interview with Lucius D. Clay. Official Proceedings of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation. Transcript of a videotape interview shown at the conference "U.S. Occupation in Europe After World War II", 2324 April 1976 at Lexington, Va., sponsored by the George C. Marshall Research Foundation, pp. 37-38. (I am grateful to Robert Wolfe of the National Archives for bringing this interview to my attention.)
[41] Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report, U.S. Army, 12th Army Group, 24 April 1945. National Archives, Record Group 331, SHAEF, G-5, 17.11, Jacket 10, Box 151 (8929/163-8929/180). I am grateful to Mr. Timothy Mulligan of the Military Branch of the National Archives for bringing this report to my attention. See also Donald B. Robinson, "Communist Atrocities at Buchenwald", American Mercury,October 1946, pp. 397-404; and Christopher Burney, The Dungeon Democracy, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1946, pp. 21ff., 28f., 32-34, 44, 46, 49.
[42] Internationales Buchenwald-Komitee, Buchenwald, Kongress, East Berlin 1961.
[43] Ernst Federn, "That German...", Harper's, August 1948, pp. 106f..
[44] Christopher Burney, op, cit. (note 41), pp. 109, 124, 128ff.
[45] Cf. Jack Wikoff, "Der Mythos von der Vernichtung Homosexueller im Dritten Reich", Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung 2(2) (1998), pp. 135-139 (online: vho.org/VffG/1998/2/Wikoff2.html). English:Remarks, PO Box 234, Aurora (NY), no. 22, 20.4.1997 (editor's note).
[46] The Jewish Times (Baltimore). Quoted in "On the Holocaust", The Gay Paper (Baltimore), December 1981, p. 2.
[47] John Mendelsohn, "Sources", Prologue, National Archives, Washington, DC, Fall 1983, p. 180; Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps, Holmes and Meier, New York 1981, p. 96; K. Morgen testimony, 7 August 1946, IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 20, p. 490; testimony by former Buchenwald inmate Amost Tauber at Nuremberg 'I.G. Farben' trial, 12 Nov. 1947. Printed in Udo Walendy (ed.), Auschwitz im IG-Farben Prozeß, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1981, p. 119; Roger Manvell and H. Fraenkel, The Incomparable Crime, Putman, New York 1967, p. 155; Buchenwald Camp: The Report of a Parliamentary Delegation, HMSO, London 1945, pp. 4f.
[48] "Official Army Report Lists Buchenwald as Extermination Factory", The Washington Star, 29 April 1945, p. A7
[49] U.S. Congressional Report on Camps, Doc. 159-L., IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 37, pp. 605-626; and Congressional Record (Senate), 15 May 1945, pp. 4576-4582.
[50] B.M. McKelway, "Buchenwald...", The Washington Star, 29 April 1945, pp. A1, A7
[51] Ibid., p. A7; affidavit of H. Wilhelm Hammann of 6 March 1947. NO-2328. Hamman was an inmate from 1938 until April 1945.
[52] E.W. Fleck and E.A. Tenenbaum, op. cit. (note 41), p. 14; see also the photo of Jewish children inmates at Buchenwald in Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart, Oxford, New York 1985, pp. 148f.
[53] Nuremberg document 274-F (RF-301). IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 37, p. 148.
[54] IMT "blue series", op. cit. (note 3), vol. 19, p. 434; NC&A "red series",op. cit. (note 29), suppl. vol. A, p. 61.
[55] Georges Henocque, Les Autres de la Bête, G. Duraissie, Paris 1947, p. 115. Facsimile reprint and commentary in Robert Faurisson, Mémoire en Défense, La Vieille Taupe, Paris 1980, pp. 185-191.
[56] Paul Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, The Noontide Press, Torrance, CA, 1978, pp. 129f.: cf. more recently: Paul Rassinier, The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses, 2nd ed., Institute for Historical Review, New Port Beach 1990.
[57] Eugene Levai, Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry, Zurich 1948, p. 439.
[58] Earl Raab, The Anatomy of Nazism, ADL, New York 1979, photo caption opposite page 21. The Buchenwald gassing myth was also propagated in Francis Tomczuk, "Days of Remembrance", American Legion Magazine,April 1985, p. 23.
[59] Germaine Tillion, op. cit. (note 10), p. 231.
[60] K. Feig, op. cit. (note 47), p. 100.
[61] Stefan Kanfer, "Author, Teacher, Witness", Time magazine, 18 March 1985, p. 79.
[62] "Buchenwald", in Clarence L. Barnhart, Robert K. Barnhart (eds.), World Book Encyclopedia, Doubleday, Chicago/London, vol. 2, p. 550.
[63] "Buchenwald", Encyclopaedia Judaica, op. cit. (note 33), vol. 4, p. 1445.
[64] R. Hilberg, "Buchenwald", in Bernard S. Cayne (ed.), Encyclopedia Americana, Americana Corporation, New York 1982, vol. 4, p. 677.
[65] E. Fleck and E. Tenenbaum, op. cit. (note 41), p. 18.
[66] 2171-PS. NC&A "red series", op. cit. (note 29), vol. 4, p. 801.
[67] Statement by Arolsen registry official Butterweck, 16 Jan. 1984. Facsimile inDeutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), Nr. 18, 27 April 1984, p. 10.
[68] Buchenwald Camp:..., op. cit. (note 47), p. 5; 2171-PS. NC&A "red series", op. cit. (note 29), vol. 4, p. 821.
[69] Robert Abzug, op. cit. (note 52), pp. 49, 52.
[70] Marguerite Higgins, News Is a Singular Thing, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1955, pp. 78f.
[71] Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1968, p. 140; Raul Hilberg, op. cit. (note 12), p. 987.
[72] "Bis 1950: Buchenwald und Sachsenhausen", Amerika Woche (Chicago), 11 May 1985, p. 3; "Im Todeslager der Sowjets", Deutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), Nr. 47, 15 Nov. 1985, p. 4; "Soviet Camps Busy, Berlin Paper Says", New York Times, 10 Sept. 1949, p. 6.
[73] Letter by E. Krombholz of Aschaffenburg, "Erlebnisbericht aus einern Sowjet-KZ", Deutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), Nr. 11, 9 March 1984, p. 10; see also sketches of conditions in Soviet-run Buchenwald by former inmate Dr. Heinz Möller in Deutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), Nr. 6, 3 Feb. 1984, p. 5.
[74] "Nazi Death Camp..." (AP) Gazette-Telegraph (Colorado Springs, Col.), 1 July 1984, p. H12; "At Buchenwald...", New York Times, 14 April 1985, pp. 1, 29.
[75] Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Ruth about Hitler's "Final Solution", Little Brown, Boston 1980, p. 1.
[76] Testimony of Commandant Kramer in Raymond Phillips (ed.), Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial), William Hodge, London 1949, p. 160; "Bergen-Belsen", Encyclopaedia Judaica, op. cit. (note 33), vol. 4, p. 610. According to this source, one group of 136 of these "exchange Jews" was deported from Belsen during the war to neutral Switzerland, and another group of 222 was transferred to Palestine; according to an Israeli newspaper report, a group of 222 "exchange" Jews reportedly left Bergen-Belsen on June 29, 1944, and, by way of Istanbul, arrived in Palestine on July 10. (Israel Nachrichten, quoted in Deutsche National-Zeitung, Munich, Sept. 23, 1994, p. 5)
[77] Sylvia Rothchild (ed.), Voices from the Holocaust, New American Library, New York 1981, p. 190.
[78] Josef Kramer statement (1945) in R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 731-737. This is also in Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach 1993, pp. 272ff.
[79] R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 19, 32f.; Roman Hrabar, with Zofia Tokarz and J. E. Wilezur, The Fate of Polish Children During the Last War, Interpress, Warsaw 1981, p. 76.
[80] Encyclopaedia Judaica, op. cit. (note 33), vol. 4, p. 610; Gedenkbuch: Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft, 2 vols., Bundesarchiv, Koblenz 1986, pp. 1761f.
[81] Testimony of Dr. Russell Barton, Feb. 7, 1985, in the first "Holocaust" trial of Ernst Zündel. Official trial transcript, pp. 2916-2917; See also Barton's testimony during the second, 1988 Zündel trial in Barbara Kulaszka (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die?, Samisdat, Toronto 1992, p. 175, and, Robert Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial: The Case of Ernst Zündel, Reporter Press, Decatur, Ala., 1990, p. 159.
[82] Testimony of Commandant Kramer in R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), p. 162.
[83] Josef Kramer statement (1945) in R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 731-737. Also in A. Butz, op. cit. (note 78), p. 274.
[84] Derrick Sington, Belsen Uncovered, Duckworth, London 1946, pp. 117f. Quoted in A. Butz, op. cit. (note 78), pp. 34f.; Gerald Reitlinger, op. cit. (note 19), p. 504 (note).
[85] G. Reitlinger, op. cit. (note 19), p. 497 (and 638, n. 23).
[86] R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 152f., 166f., 734, 736; Tom Bower,Blind Eye to Murder, Granada, London 1983, p. 224; Dr. Ernst von Briesen, "Was passierte in Bergen-Belsen wirklich?", Deutsche National-Zeitung(Munich), Jan. 13, 1984, pp. 4f., 8.
[87] Andre Biss, A Million Jews to Save, A.S. Barnes, New York 1975, pp. 242, 249f.; Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940-1945, Macmillan, New York 1957, p. 276.
[88] Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1986, pp. 722, 785f.
[89] R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 163-166.
[90] Signed report by retired Colonel (Oberst a.D.) Hanns Schmidt to Kurt Mehner and Lt. Colonel Bechtold, Braunschweig, March 3, 1981. Photocopy in author's possession.
[91] Essay by Alan Moorehead, "Belsen", in Cyril Connolly (ed.), The Golden Horizon, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1953, pp. 109f.
[92] Josef Kramer statement (1945) in R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), p. 737. Also quoted in A. Butz, op. cit. (note 78), p. 275; Essay by Alan Moorehead,op. cit. (note 91); Dr. Russell Barton, "Belsen", in Basil Liddell Hart, Barrie Pitt (eds.), History of the Second World War, Purnell, Paulton (Som.) 1966, Part 109, 1975, p. 3025.
[93] R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 396-397.
[94] "Typhus Causes a Truce", The Journal of the American Medical Association (Chicago), May 19, 1945, p. 220.
[95] Leonard O. Mosley, Report from Germany (1945). Quoted in Montgomery Belgion, Victors Justice, Regnery, Hinsdale, Ill., 1949, p. 80 (and p. 81);Time magazine, April 29, 1985, p. 21; See also essay by A. Moorehead, op. cit. (note 91), London 1953, pp. 105f.
[96] A. Moorehead, ibid.
[97] R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), p. 156.
[98] "Bergen-Belsen", Der Spiegel (Hamburg), Nr. 30, 1985, pp. 71f.
[99] "Holocaust", Encyclopaedia Judaica, op. cit. (note 33), vol. 8, p. 859; M. Gilbert, op. cit. (note 88), pp. 793ff.; See also R. Phillips (ed.), op. cit. (note 76), pp. 20, 46f.; According to a 1992 Associated Press report, more than 60,000 prisoners were held in Belsen camp when it was liberated. Then, "in the first five days of liberation, 14,000 prisoners died and another 14,000 perished in the following weeks." Graham Heathcote, AP from Tostock, England, "2 hours changed me for the rest of my life", Orlando Sentinel(Florida), Dec. 20, 1992, p. A 29, and, "Journey into hell", The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington), Dec. 20, 1992.
[100] Time magazine, April 29, 1985, p. 21, referred to Belsen as a camp created for the "extermination" of "the Jewish people".
[101] Hellmut Diwald, Geschichte der Deutschen, 1st ed., Propyläen, Frankfurt 1978, pp. 164f.
[102] M. Broszat, "Zur Kritik der Publizistik des antisemitischen Rechtsextremismus", Supplement B 19/76 of May 8,1976, to the weekly newspaper Das Parlament (Bonn), p. 6. Revised from issue No. 2, 1976, of the Vierte1jahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Munich). Hellmut Diwald, op. cit.(note 101).
[103] Dr. R. Barton, op. cit. (note 92), Part 109, 1975, pp. 3025-3029; Barton confirmed this evaluation in testimony given in the 1985 and 1988 Toronto trials of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel. On Barton's testimony in the first, 1985 trial, see "View of Belsen was propaganda, trial told", The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Feb. 8, 1985, pp. M1, M5, and "Disease killed Nazis' prisoners, MD says", Toronto Star, Feb. 8, 1985, p. A2; On Barton's testimony in the second, 1988 Zündel trial, see Barbara Kulaszka (ed.), op. cit. (note 81), pp. 175-180, and R. Lenski, op. cit. (note 81), pp. 157-160; Among his other positions after the war, Barton was superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at Severalls Hospital (Essex, England), and director of the Rochester Psychiatric Center (New York).
[104] Francis Trevelyan Miller, Litt.D., LLD, A History of World War II, John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia 1945, p. 868.
[105] Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History, Simon and Schuster, New York 1962, p. 383.
[106] R. Hrabar et al., op. cit. (note 79), p. 76.
[107] The Associated Press News Annual: 1945, p. 404.
[108] M. Holland, "The horrors of Belsen", Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), Jan. 22, 1995, p. 93; M. Holland, "Man who uncovered the horror of Belsen", Sunday Times (Perth, W Australia), Feb. 5, 1995, p. 2.
[109] S. Rothchild (ed.), op. cit. (note 77), p. 197.
[110] K. Seidman, "Surviving the horror", The Gazette (Montreal, Canada), August 5, 1993. Facsimile reprint in JHR, 13(6) (1993), p. 24.
[111] "Bergen-Belsen", Daily News (New York), April 20, 1985, p. 3.
[112] "Ceremony Recalls Victims of Bergen-Belsen", The Week in Germany(German Information Center, New York), April 27, 1990, p. 6; A figure of 50,000 is also given in Time magazine, April 29, 1985, p. 21; According to a stone memorial at the Belsen camp site, 30,000 Jews were "exterminated" there; A semi-official Polish account published in 1980 reported 48,000 Belsen "victims". Czeslaw Pilichowski, No Time Limit for These Crimes, Interpress, Warsaw 1980, pp. 154f.
[113] "Bergen-Belsen", Encyclopaedia Judaica, op. cit. (note 33), vol. 4, pp. 610ff.; Colonel Schmidt, the German officer who worked to alleviate conditions in Belsen during the final weeks and also arranged for the camp's surrender to the British, estimated that "altogether about 8,000 people" died in the camp. (This figure may, however, only include victims of the final chaotic weeks under German control.) Source: Signed report by Oberst a.D. Hanns Schmidt, op. cit. (Note 90).
[114] L. Dawidowicz, "Belsen Remembered", Commentary (American Jewish Comm., New York), March 1966, pp. 84f.; Deutsche National-Zeitung(Munich), March 21, 1986, p. 4; M. Gilbert, op. cit. (note 88), pp. 690, 793.
[115] F. Morgan, Peace and War, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1961, p. 259.
[116] "Bergen-Belsen", Der Spiegel, Nr. 30, 1985, pp. 71f.

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36 - Earth Changes Bulletin Weekly Update As Of August 29, 2011



MICHAEL WELLS MANDEVILLE


CRITICAL ALERTS

TRANSITIONS

The stories coming out of Libya through the warcaster media stink like a wharf of the infamous rotten fish of Denmark. While the manipulators of the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO) exult in their self-perceived victory, things in Libya are nowhere near as claimed. This has been true since March and it never been truer than today.

There are three datum which belie the idea that somehow a new Revolutionary Council has overthrown Qaddafi's Libya. (1) At most only a few thousand revolutionary partisans are roaming through Tripoli proclaiming themselves in authority. Tripoli is a huge metroplex of over 2 million souls. You cannot command at gunpoint such a huge area unless most of the population wants you to command; (2) There isn't the slightest evidence that the greater portion of the population wants the so-called rebels to rule. The complete absence of victory celebrations by throngs of Libyans throughout Tripoli and the remaining portions of Libya is a deafening proclamation of a different truth; (3) There are many reports from various media that no one currently is in command of Libya.

This suggests a completely different idea which has been suggested in some alternative media. Unfortunately I've read so much of it I can't remember where this idea came from. In a nutshell, we are seeing the deployment of a new type of Imperial warfare. Armed international mercenaries run games of local thugs and various opportunists by supplying them with the typical resources, money, ammunition, nifty weapons, some half-arsed training, and promises of Utopia under a new benevolent ruler. In the case of Libya this has amounted to a few thousand freebooters which is one of the reasons why no one has ever been able to show a photograph of a substantial opposition to the pre-existing government of Libya. The closest approach was a mob scene attributed to Tripoli but actually photographed in India. (The psy ops people have no modesty in fabricating lies).

These cliques of marauders, thugs, & opportunists are run by foreign operatives using intensive satellite and aerial data sources. The foreign operatives, in this case the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO) deploy at will any kind of aerial weaponry which is available in the US or NATO inventories. Air sorties come in, or predator drones mobilize, and shoot up a section of town. As soon as the aerial bombardments are finished, the pirate gangs move in most of their forces, shoot up some more buildings and people, declare the area liberated, show the press all the dead people and blame it on the law abiding militias of the pre-existing government, and then they move on to liberate the next section of town.

So far the net accomplishment is to shoot Libya up into chaos, anarchy, and ruin. As usual, we see that the only thing that the crazed white men (and Oreos) who rule the Americans and the Euros know how to do is to destroy, maim, and murder. They know nothing about leadership, nothing about how to rule humanity, nothing about how to create beneficial change for anybody, unless you count the pirate booty for the plutocracy. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Cabal came, the Cabal saw, the Cabal struck down. By all accounts, Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza are in ruins and no one gives a shit.

In Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq today you see the complete meaning of the scam and the sham which “The West” has become under the yoke of the globalist agenda now forcefully imposed everywhere by the banksters.

More is coming. They are arrogantly drunk in their power and the success of their new modus operandi.

But they have not yet succeeded in taking Libya. Nor, really, Afghanistan. This story has only begun, they may never succeed in taking it, though they may be able to occupy portions of it. This may be the beginning of a vast guerrilla war which embroils all of Africa in rejecting the crazy white man world.

I was wrong about there being a deciding moment in Libya. Nothing is being decided except head long descent into anarchy.

The good news this week is that La Niña has not strengthened in the last week. The Pacific Equator is about the same as the last couple of weeks, slightly cooler in portions. Keep your fingers crossed that this trend breaks up and leaves us in ENSO neutral year (an average year without influence from the Pacific Equator’s climate oscillations).

The bad news for the eastern U.S. is that another super storm may be forming in the Mid Atlantic. Under the influence of rising Solar Activity yesterday, it organized into TD 12 and is considered by NOAA to be highly likely to turn into an Hurricane very soon. Since Solar Activity is likely to be high going higher the next several days, I expect a big, bad, very strong Hurricane. Where it will go remains to be seen.

And of course we need another one of these like we need another four years of Oy-bummer.

Meanwhile, all the while the Bears are still sharpening their knives. If you add to their loud roars, the running of the Comet People, the proclamations of the Ascension Prophets, the continued machinations of Fascists to presume more power, and the dire screetching about the final take-over of everything by the Super Elite through massive history-altering stunts and manipulations, spiced with various 2012 cultists, all of which seem to be reaching a collective crescendo this Fall and on through next year, we have a heady brew of potent psychotropic ideation which is about to be unbottled. What an amazing clusterf*ck this is coming to be.

Say it again: One can smell and even taste now the coming political and economic bloodbath. Much is not clear about the coming upsets, but it is already fairly obvious that the apple cart will never be the same. From top to bottom, the existing political faces are likely to change substantially during the course of the next 18 months. Would that they all would disappear.

Say it again: The simple reality is that there is enormously great and wonderful talent in North America for resolving all of our grave social and economic issues within a relatively short period of time. The main problem really is that people with brains, skills, and historical background are not wasting their time trying to communicate through the den of vipers and thieves which constitutes the primary communication channels in North America. Nor are they attempting to organize some goofy political party or faction to take over one of the existing goofy parties.

A Serious Wild Card: The most important witness of all. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is about to spill the beans on who she thought assassinated her husband. Secret memoirs in the form of professional interviews by an highly regarded professional historian are about to be released. The revelation may be a FLARE which is seen widely on the beach of our reality, signaling a sudden awareness change. Already, a great body of facts is assembling on the iway. It is almost dead certain that LBJ was the conscious “fixer” to cover up the details of the assassination which was conducted by the Caballero governors…. There is no statute of limitations on the charge of murder.

__________________________________________________________

MOST IMPORTANTLY – A word from our sponsor

The energies available to focused consciousness are running stronger and stronger, especially around the Full Moons. Meditate deeply and deliberately. And continue to thank all those who stand up in opposition to the humbugs of our existence, and most especially to those who demand an end to the Evil Empire.

My personal keywords for the week: breaking through

RADIATION THREATS

This is going to go on with Japan for years. Japan may be sinking now socially, politically, and economically. The Prime Minister just resigned under the pressures. This may go on for years.

MOON & QUAKES

http://www.earthchanges-bulletin.com/almanac/data_moon/moon_ephemeris_2011.htm

The Moon is NEW today and will be in a middling Perigee August 31 (closest distance to the Earth). The next major seismic Windows, and not very good ones at that, are the New Moons of September 26 and October 28. On these two dates a weak Perigee will synchronize within 24 hours of the New Moon. Declination will remain substantially out of phase, which most likely will tend to leave tectonic activity muted.

EARTH ROTATION – THE WOBBLE & THE POLES = NO CHANGE SINCE LAST WEEK

The latest data from the IERS clearly shows that the turn has been made in the spiral of the wobble track. From Y Max to Y Min.

This turn is somewhat crooked, in fact it is far more crooked than anything we can observe related to the horrible earthquake in Japan. The only problem with this of course is that there has been no significant or even close to interesting tectonic event which would explain this crooked turning in the spiral motion of the Earth's axis. Accordingly, it must be essentially an orbital function related to mass gravity vectors of the Earth, Moon, and Sun.

Overall the shape of the spiral track for this past six months gives a definite impression of elongation towards the South (along the Greenwich Meridian roughly towards England). More than ever, this can be seen during this last week of August 2011.

This is purely in the realm of perception, I don't know how to make this mathematical, or I should say I'm too lazy to do so. To make a long story short, this is quite consistent at the moment with the notion that there has been a significant displacement during the past 12 months or so of the average location of the North spin axis (average location = center of the spiral tracks of the wobble).

If this is true, this may have been the largest jump in many decades an M1 point finish d perhaps the largest jump of the past 100 years. This acceleration is likely the tectonic cause of the acceleration of major tectonic rupturing in the Earth's crust, such as we have seen in Japan, New Zealand, Haiti, and Chile. It will take several more months before we can conclude this calculation.

If this is in fact occurring, one of the consequences will be a fairly rapid renewal of the global warming trend during the next two years. Volcanic activity will pick up in 2012 and 2013 and thus so will the flow in the oceans. Already the activity at Etna and Stromboli, not to mention Kilauea, are probably heralding a worldwide increase in volcanism during the ensuing months.

I remind my readers that the primary producer of the global warming trend is in the oceans, specifically in the great rifts which wend their way around the Earth in the middle of the oceans. Regional warming trends are quite real and are produced by the uneven flow of heat into various portions of the oceans. By summing the regional numbers into a global number, the globalists have confused regional trends by calling them collectively a global trend.

ASTEROIDS – COMETS

I am following the progress of the comets/asteroids for this year, even though I do not follow the discussions connected to Niberu, Planet X, or this Comet 'Elenin'. For a timely, reasonably good summary discussion about Elenin, go here to:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-135

Bottomline for 2011. Expect nothing from the Cosmic Frame to whammy us. Cosmically speaking, 2011 will be much like most of the last 100 years (excepting of course those Sunspot Peak years).

QUAKES - for Class 4+

NOTE: I incorrectly described the extreme declination in last week’s update as the Southern Declination. Actually it was the Northern Declination

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

The New Moon syzygy failed to generate much of a quake surge, nor did the preceding Full Moon syzygy. Activity is currently muted in all ways. Only the Extreme Northern Declination on August 23/24 produced a small surge in frequency and has brought magnitudes up into the average range. This current surge is likely to extend for at least another two or three days. This Declination surge produced some interesting patterns in North America, including a surge in Virginia which rattled a good part of the Eastern Seaboard with a Magnitude 5.9 quake. Even more interesting tectonically was a latitudinal array of relatively rare continental quakes from Virgina to Colorado, the Sierras, and the Coast of California. These interior quakes are very infrequent, to have them array closely along a common latitude from one end of the continent to another is no unconnected coincidence whatsoever, despite the rather naïvely blind comments of USGS geologists.

STANDING PREDICTION REMAINS THE SAME – so far its right on the money: Quake activity during the next few weeks probably will not be catastrophic at the same level as it has been in areas like Honshu Island or Chile or Sumatra. All in all, to quickly summarize the remainder of 2011, tectonic activity near it is likely to settle down from this point on to make the remainder of 2012 largely lackluster. As went the New Moon Syzygy in June, so goes the New Moon Syzygy in July. August will be a snoozer. (THIS WAS CERTAINTLY TRUE with the exception of the rare quakes in continental US)!!!! The New Moon Syzygy in September likely will provide the greatest tectonic activity until the Full Moon syzygy of December 12.

SUN

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/indices/DSD.txt

As of August 28, the solar flux sank slightly to 101. The Sunspot Count rose to 76 amidst about 5 recorded x-ray and optical flares. NASA reported that a small coronal hole in the Sun's atmosphere has brought us into another gusty solar wind and NASA is therefore predicting up to a 20% probability of strong magnetic disturbances in the Earth's upper atmosphere. NASA does not expect any significant flare activity during the next couple of days.

So far the Fluxgate Monitor operated by the University of Alaska is showing only very minor disturbances in the Earth's upper magnetic field. Despite this, Aurora viewing has been spectacular in the high North.

The Sunspot Count peak yesterday at 76 may be close to the peak for Mercury's alignment with Jupiter, which occurs on August 30. On top of this town we may get an even higher count produced by Mercury's alignment with Mars on September 8.

Most likely, Solar Activity of all kinds is head upwards during the next week, expect another rise above 100 for at least two or three days.

PLANETARY ALIGNMENTS (Heliotropic Schedule)

Mercury's Next Alignments:

August 25: Mercury | Uranus

August 30: Mercury | Jupiter

September 8: Mercury | Mars

SUCCESSFUL PREDICTION – THIS WAS RIGHT ON THE MONEY: “We are likely to see two peaks in the Sunspot Count for these alignments. The largest will be for the August 30 alignment of Mercury with Jupiter. These probably will clump together very closely and we are likely to see the first be within a few days, perhaps we will see a rise beginning as early as today or tomorrow.”

OUTSTANDING – VERY IMPORTANT BECAUSE OF TD 12 ON THE ATLANTIC EQUATER. Mercury aligns with Mars on September 8. This also will probably provide some fireworks. Because of the clustering of these alignments, the biggest peak may come a day or two or three after the Jupiter alignment.

The planetary projections for the next two months are fully supportive of Ruth Ryden’s August (and beyond) predictions from spiritual sources about the rapidly appearing hurricane season. Ruth also frankly answers some questions about 2011/2012 comets, elusive planets called Nibiru, and dire prophecies from other sources. It is a very good read, especially if you are concerned about extreme weather.

We are going to have some very extreme weather. The surging Sun is the evidence, the planetary alignments of August/September will induce it, and spiritual sources such as Ruth are providing parallel information which confirms our empirical projections. Rarely do I see what I see in the movement of the cosmos reflected so perfectly in matter of fact predictions from the “other side”.

Ruth’s latest newsletter: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ruth_ryden_newsletter/message/55

I note specifically that Ruth’s sources predict that the main hurricane hits in North America will be on the Atlantic Seaboard, less so the Caribbean.

If this all comes about, I want you to remember that Ruth in her way and I in my way provided an important warming which all the world’s academic scientists were unable to provide. This will be a great and important demonstration of the efficacy of merging high level systems science with well developed and seasoned spiritual perceptions and communications from high sources in the etheric realm.

So far, the weather, other than being hot and dry, has not been nearly as stormy as expected.

As the weather prognosticators put it, in their typically obscure way, signs of La Niña are still present in the weather patterns.

ENSO: LA NINA – NEUTRAL - EL NINO – The La Nina Debbil Is Back

Maybe just as a ghost. Cross your fingers.

For the third week in a row, virtually the entire Pacific Equator is now a little cooler than average for this time of year. This I can see reflected in the weather around me in Black Canyon City. It is quite uncomfortable this July/August. It is so dry I have to water my porch plants both day and night. Our air mass flow is directly off of the Pacific from a vaguely southerly direction, we are definitely getting La Nina air, which puts a lot less water into the air, and what is put into the air has a lot less energy to travel very far North. Because there is less cloud mass and thunderstorm activity, the average temperature ends of higher.

Here is the weekly summary diagnostic update by NOAA as of today, August 29:

(there has been no change in this projection during the last two weeks)

• ENSO-neutral conditions are present across the equatorial Pacific.

• Sea surface temperatures (SST) anomalies are becoming increasingly negative in

the east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean.

• Atmospheric circulation anomalies still reflect aspects of La Niña.

• ENSO-neutral is expected to continue into the Northern Hemisphere fall 2011,

with ENSO-neutral or La Niña equally likely thereafter.

That is one of the more interesting reads that NOAA has ever provided. Reading between the lines I hear the climate people saying, hey dude, we are as confused as you are and we have no idea what's going to happen next.

Me neither.

JET STREAM & HURRICANES & N.A. WEATHER

http://www.weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_vis.php?image=ir&inv=0&t=l12®ion=he

Keep tuned to the ECB posts about the Sun and the ‘canes. After the Mercury|Earth alignment, Mercury will in rapid succession align with several other planets during the remainder of August and the first part of September. This should keep the Sun apopping on a high plateau of activity for many weeks. Expect then conditions to get more and more favorable for major storms, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and all other forms of fast-changing weather.

2011 Hurricane Season Forecast

Once again, after a terrible result for last year’s predictions, it already seems likely that this year's predictions are likely to go the same way.

http://wwworigin.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/2011-hurricane-season-forecast-noaa-wsi-csu_2011-05-19

WSI Hurricane Forecast

by Chris Dolce, Meteorologist

“Outperforming other, primary, public forecasters on named storms by 25% since 2006, Weather Services International, a Weather Channel company, predicts 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes (category 3 or greater).

…Crawford added, "Since tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures are quite close to the 1995-2010 average values, and since we do not expect either an El Nino or La Nina to develop this summer, our statistical model has output forecast numbers that exactly match those for the current active 1995-2010 period"

Although WSI does not see activity reaching the historic levels of 2005 and 2010, it does expect a more impactful season in 2011 along the United States coastline.”

VOLCANOES – decline in activity continues.

Go here for a current review of major eruptions during the past couple of weeks:

Updates for Iceland, Indonesia, Etna: http://bigthink.com/blogs/eruptions

The Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program
http://www.volcano.si.edu/reports/usgs/

There are 13 new reports for this week, down three from last week. The volcanoes have fallen into their typical late summer siesta. Yet, Etna continues to rumble, portending an active period to come.

There is of course is lava or strombolian in the half dozen usual places. The most active lava expression still is Kilauea. Most of the 13 reported volcanoes were rumbling with minor puffs of ash off and on. The lava expression at Kilauea and Stromboli has subsided and it is back to its historical boundaries. Etna continues to sputter off and on by emitting very small amounts of material for relatively short durations of time.

It does not appear that there is an uptick at this present time in volcanic activity. The way reports circulate and get coalesced at the Smithsonian Institute and then reported in this weekly update means that there is about a week lag in getting the pulse of the Earth. So there actually could be during any given week an uptick which I don't become aware of until the following week.

Unfortunately the way volcano eruption data is now coalesced and reported, it is virtually impossible to grasp whether a short term trend is evident. The Smithsonian Reports are not a complete profile of what is happening from week to week.

THE MAD BAD VERY CRAZY MONKEYS IN THE BARREL

The Standing Advisory:

Massive criminal operations and manipulations are underway throughout the “Globalist” world – anchored in London, Tel Aviv, and the U.S. by the would-be world Aristocracy of the Bankster Class. Unparalleled assaults have been ramped up the past two years and now are being made against human rights and norms, national governments, and all industries, commerce, the environment, and traditional life-sustaining practices everywhere to force monopolization of all trade and money under the jackboots of criminal syndicates. The primary proof of poneralogy is now clearly self-evident. Psychopaths who manage to infect the upper class (or leadership of any group) of a people eventually corrupt their people into collective insanity, mass mental/emotional breakdown, and death of any viable social order.

Israel will be the first world proof of this principle in this era. Its psychotic loons will induce its final destruction during the next nine years. The U.S. may be the second victim, but its saving grace is its huge size, extensive real resource base, its diversity, and a population which largely in fact seeks cooperation quite aside from the bullying violence of its ruling class and the disturbed fantasies which are crooned by its humbug media. Canada is falling into the same spiral of self-destruction slightly behind the U.S. but its population may be able to pull themselves out of the dive even before the U.S. In fact, the Canadians have the abililty to lead the U.S. out of its insanity, they just need the gumption to believe in themselves rather than the traditional cons to the South.

In Europe we see the same opportunity for the people of the North, here literally the Norse. The Norwegians, if they stick to their gumptions and see themselves as Norse, not as other peoples would tell them they must be seen as, have a uniquely successful culture which could help lead all of Europe out of Rothschild’s EU deathbed. Now consciously on the world stage in opposition to Zionism, Zionazis, and the terrorist state of Israel, the Norse may be able to lite a fire under the britches of the Germans to awaken them from their Holohoax Wine Bender and their sordid dream state which has become filled with Yiddisher fantasies.

Updated Timeline

The Summer will continue with endless wranglings and recriminations though August’s floods and storms and vacation efforts will put an end to most political noises for a few weeks. Chapter 2 will begin later in September. The movement among the Arabs, and indeed among a great many Muslims around the world, continues and evolves. Immense change in Egypt comes in early 2012. Qaddafi may be failing in North Africa but the dust has not settled and it is not yet clear who is the last man standing. Regardless, Rothschild’s grand plan for Africa will fail, a different union will form free of the Anglo imperialists and stand beside the rising giant of South America. The EU will continue to slowly disintegrate, and the Arab world will begin to rise again with a new alliance of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. The final chapter will be no more than five years hence, Israel likely will fold no later than 2017. I suspect that it will end with the elimination of the Jewish State and the oil oligarchs. Pan-Arabic and Pan-Islamic movements will reshape the entire region in ways which are not very predictable, likely nominally democratic states will replace the oil oligarchs, and the State of Palestine will become the successor to Israel and perhaps as well of Lebanon and Jordan. All this will take ten to 15 years of change and intrigues.

Pakistan is now the main threatre for Jewish intrique. The entire conflict with Pakistan and Afghanistan is more about diverting the world’s attention from the Jewish genocide of Palestine, which still accelerates.

The U.S. National interest is to avoid becoming caught up in the affairs of any of these peoples. The kindest, most liberating, most responsible thing we can do is to liquidate all U.S. militarism activities, involvements, entanglements, and alliances in the Middle East (and Central Asia). That means withdrawing all American forces from the Middle East (and Central Asia). That also means terminating all foreign aid. We are an economically broken people, we have no aid which we can supply. Those people in the Middle East who need aid should apply to the Rothschild banks or to the fabulous incomes from the oil industries.

Unfortunately, it seems that a few more years must pass before those caught up in the mythology of “America the Superduper” are sufficiently browbeaten to let go of their delusions.

The way out of the barrel is 911 truth, accountability, and prosecutions. It cracks the entire imperial scheme and betrayal of the U.S. wide open. It demonstrates that a silent coup has seized control of the U.S. and will stop at nothing to feed its world ambitions. Once this is accepted as the consensus truth, the empire of crime can be terminated by many means, great and small, all working through the invisible hand which flows from the collective social consciousness of righteous people.

Keep in mind that the political class which has control of the Anglo-American establishments are in fabulous over-reach. They drink their own Kool-Aid. They no longer can pose a valid argument which rests on the gravity of simple facts. Unbalancing them will take not nearly so much as before. Those who are caught up in the insanity will never let go of their insanity, but those who fundamentally distrust the elites, which includes the greater portion of humankind, can be led out of this barrel of the mad bad monkeys.



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37 - OTHER QUOTES


The liberals are asking us to give Obama time.
We agree...and think 25 to life would be appropriate.
--Jay Leno

America needs Obama-care like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask.
--Jay Leno

Q: Have you heard about McDonald's' new Obama Value Meal ? A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it.
--Conan O'Brien

Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?
A: A fund raiser.
--Jay Leno

Q: What's the difference between Obama's cabinet and a penitentiary?
A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers, and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners.
--David Letterman

Q: If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved?
A: America !
--Jimmy Fallon

Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?
A: Bo has papers.
--Jimmy Kimmel